The Power of the Paddle

The Sunday Times Bestseller 'His name was Ibrahim. He was about five years old and the thing he wanted most in the world was to go to school.' In a tiny country on the Horn of Africa, extreme adventurer, former soldier and star of Channel 4's Hunted Jordan Wylie made an extraordinary promise to a remarkable young boy. Ibrahim's home Djibouti is a refuge from neighbouring war zones, playing host to children excluded from the basic privileges we take for granted in the West. So, armed with skills learned from a lifetime of adventures, Wylie vowed to raise funds to build a new school for those children. And thus began a series of exceptional challenges, seeing Wylie row solo across the pirate-infested Bab el-Mandeb Strait in a world first and run extreme marathons in ice-cold climates. To cap it off, he embarked on a journey stand-up paddleboarding around mainland Great Britain, along the way facing military firing ranges, crazy teenagers on jet-skis, psychotic jellyfish and, finally, Covid-19. This is the inspirational true story of the lengths one man went to fulfil a young boy's dream - and of the good that can be achieved even in the hardest of times.

Former soldier Jordan Wylie is an author, extreme adventurer and charity fundraiser. He is one of the stars of Channel 4's BAFTA-nominated and award-winning shows Hunted and Celebrity Hunted, and he appears regularly on platforms such as Sky News, the BBC and ITV. He is the United Kingdom's National Ambassador for the Army Cadet Force, in which capacity he is a frequent motivational speaker to young people in schools and colleges as well as businesses all over the world. He is the author of Citadel (Mirror Books, 2017), which details his life experiences from a council estate in Blackpool to the battlefield and beyond, and Running For My Life (Biteback, 2019), which illustrates how he ran through the most dangerous countries in the world to help inspire children.