Go 4 All – Mototherapy: disabled and blind in the saddle with the motocross champion

Vanni Oddera is a handsome, damned and famous freestyle champion. He loves danger and extreme sport. At 36, he feels the world in his hand until, one evening, a particular encounter changes his life. It was the year 2009 and Oddera was in Moscow for an exhibition. Ready to party after the race, he gets into a taxi where there is a terrible stench. He leans forward to understand where the bad smell came from and notices that the taxi driver has no legs. She observes him driving with the controls on the steering wheel and immediately thinks of the luck he has and that many do not have. Once he returns to Italy, in Liguria where he was born and raised, he feels that something has changed in him. And so, between one training and another, he contacts his friend Chicco who works in a home for the disabled in Acqui Terme. He proposes to bring the boys from the center to him to be able to attend his performances. But at the end of the day, one of these guys asks him if he can try to get on the bike. Oddera, without thinking twice, takes him, makes him sit in the saddle in front of him and takes him around the fields. The boy screams, laughs and confides that this is the best experience he has ever experienced in his entire life! So Vanni invents “ mototherapy ”, and his idea is so popular that he organizes 50 dates a year, all free. In all this he is supported by a group of other motorcyclists, the “ friends of Daboot ”, who work with him on this therapy for the disabled. “ Children in wheelchairs feel alive again and can experience the thrill of speed, ” says Vanni in an interview. Vanni now also does mototherapy with children in the hematology and oncology departments of some Italian hospitals. In addition, his experience also reached Spain, Russia, Uruguay, Mexico and Colombia, countries where he performed freestyle shows and spread mototherapy. Click here to discover all our travel proposals for the disabled and accessible !! Vanni also has problems. At the age of twelve, he was diagnosed with situs viscerum inversus, a rare disease in which all organs are reversed: the heart on the right, the liver instead of the spleen, the kidneys displaced and the blood circulating in the opposite way. "I discovered it by chance after an electrocardiogram done to enroll me in figure skating, an idea of my mother who was trying to distract me from the obsession with the bike". Fortunately, it turned out differently.