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Hello - Dai Richards here and on May 7th 2026, you will have the opportunity to vote for me in the Senedd elections. Today, I'm at Victoria Gardens, Neath, built by my great-grandfather Thomas Snow, together with his two sons, John & Thomas Benjamin Snow. | |
| The two pillars you see behind me were donated to the town by my family on the park's completion, | ||
| My family hail from Neath and in 1891 all four sets of my great-grandparents lived near the Neath town centre | ||
| I'm immensely proud of my family's historical contribution to the town of Neath and as an elected member of the Senedd I'd like to help restore our pride in the great towns that we have in the BTN consituency, not forgetting of course the City of Swansea. | ||
| But who is Dai Richards............ | ||
| This is what i love, I love the mountains, swimming in the lakes at sunrise and walking the waterfalls in flood, I love to be part of nature to be at one with this amazing planet, and i want to enjoy my remaining days left on this earth. | ||
| I'm 66 years old and apart from living five years in Swansea, I've lived all my life in Neath-Port Talbot, and the last 18 years in Brynhyfryd, Glynneath. . | ||
| I'm best known for my prowess as a sportsman, I've represented Wales at cyclo cross, triathlon, mountain running, marathon kayaking, duathlon which is combined running and cycling, and mountain biking. This is me in red top and pink shorts riding for wales in the 1996 mountain bike tour of Britain where I finished the leading rider in the Welsh team. | ||
| I rode six years as a sponsored rider for the Schmoo's mountain bike team travelling the length and breadth of Britain to race against professional teams such as Raleigh Marin and Peugeot, with the occasional magazine photo shoot included. | ||
| During this period of my life I also worked as a physical training instructor with the territorial army winning the major British military mountain running competition the welsh 1000 meter peaks race twice in succession running from the sea near Bangor to the top of Snowden via the four highest peaks in Wales and I won the territorial army triathlon championships for the first four years of of its existence. I also spent time perfecting other military skills. | ||
| In 2000 near Prague in the Czech Republic, I won the veteran over 40 title in the world quadrathlon championships combining kayaking with the three triathlon sports and in 2009 inside sport magazine named me Wales Fitness Man. I was 16 years past my best by that time and i had retired to focus on developing sport locally so that my children could enjoy a healthy lifestyle. | ||
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I live with my wife Hayley and we have four children, three of whom have represented
Wales and/or Great Britain, Simon and Dale at orienteering, Dale at
cyclo cross, Victoria represented Wales and Great Britain at slalom kayak and in 2017 Victoria was a member of the Great Britain women's team that won a gold medal in the slalom discipline at the world white water rafting championships in Japan, so we have another world champion in the family she's pictured in the front left of the raft. Two of my children are respected scientists, they both have a PhD in chemistry, Dr Simon contributed a chapter to the Royal Society of Chemistry periodical, Organometallic chemistry in 2020 and Dr Victoria is the chief editor of the chemistry journal, Nature Chemistry Communications. |
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I worked at
Neath-Port-Talbot College managing the first college
Triathlon Academy in Britain and at the same time I was chairman of Wales's largest and most successful club of that period based in
Neath, Multisport Racing Club, To support the academy,
in 2003 I started a junior section in the club that was designed as a pathway
for junior triathletes into the college academy .
The footage you are watching now is the first session of the Multisport junior section which took place in May of that year. By 2005, 75 percent of Wales age group champions were from the academy feeder system at Multisport racing Club and In 2022 the pathway to success came to fruition with a major games medal when Iestyn Harrett of Glynneath who joined Multisport Racing Club as a junior won a silver medal for Wales at the Commonwealth Games. |
| For fun i work as an extra in television and movie productions including Casualty, Sherlock and the locally filmed Pride where i was featured in the first scene filmed. If you have the DVD, I'm the first person you see when you put it on i appear to the right of Bill Nye in this promo photo. | ||
| I'll let the Welsh rugby legend Gareth Edwards take up the story from here. | ||
| text required | Gareth Edwards 1905 section | |
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audio | My day job is running the world's leading leading supplier of rugby memorabilia Rugby Relics Ltd which is a company that has evolved from when I started selling my spare rugby programmes 48 years ago, back in 1978. |
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We sell all kinds of rugby memorabilia and have an online museum of memorabilia
dedicated to the history of Wales' national sport. We
have previously exhibited some of our collection of artifacts in the 125th and the 130th Welsh Rugby Union anniversary exhibitions, that took place in Neath, the birthplace of the Welsh Rugby Union. |
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It was the purchase of an item of memorabilia and interest in the origin of Rugby Union that started my journey in governance and politics. | |
| William Webb Ellis is widely regarded as the founder of Rugby Union and I purchased his autograph at auction. To learn more about his founding of the sport I researched the material on which this definition is based and closer scrutiny revealed that it is impossible for Webb Ellis to have invented Rugby Football because he was already playing it. | ||
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I wrote a book about the origin of Rugby Union and how sport's begin and evolve. The book is called "Understanding the Origin and Evolution of Sport. Quite simply its about the governance of sport and I included a section on child's play. | |
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My second book was then going to follow on and be about child's play and this is where my concern for the future of Wales and in particular Welsh children began. I got a job as a play co-ordinator at a children's charity and I had to take a play qualification to do the job. | |
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Both myself and Hayley took the course which was organised by Swansea City Council. Dark days were ahead, we were both traumatised by the course content which we considered was abusive to children. We refused to complete the course. I followed it up by highlighting my concerns about the course to the organisers and content providers, but no-one in government would take responsibility for challenging the course content. | |
| Let me introduce you to 'deep play' to see what you think? | ||
| moreinfo........ |
What this Welsh government educational publication
states about deep play is that:
.................. it is essential for a child's personal development. Deep play means that children engage in play, which enables them to explore their own range of abilities, develop survival skills and experience fear and the conquest of fear. On the face of it when adults observe children taking part in deep play they may perceive it to be extremely dangerous and life threatening. |
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Here are examples of deep play:
Children playing in front of traffic, riding a bike on the parapet of a bridge or through a fire, high tree climbing, especially over rivers or the sea. Play in which the stakes are so high, that is...... irrational to engage in it at all. |
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| I wasn't allowed to do the job of a children's play co-ordinator unless I consented to agreeing that this type of play was acceptable when I was looking after other people's children. | ||
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Have you thought about it,
Do you believe that deep play is essential for children?
What do you think?
Children playing in front of traffic, do you consider that a good thing? |
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| Hold that thought and if you have concerns about this sort of thing then you know where to put your cross on May 7th | ||
| I'm not going to talk about children and play any more, instead I'm going to give you more reasons why you should vote for me. | ||
| Early on In this video, I've showed you my history of success as an athlete, businessman and educator. The reason I have included all this information in this video is because behind every success is good personal independent governance and that is what this election is about. It is about you deciding who is the best person or party to govern you for the next five years. You have a decision to make and democracy gives you the opportunity to choose good governance over bad governance. You have the freedom of choice for whom you can vote, that is your personal independent governance, something over which you have control. I would suggest you use it wisely and vote for someone with a proven history of good governance to govern the country for the next 5 years. Someone who has governed himself to become the best in the world, not only in sport but in business as well. Someone who will represent you as a person, not a party which has its own internal governance following its own internal agenda. | ||
| I would suggest that someone is me, Dai Richards. Please vote for me on the 7 May 2026, for the best possible future for the people of Brecon and Radnor, of Neath and Swansea and the people of Swansea Valley and of the people of Wales. Dai Richards..... Thank you |
