See how an incredible blind skateboarder overcomes his disability
As anyone who has ever stepped on a skateboard can tell you, skating can be quite difficult and frustrating. One would imagine that it would be exponentially tougher without the use of one's eyes.
But being blind doesn't necessarily mean that skateboarding is off the table; not if you're committed and patient enough. That's the lesson learned from the video above, which features blind skateboarder Dan Mancina going through some trial and error before completing a pretty impressive line on a tennis court.
Mancini suffers from a degenerative eye disease that has taken nearly all of his vision in the past four years. According to an interview with Jenkem Mag, Mancina has about 5% of his eyesight left and will eventually be completely blind in both eyes. For now, he can only see shadows and lights. He describes his vision as having "a bunch of layers of saran wrap and look through that."
But it hasn't stopped him from continuing a passion of skateboarding that began while he still had his vision.
"I got inspired one day and built a box, then I was just like I’m gonna see what I can do," Mancina told Jenkem. "Originally I was doing it without my cane but the cane gives it such a dramatic effect. It’s hilarious like, 'Whoa, is that dude blind?' I’ll take the box to a tennis court and put it along the white line in front of a crack. I’ll pop over the crack and know the box is coming up, and I feel the box with my cane and just hit it from there."
In addition to skating, Mancina makes it a point to upload videos of himself performing tasks that one might not expect a blind person to be able to do -- such as hunting, chopping wood, playing beer pong, etc. His reasoning behind it is pretty simple.
"To change the perspective of what you think a blind person is," he says. "I’m literally the exact same person I was before I was blind. People are afraid to approach me, even talk to me. Or people are always going out of their way to help me and that’s just as weird as ignoring me because you’re still treating me differently because I’m blind. Some of it comes from me convincing myself of that and then hopefully convincing other people I’m the same person. I carry around this cane and people treat me differently, so it’s pretty much living a life of proving myself. That’s kind of where the videos come from."
As of right now, he hasn't been able to do everything on his skateboard that he was capable of before going blind, but says he wants to eventually reach that point. We have no reason to doubt him.
