GEOFFREY Tripcony has set a challenge.  He says a “hobby” he used to pursue was a particularly brutal sport and wants me to guess what it was - Football? No. Rugby? 
No. Sorry, I’ve got no idea. A broad grin spreads across his face: “Bull riding.”
Wedderburn’s Tripcony is both a maker of custom fishing rods and a taxi driver in Bendigo. He’s a big man who looks much younger than his 56 years, but there’s not a lot about him that shouts “bull rider”. 
That’s until he shows you his right hand, with its broad scar from a bull’s horn that looks like a river delta from above. And he tells you some of his stories.
Tripcony didn’t start bull riding until he was 31, an age when many are choosing – or are forced – to retire from the sport. Over the next 20 years, he says he spent 15 taking part in competitions. 
He entered rodeos in the Northern Territory, New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria, won the event one year at the infamous Deniliquin Ute Muster, and appeared in a bull riding competition at Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne when the tennis court was covered over with dirt for a rodeo fit for city slickers. In 2013, he was sitting in a Mercedes van parked on the side of the road in Melbourne when a 20-tonne truck slammed into the van’s rear. 
Tripcony says a $3000 car seat his boss had bought for him just before the accident so he would be more comfortable saved his life. The crash compressed the van into something resembling a concertina.
Tripcony miraculously suffered no broken bones but had severe internal injuries and received a massive concussion. For the next three years he was basically house bound, with any exertion likely to trigger a blackout episode. Bull riding, you might think, was not the best hobby to try to resume.
But Tripcony is nothing if not determined, to a fault. 
He compares himself to the ever-optimistic Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, shouting “It’s only a flesh wound!” as another limb is lopped off by King Arthur. By 2017 he was ready to climb once again onto the back of a one-tonne bull that wants nothing more than to throw you off and then skewer you with its horns.
Somehow, despite the obvious risks, he did get back, at almost 50 years of age. 
At a competition near Ballarat, he leapt onto a cantankerous beast, and when he was finally launched towards the stratosphere he had ridden it for only half a second less than one of his rivals, at the time ranked in Australia’s top 10.
Sensibly, Tripcony is no longer challenging himself on a behemoth’s back.  At one rodeo he was thrown by a giant that then tried to gore him. He says he did what he was trained to do and gripped the bull’s head as tightly as he could while rodeo clowns tried to distract it.
Afterwards, he says he couldn’t sneeze happily for three weeks thanks to the pain in his ribs, despite there being no breaks. “I don’t bruise, but a couple of days later I counted 27 marks on my arms from his horns,” Tripcony says. The prizemoney, he says, made the pain worthwhile. The Black Knight lives on.