Alexa Leary: ‘I have to restart a whole new life every day’

Surviving a horrific cycling accident was a feat in itself for Alexa Leary. After stealing the spotlight in Paris, read about her incredible story.

Alexa Leary is ready for Paris. Picture: Christopher Ferguson for Stellar

Three years after she cheated death following a horrific bike accident, Alexa Leary has completely stolen the spotlight at the Paris Paralympics by winning her second gold medal.

But her journey to gold in Paris hasn’t been an easy one.

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Every morning when she wakes, competitive swimmer and athlete Leary has to reset her life. It’s a lasting legacy of the near-fatal accident she endured in July 2021, while she was training for a triathlon.

Leary was riding her bike on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, zooming along at 70km/h, when the front wheel of her own bicycle clipped the rear wheel of the one in front. Leary fell to the ground and landed on her head.

The traumatic brain injury (TBI) she suffered had far more than a physical impact. Aside from nearly killing her, it also caused life-altering effects.

To this day, her emotions and memory are compromised, and the result is that even the simplest of everyday activities are now a challenge.

She has found herself brushing her hair with a toothbrush. She has to set reminders on her virtual assistant device so that it calls out and tells her to leave the house so she can get to appointments.

‘It makes me feel so good when I’m in that water!’ Picture: Christopher Ferguson for Stellar

As for her heart-shaped tattoo? It matches the one that she shares with her best friend. The only trouble is, she met that friend a year before her accident, and she now can’t remember who that person is.

“I have to restart a whole new life every day,” Leary tells Stellar from the set of her cover shoot on the Gold Coast. “Sometimes, due to my memory loss, I don’t actually know what I’m meant to be doing or what’s happening. I’m living a second life.”

As well as exacerbating the symptoms of attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD), which Leary has dealt with her whole life, the brain injury means she also now grapples with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), which can cause her to become overwhelmed by and fixated upon specifics that may not seem worth the bother to others. Case in point: this photo shoot, her first high-fashion booking.

Aside from her successful career in the pool – last year Leary won both gold and silver medals at the World Para Swimming Championships in Manchester in the UK – the 23-year-old has also dabbled in modelling.

But getting in front of the camera this time required some creature comforts to help her ease into the situation. In unfamiliar surroundings, Leary requires a sense of familiarity to relax. So she brought along her own jewellery, and ensured that some of her favourite songs were playing on set as she posed for photos.

Music in particular, she says, was key to helping her recover, and it has become a massive part of her healing journey. “I bring a speaker to swim training every day. I play my bangers, I love it,” she says.

Picture: Christopher Ferguson for Stellar

“When I stop and rest I can hear the beats and they get me in the zone, then I go.”

Of her experience on the Stellar set, Leary reveals: “The team hyped me up all day. It was really fun.” But the fun couldn’t last all day, because she had to get back to training.

At the time of Stellar’s shoot Leary was just weeks away from heading to France, where she will compete in the 50m and 100m freestyle races at the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games, which run from August 28 to September 8. Her days in the lead-up are jam-packed: two pool sessions and a gym session, plus her usual appointments with occupational therapists, a behaviour coach and her neurologist, all helping her continued recovery from that accident.

It’s an intense workload, yet one that she loves, even if getting here hasn’t been easy.

Her injury can recalibrate her attitude and outlook before she even realises it.

In fact, she has often declared that she’s finished with swimming, only to wake up at 7am the next morning and head to the pool, because she’d forgotten having quit.

If the therapeutic balm of music is a common thread that connects Leary’s two lives, sport is undoubtedly another. And while it was her love of sport and a fiercely competitive spirit that almost killed her, it was ironically what saved her, too.

From the early age of five, Leary told her parents that she would one day compete at the Olympics. “I’m just a person who loves sports,” she explains.

“I have since I was little. It makes me feel so good when I’m in that water and I’m moving my body. Three years ago, when they said I wouldn’t survive, they didn’t know if I could walk or talk. Now I’m in that water, and I’m moving my body. I can even tumble turn.”

On the Saturday morning of her fateful bike ride, Leary – who had already earnt a silver medal in her age group at the 2019 World Triathlon Championships in Switzerland – was cycling not far ahead of her father, Russ.

He witnessed her accident, and was confronted with the sight of his daughter lying unconscious on the ground. Her mother, Belinda, was heading to a Pilates class when she received the call that Leary had been seriously injured.

“I’ve been a cyclist for over 20 years, so I never worried about her,” Belinda tells Stellar. “Alexa had been in minor accidents before, so I didn’t take it seriously.”

But when Belinda arrived at the hospital on the Sunshine Coast – before Leary was flown to the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital for more urgent care – she was immediately ushered into a room by staff. The news they delivered was a shock.

Picture: Christopher Ferguson for Stellar

“A nurse said, ‘You’re not going to get the same girl back. This is serious.’ And then you really start to panic,” she recalls. Her daughter had suffered not only broken bones and blood clots, but also swelling

on the brain. “When I saw her and how blown up her head was,” Belinda continues, “I thought, ‘We’re not going to get the same girl back, if we get her back at all.’ They said she might not even survive the helicopter flight to the hospital.”

Doctors performed emergency surgery to remove part of Leary’s skull in the hope of relieving the pressure on her brain.

