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Exposed: Globe-trotting athlete who wanted €60k for injury and claimed thousands in benefits

Athlete says he couldn’t work after crash while leading adventure teams

Today at 10:40

These are the pictures showing an elite athlete and adventurer leading series of expeditions after sustaining injuries in a car crash — which he claimed prevented him from working as a storeman.

Tomasz Kuczynski also claimed thousands of euro in illness benefits while leading worldwide expeditions that included scaling mountains in blizzard conditions, surviving camping in temperatures of minus 40C and travelling deep into the jungle crossing rapid rivers by rope.

He withdrew a €60,000 personal injury claim earlier this month after he was accused of lying in court and lying to the Department of Social Welfare.

Super-fit Kuczynski (41) of Beechwood Park, Tinahely, Co Wicklow, was injured in a rear-ending incident while travelling to Dublin Airport in October 2017 for the first leg of a survival expedition to Siberia.

His injury failed to put him off the trip to Siberia and he was pictured on a stop-off in Moscow hours after the collision. He was also photographed several other times in Siberia, where he led a group on a physically demanding schedule travelling vast distances in tough conditions.

Just days after his return, he was off again, travelling to Colombia, where he led another expedition into the jungle, across rivers using ropes and high up into mountains.

He returned from that trip at the beginning of November and posted that the following month he was leaving for what he described as the “EXTREME COLD” part of his project, which was a winter expedition to the Alps up to an altitude of 4000m.

“How many degrees will it be in the tent this time –40 like in Siberia or maybe –30 like it was last time in the Alps,” he wrote ahead of the journey. “If it will be –20 like in Spitsbergen it won’t be bad, although in the high mountains the temperature is more painful…

“What are you doing this for? The easiest way to say is yes… You’re asking this question… You won’t understand the answer” ..

“Sitting in the shower and smell the soap mixed with sweat… The smell of ammonia contained with thick urine baking into the nostrils… I wash away the smell the same as the homeless people at the station. Everything for this moment… Hot water burns a frozen body… Not just skin but bones, joints, muscles… Never felt so good… Well, maybe after the previous trip.. Nothing else matters now… All I need is hot water and once I’m out of here cold coke and beer.. might even mix it together..

“How little a person needs to be happy… Now if someone gave me a million dollars and said ‘there’ to go back I’d send them to hell,” he wrote.

While Kuczynski said he wouldn’t take a million dollars to turn back from his winter expedition, he did seek €60,000 in damages from his car crash by claiming he couldn’t return to work as a storeman.

However, he continued to lead expeditions through the Patrol X Adventure and Training Company and travelled to 14 countries in the two years after the crash.

In 2018, he led an expedition to the Sahara desert in Morocco, then climbed 4,808 metres of Mont Blanc in France before taking on more mountains in Switzerland and Italy.

He led another expedition to Spitsbergen, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Circle, where he led his group through a glacier, crossed several rivers and stayed in different places every night, including shelters, tents, abandoned mine buildings and hunters’ huts.

He said he marched on the trip with a rifle and taught his group how to shoot as there was a possibility of encountering bears.

He then travelled to the Philippines for his last trip of 2018.

His trips in 2019 included another winter excursion to Siberia, two more separate expeditions to Spitsbergen, led a team up 5,400m of Gasherbrum II mountain in Pakistan, and taking on several more mountains in Italy as well as visits to Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia.

When he returned to Ireland from his trips he would lead groups on survivalist expeditions in the Wicklow mountains and other parts of Ireland.

Despite these adventures, he claimed he had been unable to return to his work as a warehouseman on the basis of pain from a neck and shoulder injury sustained in the car crash in 2017.

He also regularly visited family in Poland, where he said he received medical treatment, including an MRI on his neck.

Barrister Shane English, with Clara Cassidy of Hayes McGrath Solicitors, for Allianz Insurance and its insured motorist James Byrne, told Mr Kuczynski his claim was clearly bogus and exaggerated and put it to him that he had made a separate income from Patrol-X Adventure, which he had declared to nobody, while in receipt of illness benefit totalling more than €8,000.

Mr Kuczynski’s counsel said his client was withdrawing his claim, which was struck out.

The Sunday World spoke to Kuczynski by phone this week and he said he would get back to us but didn’t respond to further calls.