H E RO ES
TUNNEL VISION
Picture yourself surfing the huge waves of Nazaré, Portugal, becoming a dot on a 15m-high wall of water. Now imagine doing it with your eyes shut. This is how Aussie surfer MATT FORMSTON rode a monster he couldn’t see WORDS AMY WOODYATT
the red bulletin: How do you surf if you can’t see? matt formston: I started out on a bodyboard when I was about five – Dad would push me into waves, get me in and then drag me back out again. I learnt how to feel the board. It doesn’t have fins, so you have to surf using the rail, to learn how to feel that water running off. Then
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I began to paddle in myself, hearing the waves coming towards me. I basically use my feet as my cane, to feel what’s happening. [I learnt through] thousands and thousands of hours of catching good and bad waves, finding out what it feels like and what my body should do. How does that translate to big waves? The biggest waves I’ve found in Australia have been 25-foot [almost 8m] waves, then you go to Nazaré and you’re surfing 50-foot [15m] waves, so it’s not really incremental progression! I worked on my breathing – you’re probably going to come off your board, and if you don’t have the breath capacity and the mental capacity, there’s a good likelihood you’ll die. I’ve got a wife and kids, and I definitely wanted to come home to them. I trained to the level where my longest single breath hold was five minutes and 40 seconds. Then I was doing ‘empty lungs’ – that’s in case you hit the water, all the air is pushed out of you and your heart rate increases. I learnt how to reduce my heart rate underwater: I’d spread out all my air, and my coach would crush my chest cavity. I did a 25-metre lap underwater with no air in my lungs. What motivates you? My attitude used to be: “I want to prove to others what I can do.” What I was really trying to do was prove I didn’t have a disability. People would say, “You can’t,” so I’d go out to prove them wrong. Now it’s more just the curiosity of what’s possible. How do you balance the element of risk with family life? Risk is a perceived thing; it’s not necessarily based on data. I looked at Nazaré: people see the wave and they feel fear. When you look at it, many highly trained people go there and not
many have died. I knew I’d trained as hard as anyone else. On top of that, I had the best team in the world. When you break that down on a piece of paper, rather than just looking at the big wave, the data says I’m actually pretty safe. How do you prepare to surf big waves? There’s a lot of trust between the whole team to make the call on whether I go or not: I can’t see how big the wave is. I only find out how big it is when I get to the bottom of it. When Lucas Chumbo [a Brazilian former surf champion who tows Formston into waves] has got me into the right spot and I’ve got the right speed, he blows a whistle and I know that’s the time. I pull myself forward using a rope and that takes me over the ledge of the wave. What did it feel like catching your first wave at Nazaré? All I heard was the whistle. Then the whole world was silent. It was just me going down this massive wave and I can feel the water coming up on my board. It’s just this feeling of the board slicing through, going at, like, 60kph. When I heard the kick-out of the wave, I knew I’d made it back to safety. Then all the audio comes back and I can hear all the guys screaming, all the jet skis rolling around and the crash of the waves breaking. How do you follow up that goal? I’m considering going for a freediving world record because of all the training I did with my breath capacity. It feels like something I should use. Formston’s journey has been captured for a documentary, The Blind Sea, set for release this summer; theblindsea.com.au
THE RED BULLETIN
THE BLIND SEA FILM
Matt Formston has been blind since the age of five. For the Australian, surfing provides endless possibilities. Some days, he feels like a racing driver on his board, making sharp twists and turns. Other times, riding waves is more creative, he says, allowing him to “create my art on the canvas by synthesis or feel”. Feel is key. Formston has spent the last four decades fine-tuning his surfing, learning how to manoeuvre himself on waves he can’t see. When he lost his sight as a child, Formston’s parents didn’t treat him any differently: they kept him in mainstream school, entered him into tag rugby with his mates, and encouraged him to try whatever sports he liked. After years competing in para-cycling – with a world record, national titles and a Paralympics appearance to his name – Formston switched his focus to the sea. “I wanted to be a pro surfer, but due to my disability I couldn’t compete in the water the way others did,” says Formston, 45. “Even when I was cycling, I was always saying, ‘I can’t wait to retire so I can just surf,’ because that’s what I love doing.” When the chance came to compete in the first world championship for blind surfers, he plunged himself headfirst into the sport. Then, as a man who rarely does things by halves, Formston began training to catch big waves at surf mecca Nazaré…