Across the 111 days she spent in hospital, Leary’s parents and four siblings waited anxiously for a clear picture of just how badly her accident would affect her.

“Because they don’t know about the brain, and it’s so slow to heal, the doctors didn’t know what to expect,” explains Belinda, who nonetheless harnessed hope the whole way through.

“I had this belief she was going to get better. I just had this feeling that she was going to be OK. I guess I was in denial – or shock.”

After learning to walk and talk again, Leary was released at the start of 2022, but she still had to learn who she was. She had no comprehension that she had been in an accident – one that had changed the entire course of her life.

“All of a sudden she started to realise that life is different,” says Belinda. “She started to get really angry and frustrated, and realised everything changed drastically for her. It was an awful time. She would say, ‘I wish I had died in the accident’, because she couldn’t cope with the fact that her life was not her life anymore.”

Picture: Christopher Ferguson for Stellar

Leary points to another troubling after-effect of her brain injury, admitting that she was ill-equipped to deal with the emotions her new mental state triggered: “I slammed my head so hard it upset all my emotions,” she explains.

“I get sad, happy, angry, all in a minute.”

She was understandably spiralling. But it was in the depths of that dark time that Leary found a life raft in swimming. Doctors encouraged her to investigate ways to disperse the anger she was feeling and couldn’t control, and she needed to start rehabilitating the right side of her body, which was so stiff it could hardly move. She had to start somewhere. And that’s how she ended up in the pool.

With her speaker in tow so she could listen to her favourite music as she traversed the water, Leary gingerly attempted to swim some laps. What she discovered was that with each stroke, her fighting spirit began to rise back to the surface.

Getting to the pool each day, and keeping to schedule, was still a struggle, so she relied on her Amazon Alexa to manage her diary: to the pool, then the physio, off to the doctors, then back to the pool.

Fittingly, Leary has now partnered with Amazon to promote the product that shares her name – an obvious alignment, sure, but also an endorsement of the device that helps her stay on top of a life she still has trouble controlling. As Leary reasons, “I always ask Alexa to remind me about my appointments and tasks during the day.”

Less than two years since she got back in the water, Leary is powerful – and fast – enough to be competing on the world stage. In Paris she will swim in the S9 classification (paralympic athletes are grouped by the degree of activity limitation, and the S9 acknowledges her weakness or co-ordination to one part of her body, and that she may have difficulty in applying even power to the water).

Asked how she’s feeling about the impending competition, Leary is upbeat. “I’m overwhelmed to be heading to the Paralympics, and I’m so proud of how far I’ve actually come,” she says.

Her family will be joining her in Paris to offer their support from the stands, as will her boyfriend Marcus, whom Leary is proud to note she asked out last October after they met at a recovery centre.

“You’ve got to go out and get it. That’s how I see it,” she says with a laugh.

Belinda tells Stellar that while her daughter is in many ways a heightened version of the young woman she knew before her accident, she has also noticed some changes: “She was never this confident. She’s really confident and very outspoken now. She says it how she sees it. She’s very funny.”

And although Leary has always had to manage ADHD symptoms, Belinda insists her daughter is strangely calm about what’s ahead. “She used to be nervous with her triathlon, but not since the accident,” she says. “She’s taking it in her stride.”

Leary’s goal at the Games is, she says, “of course to bring something special home. I want to, so badly. But also, it’s being there with my family, as they were the ones who were there in that hospital with me. They’re the reason why I’m here.”

Belinda has been to the Paralympics previously, having watched a neighbour compete. Admittedly, this time around is not quite the visit she expected.

“I never thought I would be there watching my own child. But you never know if it’s going to be you in that position,” she says. “I mean, it could be you next. You could have an accident. We just don’t know what’s around the corner, so we can’t overthink things and worry.

“It has been a big three years, but it’s going to be a happy time in Paris. If I could turn back the clock, I would never allow this stupid accident to happen.

“It’s changed her life and put her on a different path. But it’s working out OK for her. Her story didn’t end all bad.”

While it’s the Olympic athletes who tend to dominate headlines, Leary also wants to help increase the focus on Paralympians. “They deserve more attention,” she says. “They’re so inspiring. So many have been told they wouldn’t live – let alone walk or talk. And look at what they’re doing. It makes me cry my eyes out.”

That notwithstanding, Leary is a keen fan of 20-year-old breakout Olympic star Mollie O’Callaghan.

“She is so young and so inspiring and an absolute weapon,” she says, adding that “we made a deal. We messaged. I said, ‘If we both podium, mainly gold, we both can get a Nutella crepe together.’” O’Callaghan held up her end of the bargain when she won the 200m freestyle final. Now Leary is ready to do the same.

When the Games are over, there will be plenty more work ahead for Leary. Rehabilitation continues, as do her sessions with her behaviour coaches. But beyond that, she wants to keep telling her story – and hopefully serve as an inspiration to others who may be questioning a way forward after experiencing irrevocable changes to their body.

As she points out, “I will never not have a TBI, and I will always face challenges. But I hope to raise awareness, and for people to understand and have acceptance for those who have such as injury.

“I try not to spend too much time looking back, but looking forward.”

Originally published as Alexa Leary: ‘I have to restart a whole new life every day’