Rolling With The Punches

Dealt a cruel hand at birth, Dylan Alcott has spent his 27 years breaking down barriers to become a champion in two sports and the epitome of can-do zeal

- Daniel Williams

SOME OF US CAN feel hard done by our whole lives because we were born with a weak chin or a predisposition to baldness. Dylan Alcott, on the other hand, came into the world with a tumour wrapped around his spinal cord that would rob him forever of the use of his legs but only briefly his passion for living and drive to excel. “I spent the first three-and-a-half years of my life in hospital but the best thing my family did was never to wrap me in cotton wool,” says Alcott, who on this forbidding Melbourne morning is rallying against a wall in an underground carpark. “They never cared about the fact I had a disability so I took the view that if they don’t care, why should I?” Alcott lost his mojo only in his first year of high school, where friends became less patient and bullies crawled out of the woodwork to taunt him. Suddenly self-conscious and embarrassed, he struggled for a while until grabbing an opportunity in the shape of competitive sport. “I don’t say this lightly: sport