Brad Ludden Philanthropic Heartthrob
The kayaking pin-up who's using outdoor sports to give something back.
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Brad Ludden is standing on a rocky outcrop in the baking hot desert near Moab, Utah. He casually leaps across the two-metre wide gap in the cliff, landing on the other side on perilously loose stones and sand. In between there is a 50 metre plunge onto a fatal floor of rocks and sand. 'I needed something to get the adrenaline pumping,' he laughs in a soft, mid-Western accent.
Energetic, positive and oozing a folksy charisma, the 27-year-old professional kayaker is a veritable poster boy for the perfect outdoors lifestyle. And this has not gone unnoticed. He was recently awarded 2008's Most Eligible Bachelor by Cosmopolitan magazine in the USA an accolade he takes with a pinch of salt, after being fawned over by a host of middle-aged women on network television. The prize money, a healthy $10,000, was put to good use, thanks to Brad's decision to donate the lot to First Descents, a charity he began in 2001 offering outdoor adventure camps to young adults with cancer.
'When people get cancer, it just completely shuts everything down. They lose their independence, their social status, their identity; everything's just completely broken,' says Ludden. 'So once you get through it, you're told, Å’You're fixed, get back in the world.' But you need to know you're not fragile or broken because of this disease, and most importantly, that you have an identity outside of cancer.'
Brad Ludden
Ludden began kayaking 'with a love-hate relationship' at the age of nine. But competition wins and video parts followed what Ludden describes as 'taking some risks', gaining sponsorship from Nike ACG and travelling the world. But it was volunteering to teach children to kayak at a paediatric oncology camp that unlocked a passion for philanthropy.
Says Ludden: 'I was living a dream life and realised that all these experiences and good fortunes were wasted unless it was shared, you need to give something back. It's a social responsibility that we all have and once you recognise that, you can't turn your back on it.'
It may seem easy to be cynical, a privileged athlete harping on about charity work. But Ludden's down-to-earth enthusiasm speaks volumes, and he's looking to expand First Descents to offer skiing, surfing and backcountry explorations in the future.
'It doesn't matter what activity it is, as long as it's really challenging. You can't just give people a gold star for painting a picture. You've got to make them earn it. Anything you can plug in that they can look back on at the end of the day and feel like it's something they were proud of. That's what we provide and it has to be outdoors and it has to be inspiring because I think that's so important.'
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Brad Ludden (text) by Ed Andrews is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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