Wednesday Night
It was a night at the pub, as per my usual Wednesday routine.
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Christmas Week
Chatting with a colleague yesterday, she told me she felt “terribly organised” for Christmas this year, in a way she hadn’t been previously. This surprised me, as she’s ordinarily a “terribly organised person” in my view. “It must be the placement of the days”, she told me. And indeed, it was lovely to have three days off in the middle of the week, though to be truthful it was probably only Christmas Day when I really took time out. This is a busy time of the year for me, as others take time off, and I “keep an eye on the shop”.
Christmas Day was spent chatting with relatives and friends on the phone and Skype, and in person, for lunch with a friend and her family at Bondi. What surprised me most was the growth of her niece and nephew. The last time I’d seen them was at my friend’s mother’s funeral six years ago. At the time, they were “awkward teenagers”. Several years later, they’re young adults.
Also this week, I went to see the film about Dick Cheney, called Vice. “Christian Bale is awesome playing a complete c…”, I texted a friend after the movie. It’s a good film, not a great one, as some of the more “theatrical” parts of the film seemed a little contrived, in my view. But I enjoyed it, and it was nice to spend a couple of hours in an air-conditioned cinema.
With three days off in the middle, work on Monday and Friday was extremely productive. The only downside at work was that the usual places I grab coffee and lunch were closed this week. Yesterday, I ended up wandering all the way to Darling Harbour to find lunch. My usual lunchtime places were closed, so I headed towards The Powerhouse (too crowded), and then towards two local pubs (neither of which were doing lunch), until finally, arriving at Darling Harbour, where I discovered Fratelli Fresh was open.
Wotjek Czyz – sport and support
As a young man in Germany the world of Wojtek Czyz was abruptly upended on 11 September 2001. Playing his last amateur match before taking up a professional football (soccer) contract, he sustained a severe injury.
“I got a hit from a goalkeeper while playing football, and got an injury which caused what is called compartment syndrome. Unfortunately, the surgery and all the support from the hospital were done too late. And this is why my lower leg became necrotic, which means everything was dead.”
Because the damage extended through the joint, the procedure resulted in an above-knee amputation. At just twenty-one years old, standing on the precipice of a professional contract, Wojtek faced a profound psychological crisis.
The turning point came during rehabilitation three weeks post-amputation, when he met Roberto Simonazzi, a German sports therapist, former elite Paralympic athlete, and fellow above-knee amputee. Finding someone who truly shared his lived experience proved to be transformative. Wojtek notes the vital impact of this encounter:
“That was for me a game changer, that this guy knew exactly what he needed to tell me to open my eyes and take away these black demons out of my head, that my life was over, and simply open new doors for me. And the new door was Paralympic sport. Basically, six months after my amputation, I was already the German champion in the 100 metres and long jump.”
This pivotal mentorship instilled a philosophy that Wojtek carries forward today: that recovery is “all about perspective and all about belief.”
Recognising how crucial that initial guidance was, he shared in an interview for The Limb Shift podcast, he has dedicated a significant portion of his life to visiting hospitals, talking to fresh amputees, and lifting the heavy shroud of insecurity surrounding body image, mobility, and future prospects.
A Legendary Career in Paralympic Sport
From those astonishing beginnings just six months post-amputation, Wojtek rapidly ascended to the absolute pinnacle of international disabled athletics. Over his stellar competitive career representing Germany, he became one of the most recognisable and dominant figures in Paralympic track and field. He captured multiple Paralympic gold medals—shining brightly at the Athens 2004, Beijing 2008, and London 2012 Games—while setting world records in the 100-metre sprint, 200-metre sprint, and the long jump.
Two years after losing his leg, Wojtek also pursued a degree in sports science, bridging his personal journey with rigorous biomechanical research. He explains:
“I did a lot of biomechanical research in regard to the movement of amputees, and especially in sprint or long jump. We did a lot of analysis, and even developed a blade together. So there was a lot of passion in it because I was part of the studies.”
Global Impact
Driven by a desire to share what he described as the privileged level of medical and prosthetic support he received in Germany with populations lacking similar resources, Wojtek and his wife, Elena Brambilla—a former professional high jumper—embarked on an extraordinary global humanitarian mission. They sold their possessions, built a catamaran equipped with a technical workshop, and sailed around the world to deliver custom-crafted mobility solutions for people with limb loss and limb difference.
Describing the impact of this venture, Wojtek shares:
“The best way to help is to be there, and to have the parts there with you… We gifted ninety prosthetics, mostly paid for by ourselves.”
Visiting nations across the globe allowed them to confront social stigmas head-on. Along the way, Wojtek set free-diving world records to challenge the perception that amputees safely enter the water.
