Ryley Batt is only young but with two Paralympic Games already under his belt, he is one of the best and most experienced players in the Australian wheelchair rugby team.

Born with a limb deficiency, Ryley does not have legs and required surgery to separate his fingers from each other. Amazingly, it wasn’t until he was 12 years old that he began to use a wheelchair. Up until then, he preferred to ride around on a skateboard with his friends, scraping his hands along the ground when he needed to stop. It was a wheelchair rugby demonstration at school that finally convinced Ryley to use a wheelchair, and he hasn’t looked back since.

Ryley played in competition for the first time in 2002. The following year, he represented his country in Japan. At the Athens 2004 Paralympic Games, he became the youngest ever wheelchair rugby Paralympian at just 15. However, Athens was also a turning point for Ryley. His provisional classification of 2.5 – a “mid-pointer” was overturned and he was classified at the Games as a “high pointer” – 3.5.  This required him to adapt to new responsibilities on the court, which has since seen him lift his game to a new level, as he carries almost half his team’s total point allocation whenever he takes to the floor. At the Beijing Games in 2008, Ryley helped his team win a silver medal after a narrow defeat to the USA. He achieved his goal to come away from Beijing with a medal.

Since Beijing, Ryley has continued to build upon his reputation at the greatest wheelchair rugby player on the planet. In 2010, he led the NSW Gladiators to their fifth consecutive Australian Wheelchair Rugby National League title, and also led the San Diego Sharp Edge to a defence of their US National League crown for the second straight season. Ryley was MVP in each one of those tournaments.

Internationally, he has been just as dominant. At the 2010 World Championships in which Australia claimed the silver medal, Ryley was named tournament MVP. This followed the two International events won by Australia in the lead-up to the World Championships in which Ryley was also named MVP – the 2010 Four Nations Championship and the 2010 Canada Cup. The team’s success continued in 2011, winning the Great Britain Cup and Asia Oceania Regional Championships.

Ryley is an adrenaline junkie and loves to ride quad bikes and motor bikes in his spare time and is a passionate motorsports fan.