"It's all good"
Why the tragic death of extreme sports star Richard Taylor helped so many
Richard Taylor had a catch phrase. If something went wrong in life - something that might send even the most resilient into a tail spin - he would break open his trademark smile and reassure those around him "It's all good".
Richard was blessed. Imbued with unbreakable optimism since birth, he was cool-headed, charismatic, humble, thoughtful, fun, generous and good looking.
As if that was not enough of a win in the genetic lottery, he was a talented sportsman to boot.
So talented in fact that the boy from the small seaside town of Barry in south Wales - famous for its pleasure park and TV comedy Gavin and Stacey - went on to become a celebrity in the extreme sports worlds of aggressive inline skating and freestyle skiing.
"If ever he got into a scrape and I'd be thinking 'Oh no', he'd just laugh and say 'It's all good'," his mother Gaynor says.
"Like the time he got a key snapped off in the lock of a car he'd hired and he was stuck miles from nowhere. There was no panic. 'It's all good mum, we'll sort something out'.
"He'd always been the same. From when he was a small boy, he had this amazingly positive way of thinking.
"Honestly, he was always happy and couldn't abide moaners.
A smile - that's how you would think of Richard. He had this shining smile."
As Gaynor walked beside her son for the final time just before midnight on Sunday 8 August 2004, as his hospital bed was wheeled into an operating theatre to remove his organs for donation, the reality of what had happened was yet to sink in.
A future as a world-class skier, an unrivalled reputation as a champion skater, his burgeoning career as a stuntman, the force of nature that had been Richard Taylor with the shining smile, shaggy blond hair, and "It's all good" philosophy - all of it was gone.
Richard had taken many risks throughout his life.
He had positively thrived on a sense of danger - stunt skating, cliff jumping, skiing, abseiling, rock climbing, sky diving - though everyone who knew him is keen to stress, never recklessly.
His favourite quote was: "To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it."
Richard had pulled off countless spectacular - and potentially dangerous - stunts so it is all the more tragic to think it was a freak accident that killed him just yards from home on a run-of-the-mill Tuesday morning.
"Richard always said he was invincible and I believed him," Gaynor says. When she reveals a little of what life was like as his mother, it is easy to see why.
Climber
Gaynor, a keen gymnast and swimmer in her younger days, and John Taylor, a motorbike enthusiast, welcomed the first of two sons, Richard John, into the world on 6 July 1981.
It was not very long before the irrepressible spirit she recognises in herself began to emerge in Richard.
"From the time he learned to walk, he was constantly climbing," Gaynor says.
"We'd not long moved into a three-storey town house, we were still doing some work and there was scaffolding at the front of the house.
"We were woken one morning by a knocking on the window. We got out of bed, opened the curtains and there was Richard laughing and waving.
"He was three years old and he’d climbed up three storeys of scaffolding. I didn’t even know he was out of bed.
"His father was beside himself and as he ran outside to get to him I remember just hiding my fear and fixing a smile on my face and saying 'Oh hello Richard, climb back down nice and slowly now'. I didn't want to panic him by showing I was scared.
"He was just so adventurous. There was no stopping him when he was a boy.
"He would do things that were very close to the edge.
"I got used to my heart being in my mouth but I'd smile and calmly say 'Ok Richard' and then try to distract him from what he was doing and get him back to safety."
In an attempt to harness the boundless energy of Richard and younger brother Robert, Gaynor packed them off to Cubs and Scouts as soon as they were old enough, telling them it was the law and that they had to go.
Meanwhile their father John spent time off from his local bakery business, John's Hot Bread Shop, taking 'his boys' to the woods to make bows and arrows and climb trees.
On top of that there was an exhausting rota of gymnastics, martial arts, golf and trampolining classes.
When Richard was 11 or 12 Gaynor took him along to the local roller dome where an elite team of skaters - sponsored by skate brand Bauer - were giving a demonstration.
Richard was transfixed.
"They were a professional team from all over the world," Gaynor says.
"From an early age Richard said he wanted to be stuntman. He saw what they were doing and that was it. He wanted to skate."
During a family holiday in San Francisco not long after, Richard used his savings to buy his first pair of inline skates.
He would take himself down to Leckwith Skate Park in Cardiff - the only half-pipe in south Wales at the time - where he spent hours practising and filming his stunts on his father's camcorder.
Repeatedly rewinding the video, he would analyse his performance to see where he could improve.
He put a show reel together and Air Circus, a skate shop in Cardiff, agreed to sponsor him. And so began Richard Taylor's ascent into the world of extreme sports.
Pro-athlete
At 15 Richard turned professional after winning the World Amateur International Inline Skate Series.