Remembering the profound emotional weight of these interactions around the world, he recalls:
“Our first project was in Morocco, and the people there travelled around six hours on public transport from somewhere up in the mountains. I remember one kid got a prosthetic, and for the first time in his life, stood up on two legs. Everyone was crying.”
New Horizons in Aotearoa / New Zealand
Stranded in New Zealand by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Wojtek and his family ultimately put down roots in Eureka close to Cambridge. Alongside managing an export business for high-grade Mānuka honey tailored for high-performance athletes—developed in partnership with his wife, who studied herbal medicine and biotechnology—Wojtek turned his energy toward revitalising local parasport activation.
After settling in New Zealand, Wojtek picked up badminton from scratch in 2021. He rapidly built an impressive international resume on the Para Badminton World Circuit, winning gold in Men’s Doubles at the 2023 Oceania Championships and climbing to world number 12 in singles. This journey culminated in May 2024, when he became New Zealand’s first-ever Paralympic badminton representative at the Paris Games.
Driven by a desire for community activation rather than personal glory, Wojtek used the sport to raise the profile of parasports across Aotearoa. By stepping onto the court, he successfully established new competitive pathways and inspired a fresh generation of athletes to find their way into the game.
Motivational Speaking and Future Initiatives
Looking back on a quarter-century living as an amputee, and summing up his core philosophy, which he hopes may be useful to other people with limb loss and limb difference, he says:
“You will face some situations where you think, ‘Oh, come on, why me?’ For me, the most important thing besides never give up is simply to be curious. You have to get the ability to laugh at yourself. So many funny things are happening; you can get frustrated, or you can laugh about it. And I am the one who’s laughing about it.”
Today, Wojtek channels his life into high-impact keynote and motivational speaking engagements worldwide, inspiring corporate teams, athletes, and individuals to reframe adversity through resilience, humour, and a shift in perspective. To connect with his ongoing projects, keynote bookings, and community initiatives, you can visit his official website at Project Wojtek: https://www.wojtek2024.co.nz/
Furthermore, continuing his life’s mission of supporting athletes, he is involved with innovative ventures like his startup platform, Match-me.org (http://match-me.org/), designed to guide professional athletes seamlessly through career transitions and dual-career development.
This article is based on an interview with Wotjek which will be featured in The Limb Shift podcast, to be released in October 2026, and which is available on Apple, Spotify, YouTube and via https://thelimbshift.com/
Richmond River High School (Class of 1978-1983) Reunion
“He spent half the night pacing back and forth to the door, checking if you had returned home, and eventually woke me up when you finally did,” my sister Pat recounted her husband’s concern over my night out in Lismore for our school reunion. Despite being in their 70s and 80s, they still worry about me as if I were a teenager attending an end-of-high-school event.
It’s been over four decades since I graduated from Richmond River High School, and here I am back in Lismore for a school reunion. The first reunion was held in 2004, which I helped organize. Although I was involved in planning this event too, I had to take a step back due to ill health. Nevertheless, I managed to attend and even found myself on the dance floor for a while. YMCA is pretty easy to dance to, even with a missing half-leg!
Welcoming attendees at the door of the Lismore City Bowling Club, I found myself saying, “I’m sorry, I don’t recognize you,” to a few people I hadn’t seen since high school. Yet, as soon as they mentioned their names, recognition flooded back.
While some women have maintained their hair color with just a few greys peeking through, some men have acquired noticeable beer bellies. Some women have embraced their grey hair, and it’s apparent that age has left its mark on us all. Amongst the men, the phrase “spent a bit of time in the front paddock” (country people will understand) springs to mind, referencing their “beer bellies”/
Though many of us stuck to our high school cliques, others were open to mingling with less familiar faces. I found myself engaged in lengthy conversations with individuals I never spoke to during high school, prompting me to ponder why we didn’t connect back then.
The answer perhaps lies in the competitiveness of our youth, something that seems far removed from our current selves, comfortable in our aging skins.
Embracing a former classmate whom I’ve sporadically encountered over the years, he quipped, “We’re part of the ‘still standing’ group,” alluding to our joint near-death experiences in recent times. A number of people in our class have passed away, sadly.
This reunion differed from the previous one, with some absentees from the last gathering making it this time, and vice versa.
The following morning, a few of us visited our high school building, which had suffered severe damage in the 2022 floods. While we couldn’t access the school grounds due to safety concerns, we gathered by the fence, reminiscing about the highs, lows, and quirky moments of our school days.
Catch Ups and a Cool Change
Last year, when I visited Sweden, I was lucky enough to meet “Sandra In Sweden”.
