“I was diagnosed with cancer when I was about 12 so I was in and out of hospital for quite a bit of time before my amputation at 16, and I had been a fairly active kid so I was pretty keen to get into sport straight away,” Skuse said.

“I remember one of my first questions to my rehab doctor was ‘When can I start playing wheelchair basketball?’ and she asked ‘Why would you want to do that?’ and I said ‘Because I’ve been sitting in hospital for four years’.

“Pretty much straight away I got into wheelchair basketball and that became my main sport for the next ten years or so.”

Skuse’s basketballing career resulted in the Bungendore lad gaining national representative honours as a member of the Australian Wheelchair Basketball team, alongside stints in the national domestic competitions in Australia, Spain and Italy. But about six years ago Skuse threw in the towel on basketball and began focusing his attentions elsewhere.

“When I finished playing wheelchair basketball, I came back to Australia and had this hole that basketball had left,” Skuse said.

“So I filled it up with things like adventure racing, mountain biking and more recently I’ve been getting into the triathlons.

“I’ve always been fairly active and pushing the limits of the legs and things that have been made for me, and testing my prosthetist Richie [Richard Goward] out.”

Bruce-based prosthetist Richard Goward has been working with Skuse on his leg for a couple of years and his client’s intention to compete in the 2016 ITU Cross Triathlon World Championships at Thredbo in November has allowed the doctor to exercise his creative streak.

“The easiest way to think of a prosthetic is as a shoe,” Goward said.

“You don’t wear a dress shoe when you’re going out running, you don’t wear a hiking shoe when you’re walking at the beach.

“There are all different types of activities that we would especially build a prosthesis for. Darren is on some pretty new technology and he’s one of the first people in the country on this particular foot that he’s on at the moment. It’s based loosely on the running and jogging style feet, which gives a little bit more flexibility, and there’s lots of stuff that we’re getting to play around with now which is quite exciting.”

Skuse and Goward are also involved in the Michael Milton launched Team Amped, a mountain biking team aimed at active amputees, and Skuse said the single most important aspect of his involvement in physical activity and sport was the awareness it would create.

“Over the years I have found my own path, but it hasn’t always been so clear what to do there, who to talk to and how to get to this kind of level in doing these things,” Skuse said.

“I want to be able to assist people and show them that there is a pathway because if that person doesn’t have the same kind of personality to keep pushing and keep asking, they might get put off a lot easier and then not have the opportunities at the end of the day that I have been lucky enough to have.”

“Disability is absolutely not the end of function, or the end of participation,” Goward said.