Why the Paralympics are the most extraordinary sporting event of all

Every athlete in a Paralympic village has overcome life-changing challenges to be there. That’s the reality that will help make the Paris Games next week a truly special event.

Madison de Rozario competes in the women’s T-53 200m final at the 2012 London Paralympics. Picture: Sport the library/Courtney Crow

What a photo. What a woman. Mesmerising. Awe-inspiring. The physical strength. The mental fortitude? Only Madison de Rozario truly knows the challenges and complications of her day-to-day existence. Let’s not gloss over the reality. Life ain’t exactly a walk in the park for Australia’s Paralympians.

I reckon that’s the real backdrop to next week’s Paris Games. The very human struggle behind these quests for fleeting sporting acclamation. Getting out of bed of a morning, brushing one’s teeth, raising a coffee cup to thy lips, getting from A to B on cobblestone streets, nothing’s easy.

For starters, you’ll never see a village like a Paralympic village. The blind leading the blind to the food hall, the paraplegics and quadriplegics rolling through in their wheelchairs, the amputees hobbling around with big mad grins on their faces. What have they overcome? What haven’t they?

A Paralympics leaps above and beyond an Olympics in its ability to make an achingly deep emotional impact. I’m reminded of a bloke named Greg Smith. He carried the flag for Australia at the London Paralympics. Smith was a 19-year-old tank driver with the Army’s 1st Armoured Regiment, fit as a fiddle, tough as teak, when he decided to drive from Sydney to Ballarat to see his family. That would be a nice surprise. He fell asleep at the wheel. Crashed down an embankment.

Drifting in and out of consciousness in post-midnight darkness, he could’ve sworn he was crawling through the dirt to the road. The sun came up. He hadn’t moved an inch. He’d imagined his legs were moving but they hadn’t shifted an inch. Never would again. Surprise.

A wheelchair was Smith’s for life. A mega-active, on-the-go, extremely motivated young fellow was now telling his mum he wasn’t sure if he wanted to go on. Broke my heart when he told me that. He had so much life in his eyes, and tenderness in his speech, and goodness in his heart, and he was paralysed from the neck down. He’d go to the beach in his wheelchair to get some fresh air. Then he’d see someone sprinting to the surf for a dip and think, “Lucky bastard.” Then he’d get frustrated all over again.

Then Paralympic sport came to the rescue. It’s helped save a whole lot of the athletes converging on the greatest sporting village of them all. More power to their arms. Those who have them.

We can say things like that, in my experience. Paralympians don’t want to be treated with kid gloves. They don’t want us to pretend we do not see. The amputees are well aware they don’t have a leg to stand on. None of them, again in my experience, shy from their difficulties.

An Australian Paralympic team is like no other. At Athens in 2004, marching into the opening ceremony, they belted out Waltzing Matilda. If any of our athletes deserve more support, I haven’t met them yet.

“This is a team that all Australians can get behind,” Australia’s chef de Mission Kate McLoughlin says. “They are incredible athletes, exceptional human beings and a wonderful example of what can be achieved with determination and resilience.

“I hope everyone who has played a part in supporting and developing our athletes feels a great sense of pride when they see them representing Australia in Paris. The team is ready and raring to compete on the biggest stage of all. It’s ready to make all Australians proud.”

Only once in a couple of decades have I cowered under my writing table because I was unable to watch a sporting contest. It was at the Beijing Paralympics. Australia’s murderballers, the wheelchair rugby players, including Smith, were playing a semi-final against Canada. I was writing a book on them – Murderball, still available in all good op-shops and second-hand bins! – and felt rather attached. Give ’em a break. That was my prayer to ye sporting gods. Give ’em a win. I literally stuck my head under my desk and clamped my eyes shut until it was over. They won by a goal. Finished with silver. I felt so bloody stoked for them I went out the back and wept.

Australia’s Ryley Batt scores a try against Yukinobu Ike’s Japan in the bronze medal match at the 2021 Tokyo Paralympics. Picture: Getty Images

Those murderballers were among the most brave, big-hearted, fun-loving, larger-than-life, achingly beautiful humans I’d ever met. I’m sure the 2024 edition, still coached by Brad Dubberley and led by Ryley Batt, are the same. But I’ve come to realise the Steelers aren’t completely unique in their uniqueness. Australia’s 160-strong team for Paris is basically 160 variations on the resilient, gritty, determined, lighthearted, lion-hearted murderballers.

From the five-times Paralympian, two-times gold medallist, 30-year-old track athlete Madison de Rozario, who will carry the Australian flag at the opening ceremony alongside swimmer Brenden Hall, to the 15-year-old swimmer Holly Warn, the youngest member of the Australian team, they all have a history that will knock your socks off.

Warn, for example, had a stroke in-utero, was diagnosed with cerebral palsy at the ripe old age of four months and now she’s a Paralympian getting a rousing, soul-stirring send-off from her Year 9 school mates on the Gold Coast.

“When my head is in the water no one is judging me,” Warn says. “It’s freedom.

“I want to be a great person, not just a great athlete. I want kids with disabilities to know anything is possible.”

De Rozario was four when she developed transverse myelitis. A neurological disease inflaming the spinal cord and whacking her in a wheelchair for good. I reckon you’ve gotta be a pretty tough four-year-old to get your head around that.

“I love our Paralympic team because of who we are as athletes,” de Rozario says. “And also because of the personalities that we see come out of it. They’re some of the best. Those post-race interviews, the interviews leading in, the integrity with which our Paralympians approach sport, it’s unlike anything else. To get to march out representing that team, that’s all I want to do. I’ve seen the people who’ve done it before and it feels odd to be in that same space.”

She says: “Right now it feels like it doesn’t quite fit. Maybe when my career’s done it’ll make a bit more sense. I’ve just always looked up to the athletes that get up there and carry the flag for us. Not once in my mind did I ever think I’d reach that status. To be in among such an awe-inspiring, legendary status crowd of people is amazing.”

Madison de Rozario and Brenden Hall are Australia’s flag-bearers for the Paris Games. Picture: Getty Images

Funny thing about awe-inspiring people. They don’t always know how awe-inspiring they are. Hall was six when his right leg was amputated because of severe chickenpox. He lost 70 per cent of his hearing. I reckon you’ve gotta be a pretty tough six-year-old to get your head around that.

“Hopefully I can do our team proud, our country proud, family and friends proud,” he says before his flag-carrying duties in Paris. “There’s just an immense amount of pride in being able to represent Australia. Being asked to carry the flag – I’m over the bloody moon.”

And so off we go to the French capital for more espressos, croissants, cheeky glasses of red and round two of this year’s great sporting feast. The glory of sport and the human spirit is about to be amplified.

Give me two weeks to live, and the choice of covering an Olympics or Paralympics, and I’ll take the Paras every time. It’s the most extraordinary tournament of all. I’m packing my pen, notebook, laptop and unashamedly, a box of tissues. I used to think it was best to ignore the profoundly emotional life stories. No longer. They’re the beauty of what we’re about to witness. These are the most human of humans.