As I noted at the time…
She’s an American married to an Australian and on her blog she writes about their life in Stockholm. They’ve been in Stockholm five years now. This month Sandra and I have swapped lives. She and Robert have been visiting Robert’s family in Australia. Co-incidentally, Robert spent much of his early life in Young, which isn’t far from where I used to live in Wagga Wagga. So while they’ve been travelling around the region visiting family and friends who live in the Riverina and Central West and visiting places I know very well, I’ve been in Stockholm visiting the places they know very well. While they’ve been enjoying the sunshine in Australia, I’ve been enjoying the ice and snow in Sweden. For me, the ice and snow are interesting and exotic, not so for Robert and Sandra. I got an email from Sandra the other day asking when I was returning to Australia. Suddenly it became obvious we had a small window of opportunity to meet each other. So at about five o’clock today, I paid a visit to their fantastic apartment on Sodermalm, which, incidentally is the place in Stockholm I’d most like to live. Literally ten minutes after they walked in the door of their house, I was there to “welcome them back”. Over an hour or so we chatted about our lives, and made some interesting observations about both Swedes and Australians
Ten months later, our lives were reversed again as she and her husband were visiting Australia. We went out for lunch in Chinatown at my new favourite restaurant, Red Chilli. I’m pleased they enjoyed it as a different, but still authentically “Sydney” tourist thing to do.
Later in the afternoon I had a nap, ahead of catching up with some friends, including The Best Judge, as well as a couple of fellow ABBA fans. A fun and wild night was had by all.
Thank goodness for the cool change which came through mid-afternoon just as I walked Robert and Sandra to the car-hire place.
This American Life – The Movie
Today I went to see a preview of the movie version of the “This American Life” radio program. A radio show as a movie? It’s not too surprising, in some ways, because the program has a strong visual element to the story-telling. In some ways, the movie was like a snapshot of the program. There were monologues, there were interactive pieces, there was music, and there was some story-telling which I’ll later describe as “reading out loud”. As such, the movie contained elements of the radio show I really like, but also elements I really dislike.
I’ll start with the “dislike”. I really don’t like the “reading out loud” elements of “This American Life”. By that, I meant those elements where someone has written a short story and they come on a read it. For me, the short story is something you read off a page, where your imagination can really go wild. In stark contrast to some of the people I spoke with outside the movie later on who said, “Oh no, I love the reading out loud moments, I’ve discovered so many new authors through this show”, “reading out loud” just doesn’t do it for me.
For me, “reading out loud” can often sound overly “rehearsed” and therefore, not entirely authentic. It’s a generalisation, of course, since people like David Sedaris can ably take their written words and turn them into something quite dramatic. He’s an exception, though. For me, many of the “reading out loud moments” can “sound” quite predictable and very similar. They all seem to be presented in a style which seems highly derivative of the attitude and vocal intonation of an amalgam of Hunter S. Thompson and Tennessee Williams, with a bit of “beat poetry” thrown in.
Although there are many occasions when practice and rehearsal can sound “real”, quite often it doesn’t sound authentic, because people tend to speak in short sentences and phrases. Most people don’t speak in complete sentences, and when you hear someone reading out a long and complex sentence, my gut-feeling is they’ve spent a lot of time thinking too much about the words, and in being clever. They’ve forgetten the emotion and the honesty that comes from the oral tradition. A generalisation, I know, but it’s just “my thing”.
It’s an idea which, I acknowledge is probably in stark contrast to what I love about “This American Life”. I love the use of music, sound effects and dramatic pause. All of those elements can be rehearsed also and lack a degree of authenticity in their delivery. But for me, these elements add a wonderful element to talk radio that’s often under-estimated. It’s the element that talk radio, even without the use of music, has a strong musical quality. It can be like a symphony, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, with quite moments, dramatic moments, and mid-tempo moments also. “This American Life” incorporates sound beautifully.
There were moments today when I was deeply involved and moments when I was deeply disengaged. Without wishing to spoil the viewing moment, there’s a wonderful story from a woman who talks about her experiences with the American singer, Taylor Dayne. The story has a great narrative, and she uses pause and effect beautifully to tell a wonderful story. And there’s a great punchline to the story. There’s also a wonderful story about a man who is blind who talks with both humour and sensitivity about how he explained to his young daughter (under the age of five) that he couldn’t see, and how she progressively began to understand it. In contrast to what I said above about the use of music and sound, another story, about a man whose family moves to the country, which uses sound and music at a wonderful level, lacked direction and a clear sense of narrative, in my view. It just never went anywhere.
