THE rodeo community has rallied around injured young star Jordan Lane Robb, with well over $30 000 raised and hundreds turning up for a charity auction and rodeo at the AELEC on Saturday night.
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The 18-year-old Dubbo bull rider was on board Road Bomb at the Armidale Rodeo last November when an awkward fall saw him suffer breaks to the C4 and C5 vertebrae as well as severe spinal damage.
Since that day the Robb family has been overwhelmed with support, and not just from friends and family.
Robb’s father Chris said it was very confronting for the whole family at first, but the level of support they have received has been overwhelming.
“He was an 18-year-old kid who loved chasing pigs and riding bulls,” Chris said.
“It was very hard to deal with but we have had to accept it and make it as best we can for him.
“It has just been incredible the way the rodeo community, the Tamworth and Dubbo community, and his friends have come together.”
Since the Jordan Lane Robb Fundraiser Facebook page went up the story of Jordan has gone around the world with messages of support coming in from several of the biggest bull riders on the circuit.
Jordan was left blown away by a phone call from the mother of fellow fallen rider Lane Frost.
Frost is the subject of the movie Eight Seconds and was a world champion before a similar fall claimed his life in 1989.
“Messages like that keep him going,” Chris said.
Jordan’s best mates Jesse and Clint Glass live in Tamworth, and along with their sister Teagan have been working tirelessly to get the auction and rodeo off the ground.
A Greg Gibson horse float was raffled off during the rodeo, as well as thousands of dollars worth of other donated goods and services both online and live on Saturday afternoon.
While Robb still has a long way to go. In some respects he is quite lucky to be breathing under his own steam and able to move his shoulder blades and chest, something people with similar injuries can rarely do and a condition that baffled doctors and leaves a glimmer of hope.
The money raised on Saturday will go towards a future move from the Royal North Shore Hospital to the Ryde Rehabilitation Centre, and from there Jordan wants to move to Tamworth where he can be near his friends and the AELEC, to watch the sport he still loves.
“From the age of three when his grandfather put him on a poddy calf it is all he has ever wanted to do,” Chris said.
“He holds absolutely no regrets or bad feeling towards the sport and neither do we.”