"I was much more interested in the thrill and excitement of riding a bike than the fear."



Kish’s first love was climbing. According to his mother he was scaling things at six months, long before he could walk. Furniture, bookshelves, then as he got older neighbour’s fences and trees… Kish says: “I was pretty agile, so it was easy for me to climb. It was second nature though I was pretty much the only kid who climbed the way I climbed. I mean the kind of trees I climbed and the height.”

I ask if he thinks that’s because he couldn’t see down? “I don’t know. I could certainly echolocate down but you’d get up to a point where you can’t really hear the ground anymore because you’re so high. In general blind people don’t seem to have much of a fear of heights though.”

I ask how the bike riding came about? “As a kid it was just what the other kids were doing. So I thought: ‘This is what kids do.’ It looked interesting and it was fast, and I could tell there was an agility to it.”

Kish’s friend had an undersized bike that he learnt on. First by holding onto a wall, then he realised he didn’t need the wall so off he went “peppering the environment with a barrage of clicks”. He was just six.

He says: “I really wanted a bike of my own and then one showed up. At first I was very disappointed as it was big, the proper size basically, but I’d learnt to ride on this little thing so I was quite annoyed at first but then I just learnt to ride that.”