And that brings me to the substance of the film. I just never had a sense of where it was going and why they were doing it. “We spent a lot of money on this, so please support it”, Ira Glass says at one point in the film.
There’s one sketch which I think sums up the “why bother” feeling. It’s a segment where a famous American radio presenter interviews a guest, is entirely engaged with her subject, and as soon as the interview is over, totally loses interest in the subject. Those of us who have been on radio, and have worked in radio, laughed out loud. We got the point of it all, and then laughed out loud. But the sketch then went on and on and on in a weird, self-indulgent kind of manner.
For me and others I spoke to afterwards, the general consensus was the film was far too long at over two-hours. “Maybe I’ve just got a short attention span”, I said to a colleague today who in the afternoon asked what I thought of it. “Seriously, when they got to Act 6, I thought the film would never end” I told her.
Stockholm Under Construction
I swear there must be a secret plan for Stockholm to put in a bid to host the Olympic Games. That, or they’re expecting a Swedish economic crisis, so they’re doing as much now as they possibly can. How else could you explain the amount of building activity going on around Stockholm at the moment?
From the Royal Palace to Sergel’s Torg, the city is awash with scaffolding. Major buildings are either being given an external clean or a major renovation. In the case of Sergel’s Torg, the glass tower in the middle of Stockholm, the accompanying signs tell you it’s so this iconic Stockholm monument can live on well into the future. Personally, I think it’s ugly in a Blues Point Tower kind of way, and I can’t see what they could possibly do to make it look better.
Of course, the major work underway is the re-development of Slussen, the transport hub, and the creation of a tunnel which is supposed to alleviate traffic problems in the city, and hopefully, make it a far more friendly place for pedestrians and cyclists. There’s certainly some opposition to this development. Benny Andersson from ABBA has been one of the most vocal critics. In fact, he demanded the poster of ABBA at Stockholm Airport welcoming people to Stockholm be taken down. Interestingly that poster has been replaced by many others promoting the forthcoming opening of the ABBA Museum.
As I walked around today, I could begin to imagine how Stockholm, which is already a very beautiful city, could become so much more beautiful if it became more of a place for pedestrians and cyclists. Combined with all of the renovation work going on around the city, you can begin to imagine how the city might look in five to ten years. But hey, I’m just a tourist who visits from time to time, with little idea of the practicalities of what’s underway.
Speaking of Benny from ABBA. Do you know how I mentioned I inadvertently booked a hotel room that looked directly onto his business, Mono Music? Well, guess who I saw this morning as I walked back to my hotel room? He was chatting with a woman with an English accent as I walked past by. Ten years ago I might have been interested in stopping and asking politely for a photograph. But that’s not where my head-space is, these days. My interest in Sweden started all those years ago with ABBA, but meeting a member of ABBA is not something I really want to do these days. OK, maybe Frida.
I also saw the former presenter of the Swedish TV program, Allsang pa Skansen, Anders Lundin at T-Centralen, and that was mildly exciting too.
But aside from celebrity-spotting, it was a day of practicality. I booked out of the hotel I was staying and met one of the two guys who I’m renting an apartment from. He works as an IT systems developer for a major world company based in Stockholm. He was the loveliest guy. He showed me around the apartment, apologised the wifi hadn’t been installed as quickly as they’d hoped, and told he had bought a dongle so I could use the internet. He also gave me some great tips, including the one a colleague back in Sydney had also told me about, the famous Stockholm cafe, Sirup, which is directly across the road from where I’m staying. The apartment’s great and I’m looking forward to it being my home base for the next ten days, before I head off to Berlin.
The other practical thing I did today was getting a Swedish SIM card which has given me a local number (so I can avoid those international charges) and 2 gigabytes of data. One of the guys in the shop was really helpful in helping me decide which pre-paid plan to go on. I think the other guy thought I was a bit of an idiot when I asked for some help setting it up. “I just don’t want to stuff this up, and my Swedish isn’t good enough to guarantee I won’t”, I told him. I’ll be here for most of the next two months, so it made a lot of sense to do so.
Aside from those very practical things, I had a terrific day reacquainting myself with inner-city Stockholm. I got lost for a little while, as I struggled to remember the difference between North, South, East and West. It also took a moment to remember which way the traffic travelled. Thankfully there were no near accidents for this boy from the Southern Hemisphere.
The day was stunning. After arriving in cold conditions last night, there were times today when I even thought it was a little warm. Just before sunset, it was 6 degrees and clear. Shock! Horror! That said, I also went past a playground where children were playing ice hockey and skiing just metres from my door. And on Saturday night, the temperature’s forecast to reach minus twelve, so I’m not ready yet to hand back the warm jacket Damien loaned to me for this trip.