Dubai: In July 2014, British national Sebastian Bates was BASE jumping in Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland. The lead-up to the jump was fine. The wingsuit flight was normal. The weather conditions were perfect.
Then, disaster struck.
“My canopy collapsed. I was still strapped into the wingsuit, so I couldn't free my arms to slow the descent. I dropped 50 feet.”
Bates broke both his legs and feet. His heel bone exploded, and the tendons tore off his left foot. “At one point there was a real chance I'd lose that foot.”
The doctors told him he would never walk again. He was only 24.
Bates said: “Later, I was referred to the pain clinic. It's the Alamo of rehabilitation: they teach you how to live with pain for the rest of your life. Most of the people in that room were in their 70s. I decided that wasn't going to be my life.”
He stayed true to his promise to himself.
Today, 12 years later, 36-year-old Bates’ grit and resilience is in complete sync with the Dubai-it spirit to excel. He is founder and CEO of The Warrior Academy – the largest martial arts academy network in the Middle East. He also established The Bates Foundation, which sponsors thousands of vulnerable children across nine countries.
And, in complete defiance of the idea that he would never walk again, Bates is also training for his first IRONMAN Oman, which is happening next month – he plans to complete a marathon run, along with a 3.8km swim and a 180km ride.
Thinking about the 24-year-old version of him, lying in the hospital bed, Bates said: “He wouldn't believe it. I’m dedicating race day to him, the version of me who almost believed he’d never walk again. I'm not chasing a time. I'm taking him with me to the finish line.”
Born from necessity
Bates hails from Somerset, England.
It’s where he developed his passion for martial arts – a practice born from necessity. He said: “I was bullied from the age of seven and spent a lot of break times hiding in the school library. My parents put me into martial arts to build my confidence, and it worked.”
At age 19, in 2011, Bates knew he wanted his future to involve martial arts, so he started a small club, in the village of Rode in Somerset. “That club became The Warrior Academy.”
He has now been in martial arts for 25 years, even once participating in a paid professional fight in Thailand.
But in the early days of the Academy, its growth was hard-won. He said: “There were no investors. It was funded by bank loans, credit cards and putting my own money back in, year after year.”
When the accident happened, he faced a betrayal that forever changed how he works: “While I was lying in a hospital bed in Switzerland, my business partner tried to take the business from me. It changed how I build. Today, The Warrior Academy runs on systems and a leadership team, not on any one person, me included.”
Anger, gratitude, and character
Bates’ recovery progressed slowly and steadily. It took him two years to walk without a limp.
He said: “For a long time, I was angry with the 24-year-old who jumped. Then, I realised the part of me that took the risk is the same part that refused to accept the words ‘You'll never walk again’. So, if I'm angry with him, I also have to be grateful to him.”
It’s why Bates said he strongly believes in building character – it’s at the core of his martial arts training programme, which focuses on building confidence, resilience, focus and self-discipline.
He said: “You don't get to choose what happens to you. You do get to choose whether it becomes your story or your excuse. That idea sits at the heart of what we teach children every week. A child who is being bullied can't always choose what happens at school, but they can learn how to respond, and that changes everything.”
Even as he focused on recovery, Bates hired his first employee in 2015, and went on to write two bestselling books.
The Dubai chapter
He also made a decision that would expand The Warrior Academy beyond expectations. It was 2019, and it was time to move to Dubai.
“We had grown The Warrior Academy across the English countryside. When I visited Dubai, I saw that nobody was teaching children martial arts with our focus on character development. So, we took the big move and launched here, to give expat children something that didn't exist yet.”
The move came on the heels of his wedding to his long-time partner Vicky, whom he met just three weeks before his accident. They got married in Italy in 2019 and moved “straight to Dubai instead of having a honeymoon”. They arrived in the city with their daughter, Molly, who was born on July 17, 2017, “the exact anniversary of my accident. That was the day I stopped jumping for good”.
Even today, the family still lives in the same house they first moved into, in Jebel Ali, Dubai, in 2019.
When they arrived in the emirate, the business was making “a few thousand pounds a month”. The Warrior Academy has since grown into an award-winning, eight-figure business, bootstrapped, with no investors, and a team of 85.
Dubai surprised Bates, with its immense support for businesses and entrepreneurs. Bates said: “Dubai gives you the opportunity. It doesn't do the work for you. You still have to put in the hours and the grit, and you have to get comfortable with uncertainty. What surprised me was that the roadblocks I'd hit in the UK simply weren't there.”
He said the biggest aspect the city has made possible, is scale. In the UAE, the Academy (@warrior_academy on Instagram) teaches around 2,500 students across 700 classes a week, and now has four full-time locations across Dubai and Abu Dhabi.
In 2023, Bates took his mission further, with the launch of The Bates Foundation: “It started with 30 boys in a homeless shelter in Thika, just outside Nairobi. We opened a Warrior Academy there, and their school attendance went up. Today, the Foundation teaches around 15,000 children every week, most of them in slums, which makes it the largest scholarship martial arts academy in the world. Alongside the training, children get mentoring, food, clothing and an eight-year character programme that takes them into adulthood.”
For Bates, the Foundation was a natural next step. As someone who was bullied in childhood, he said he knows what it’s like to feel small: “Every child deserves the chance to find out how strong they are.”
The next challenge
Now that The Warrior Academy is well established, and he can step back from the day-to-day operations, Bates is focusing on helping other businesses find their legs. He has added ‘investor’ to his list of accomplishments.
He said: “I partner with founders of UAE service businesses, especially in sports and education, who want to scale. I've spent years learning what breaks as a service business grows, and I'd rather help other founders avoid those mistakes than watch them repeat them. I like to work alongside them for the long term, sprint by sprint, rather than just write a cheque.”
The time is also giving him the opportunity to fulfil a personal dream – of running his first-ever marathon, at IRONMAN Oman. Bates said: “For years after the accident, I couldn't run more than 5km without limping for three days. I only learned to swim proper front crawl in 2025, and three months later, I swam 7km around the Burj Al Arab.”
But he believes this is only the beginning. He’s going to Dubai-it every step of the way, with his family’s support.
A family affair
His wife, Vicky, who has been part of The Warrior Academy for 15 years, is racing her own triathlon, the Dubai T100, on November 15.
His children – Molly, 9, Max, 6, and Mila, 2 – are joining their parents after IRONMAN on a 1,300km run across Kenya to break a Guinness World Record, with the aim of giving out “one million meals through The Bates Foundation, which sponsors 15,000 children every week in some of the poorest communities in the world”.
Next June, Bates is planning to take all three kids to train alongside children in his Foundation’s academies.
It all comes back to building character. By refusing to give up, Bates learned something about himself at 24, during one of the most difficult periods of his life – and it shaped his entire future. He said: “What I hope [my kids] learn is that hard things are where you find out who you are. Money can be left in a will. Values have to be handed over while you're still here.”