Immediately entered into the professional category of the competition, held in Amsterdam that year, he came a very respectable sixth place.
Brands were clamouring to sponsor him. One of them was Bauer.
Richard joined the same elite team he had watched with such wonderment that fateful day in Barry just a few years before.
Aggressive inline skating - which uses skates with a single row of wheels specially designed for grinding and spins - also called blading, inline stunt or rolling, emerged from a fusion of the BMX and skateboarding cultures which exploded in the 1980s.
The spandex stigma of roller-skating was vanquished as the ultra-cool surf and boarding types adapted their skills to blades.
Inline skating quickly grew into a popular recreational and competitive sport worldwide.
And the teenager from Barry - lionised by a fan base across Europe and the US - was one of its biggest stars.
"Richard had a natural ability," Gaynor says.
"You couldn't put your finger on it but he just had that something special. I'd call it star quality. Nothing seemed to faze him.
"I didn't worry especially mainly because right from the start I'd instilled in the boys that if they started something they give it respect and take time to do it properly.
"I'd always tell them to have confidence in their skill and if there was any doubt, then don't do it.
Richard knew his limitations. He was adventurous, never reckless."
"Yes he took risks but they were always calculated risks."
Richard had a lifestyle other teenagers could only dream of.
He regularly went on tour - Australia, the US, Middle East and Europe - competing, starring in promotions and signing autographs.
"He travelled the world for two years virtually non-stop," Gaynor said. "One year he was only home for two weeks."
It was only a few months before his death that Richard, who counted Red Bull and Rollerblade among his most recent sponsors, turned his attention to skiing.
His plan was to skate in the summer and ski in the winter.
Richard had skied occasionally on family holidays but had little experience on snow.
But then why would that stop him?
After a ski season in Vail, Colorado, he began competing against those who had learned to ski before they could walk.
In March 2004, having taking up skiing just a few months before, Richard entered a competition.
This time he even managed to amaze himself.
A spectacular 900-degree rotation off a huge jump won him the Big Air title at The BRITS - British Freestyle Skiing and Snowboarding Championships.
And just as with his skating career, another big sponsorship came calling. Richard was asked to join the prestigious Line Skis professional team.
Richard's brother Robert - whose own hopes for Winter Olympics qualification were ended recently due to injury - is certain his brother was headed for skiing stardom.
"I've no doubt," he says. "In that short space of time everyone in British freestyle skiing knew who he was.
"Here was this random bloke who came from nowhere and literally took over.
"Many of them had skied hard all their lives and Richard just rocks up, a 23-year-old which is quite old to start competing.
"At first they were like 'Where's this guy come from?'. But he was accepted into the skiing community very quickly.
"He was already doing a lot more than other professional skiers were doing.
"One of the stunts he did was only achieved by someone else three years after his death and it won him a major competition. Rich was pioneering stuff by transferring skate stunts onto snow."
Stephen Riddick - Richard's friend from Barry who was with him the day he had his accident - believes he would have become as big a deal as legendary US ski champion Tanner Hall.
"At the time, watching what Richard was doing in competitions, I thought he was more talented than Hall," he says.
Stephen is not alone in his conviction that had he lived, Richard would have become one of his nation's biggest sporting stars.
With another skating world tour, his second UK National Inline Skating Championship and the Big Air title under his belt, Richard headed home to his beloved Barry to regroup and plan his next challenge.
Accident
On Tuesday 3 August 2004 Gaynor left for work as usual. Richard, who had been working shifts as a security guard at nearby Cardiff Airport, was asleep in his room.
A couple of hours later two old friends from Barry's self-styled KRU (Kinetic Rollin' Union) - Stephen Riddick and James Yarr - called at Richard's family home.
"It was a beautifully sunny day, blue sky, not a cloud in sight," Stephen says.
"We decided to just go for a cruise. No one wanted to do anything too full-on."
The three of them set off from Richard's house and headed down a steep residential incline known locally as Ship Hill.
It was a route they had taken countless times before.
As usual the skaters would cruise down the hill and as they reached a junction at the bottom, one of them would call the direction - left, right or straight across to Barry Island.
That day Stephen made the call. Straight on to Barry Island.
He was about 8ft behind Richard when he saw him clip his boot on the pavement kerb and saw his legs go away from one another.
They were travelling at speed - by Stephen's reckoning between 30 to 35mph - and he remembers thinking Richard may have spotted something, a car maybe, and had jumped onto the pavement to avoid it.
Life-long friend Mike Rolf - their mothers were best friends too
"I was scanning around to see if there was anything to avoid so I didn't actually see him fall," he says.
