Background
Smith was born on 21 April 1978 in Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland. He was born with a club foot and for the first three years of his life he had his bones repeatedly broken and reset to correct his foot"s alignment.
Smith was born on 21 April 1978 in Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland. He was born with a club foot and for the first three years of his life he had his bones repeatedly broken and reset to correct his foot"s alignment.
He graduated from the University of Bath in 2009 with a bachelor"s degree in sports performance.
In 2010 he underwent emergency surgery after doctors found a tumour inside his spinal cord at cervical spine level The surgery left him temporarily paralysed, an issue that was later determined to be the result of a blood clot. Early Sporting He earned a Black Belt in Karate and was is the British squad for 6 years.
But running round bends caused stress fractures which forced him to quit.
He turned to bobsleigh, because straight-line running was fine and made the Great Britain team as a brakeman. But neck and back pains interrupted training and he missed a 2006 Winter Olympics spot by one-hundredth of a second.
Smith was introduced to adaptive rowing in 2009 at a Paralympic Potential Day run by the British Paralympic Association. In 2011 he competed at the at World Championships held at Lake Bled, Bled, Slovenia.
They completed the one kilometre course in a time of three minutes, 27.10 seconds, finishing nearly five seconds ahead of runners-up Canada.
The result qualified a boat for Great Britain into the 2012 Summer Paralympics in London. The crew repeated their gold medal result at the Munich World Cup event in 2012. Smith was selected along with Relph, Riches, Roe, and van den Broeke, to compete for Great Britain at the 2012 Summer Paralympics in the mixed coxed four event.
The event took place between 31 August and 2 September at Eton Dorney.
Despite his success at rowing, medical issues forced Smith to retire from that sport, and he subsequently joined British "s Paralympic Academy programme in 2014. He continued to compete at Paracycling despite further surgery on the tumour, taking ninth place at the final Para-cycling Road World Cup of the 2015 season in Pietermaritzburg, but in January 2016 he announced that he"d need another operation that ended his plans to compete at the 2016 Paralympic games.
Smith was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (Administration Member of the Order of the British Empire) in the 2013 New Year Honours for services to rowing.