Karl Bayldon grew up on the Sunshine Coast, skating with a local crew, including Sammy Winter, Dave Harris, and Jackson Pilz. He spent his weekends on skate missions to Brisbane and the Gold Coast, eventually getting hooked up by a couple of sponsors. Karl is 35 now and still pushing. He and his fiancée have just bought a house in Birkdale.
It’s a Wednesday arvo when I catch him for a chat. “I’m great, man. I cannot complain,” he says brightly. “I’ve just been working, a little bit of skating and training – just normal adult life.”
But it wasn’t so long ago that the future looked pretty uncertain for Karl. Four years back, an ultrasound revealed that he had calcifications of cancer on one of his
