Toni Mould is a 37-year-old para-cyclist who has carried the South African flag for more than seven years. She shares her experience as a national athlete with cerebral palsy and how sport has changed her life.
Toni Mould discovered paracycling ‘quite by accident’, she says. As a child, she loved sport and always wanted to be involved in some sort of physical activity, but at the time, there were few opportunities in her hometown of Plettenberg Bay, especially for someone with her disability.
Mould was born with Cerebral palsy (CP), which according to the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention is ‘a group of disorders that affect a person’s ability to move and maintain balance and posture… Most CP is related to brain damage that happened before or during birth’. It can affect different people in different ways and symptoms can include neurological problems and difficulty with mobility, muscle coordination and speech.
‘It affects basically all my muscles, so anything to do with muscle coordination or balance, movement, [as well as] my speech. It’s quite a wide-ranging disability,’ Mould explains.
‘Some [people] are more severely affected, some are less. I would say I am just over the halfway mark between…