"When I went past Richard, he was lying on the floor by the lamp post.
"At first I was laughing. I didn't think it was a big deal, just a silly fall and he'd just get back up."
Unaware anything was wrong, Stephen skated past. When he looked back Richard was still lying on the ground.
He rushed back to him and soon realised it was far from a silly fall.
After clipping the pavement Richard lost control - it is likely a knee injury he was recovering from played a part - and crashed into a concrete lamp post.
He had not been wearing a helmet.
Richard's father, who had often talked to his son about the importance of safety gear, said at the time that headgear would not have saved his life given the speed and nature of the accident.
Stephen agrees. He says the quality of helmets available back then would have offered little protection.
That of course is no longer the case and needless to say ever since that day Stephen has never skated without one.
Gaynor got the call in work.
Richard and brother Rob
One of Richard's friends, clearly upset, told her there had been an accident.
She then recalls a member of the public, who had stopped to help, was handed the phone.
He told her an ambulance had been called and it looked like her son had broken his leg.
As she headed to accident and emergency at Cardiff's University Hospital of Wales - the police called. It was worse than a broken leg.
As well as breaking both his legs, Richard had suffered catastrophic head injuries.
Gaynor contacted her husband who was in London that day and they called Robert who was holidaying with friends on a beach in Australia.
He began the agonisingly long journey home knowing his brother and mentor was in intensive care.
Legacy
Five days after his accident, tests confirmed the worst. Richard was brain stem dead. The family gave permission for his life support to be turned off.
"A minute or so later the doctor came back in with a look of dread on his face," Gaynor said.
"He asked us if we had considered organ donation. You could tell he just didn't want to ask that question so soon after being told we had lost our son.
"Before he could even finish asking us, we both said yes. We both carried donor cards and we supported it. There was no doubt in our minds.
"I later found out that Richard was on the NHS Organ Donor Register which he'd done when he renewed his driving licence. I had no idea. It was such a relief to know it was what he would have wanted."
Although Richard's time of death was officially recorded at 09:20 BST on Sunday 8 August, the family had to wait until around midnight to escort him to the operating theatre to have his organs removed.
Richard's organs went to two people on the 'super urgent list' - those expected to live only 24 to 48 hours without a transplant.
His liver was donated to the mother of a child and a young baby. The transplant was a success.
His heart went to a man in his 50s. He arranged for Gaynor to be given the gold medal he went on to win in the Transplant Games.
An elderly man and a young girl were given the gift of sight when they received his corneas and a father of two, a diabetic with renal failure, was given his pancreas and kidney.
Since then Gaynor has been an advocate for Organ Donation Wales. She strongly supports the law change in Wales on 1 December 2015.
It allows for 'deemed consent'. This means if you do not actively opt out of the register, in the event of your death it will be presumed that you have no objection to donating organs.
Richard was not the only member of the family to help others in this way.
John Taylor died of a heart attack 18 months after the death of his son. He was 55.
Gaynor says he never got over what happened to Richard and while he tried to hide it from her, she knew he cried every day.
John helped set up the Richard Taylor Fund to raise money to build a new skate park in Barry, something his son had long campaigned for.
Sadly he died before its grand opening.
Just like his son before him, John's organs were also donated to help others.
"It's a subject we don't talk about enough," Gaynor says.
"No one wants to talk about death but it helps so much during a very traumatic time, knowing what someone's wishes were.
I really urge people to talk about organ donation. Let people know on Facebook or whatever, so that if something does happen to you, family and friends will know what you wanted."
The knowledge that Richard's death helped so many people remains a huge comfort to his mother, brother and friends.
"Richard was always thinking of others," Gaynor says. "It was his nature.
"When he was a big star, he'd take time out to help the younger skaters. He'd always go out of his way, to get down to their level and help them.
"So to think this is part of his legacy is a huge thing. And it was what he wanted. He helped a lot of people. I'm very proud of him."
To so many people, Richard Taylor's distinctive thumbs-up approach to life lives on in so many ways.
There are those who received his organs of course as well as their families and friends.
There are also those he inspired with his sporting prowess.
Then there are those who visit Barry's Richard Taylor Memorial Skate Park, those who travel miles for beach parties held on his birthday, those who compete in the annual Richard Taylor Trophy and those who simply knew and loved him.
For those of us who are new to the legacy of Richard Taylor, perhaps it is best to leave the last word to the man himself.
This was Richard's MSN profile but it is as fitting an epitaph as any.
I like to live life, live for today and not tomorrow. I don't care what people think of me. My mind is open to anything it gets hit with. It's all good. All the time. It can never be bad. Peace."
