Adventure Journal

The Blind Danny MacAskill? Matt Gilman Can’t See, He Rides Trials, and He’ll Blow You Away
by MICHAEL FRANK on OCTOBER 17, 2011.

Baltimore native Matt Gilman has to call me back. He’s frazzled, maybe a little annoyed. When I speak to him two hours later while he’s waiting for a ride home from his wife he sounds a heck of a lot better. “Sorry about before,” he says. “I almost cut a fork too short. In 15 years of being a bike mechanic that’s never happened. It was close, but I’m still batting a thousand,” he says, and chuckles.

Gilman is blind. He’s blind, he’s a bike mechanic, and he rides trials. Did we mention he’s blind?

Gilman was a talented BMX rider before losing his sight. He never cared much about limits, and though diagnosed with Type I diabetes, the disease was a kind of limit, so he addressed it by ignoring it.

“I suppose I thought I was invincible. I didn’t check my sugar. I hadn’t been to a doctor in a long time. What happened to my eyes [22 surgeries from 2004 to 2006] was probably inevitable,” he says.

After all that, he was left with zero vision in his left eye and 70 percent in the right, but it’s extremely blurry, as if looking through “a bottle of olive oil” and his cornea is milky.

“My vision is so bad that I can’t walk around on my own,” he said. “I use a white cane to navigate. I also can’t see any obstacles that don’t have super contrast to them. When I ride rocks I can’t see pretty much any part of them as they blend in with the surroundings. Sometimes when I ride rocks I find it easier to ride with my eyes closed so as to not let my mind think I see something that is not there.”

Gilman had spent a couple years riding trials before the diabetes took his sight, but as he puts it, “I was kind of lazy at it.” Gillman explains that he wanted to jump right ahead to the cool stuff, and after he dropped BMX for trials full time, he was only pretty good at the latter. Then, through the two-year ordeal of losing his vision, he couldn’t ride, and he couldn’t see, and the thing he missed even more than seeing was riding trials.

So despite the better wishes of his doctors, he got back on his bike.

Nikki “was cool with it,” says Gilman of his wife. “She didn’t want me to kill myself or anything, but I guess neither of us anticipated this.”

By “this”, Gilman is referring to riding trials in front of hundreds of people, to visiting diabetes camps, and to motivating people to do whatever they believe they can do.

And Gilman knows a lot about that. He was out with a friend the other day, trying to capture footage for some new video he wants to put on his site. (Yes, Gilman does the uploads himself, and he also texts, Skypes, adores Twitter, and uses e-mail all thanks to the brilliance of his iPhone.)

“We got some really good crash footage,” he deadpans of the hours-long effort to come away from the day with something salvageable. But he also admits that it was no different when he could see, because trials are hard, regardless of whether you can see.

“I expect everybody to be better than me but the thing is I can’t take anything for granted now. I had to relearn how to ride completely and now I have to walk every inch of what I’m going to ride.” Gilman says he’ll walk a stunt, get down and feel it with his hands, and paint a terrain map in his head. “If someone told you to memorize a beautiful painting that they were going to take away eventually and ask you questions about, that’s what you’d do, you’d study it,” he says, and that’s what he does, it’s just that his persistence as well as uncanny proprioception belie what we think of as possible.

Not that he cares about such preconceived notions. Gilman even coaches sighted riders, asking them for vocal cues about their positions on the bike, feeling their body positions, because in his mind he can see proper form and call B.S. on a pal’s moves when it doesn’t fit the right protocol.

But despite his gifted imagination and determination, coaching and wrenching aren’t the end for Gilman. He wants to be a motivational speaker full time, whereas right now it’s just a sometimes gig. He says that being blind has given him a fearlessness to try, to dare to do stunts and talk to big crowds that he never had the courage to even dream about when he could see.

“Most people have a lame excuse for why they can’t do something. I can help them get beyond that. If I can help people, if I can talk to kids with diabetes or whatever they’re going through and scare them into taking care of themselves but also let them know not to give up no matter what…Look, I’m riding a bike, like this. If I can do this, you can do anything.”