Written by Elizabeth Wright, Para-olympic Games, September 4, 2024
There are two things I remember from my first big swimming competition: being disqualified from the 50m breaststroke race after swimming the wrong stroke, and meeting hundreds of disabled athletes just like me.
The disqualification didn’t stop me from pursuing Paralympic representation. I made the team for the 1996 Atlanta and the Sydney 2000 Games, winning medals at both.
But it was meeting other Para swimmers that had the biggest impact on my life.
Born with my physical disability of limb difference, doctors despaired about my future, telling my parents I would have no quality of life.
But through the sport of swimming, I discovered that my future could be very different.
At the pool, I discovered that people living with disabilities could be strong and successful.
I found out that I could be competitive in the pool, and maybe one day represent my country, like my childhood idol, swimmer Hayley Lewis.
With Lewis’s poster on my wall, I wanted to be just like her.
It was a dream I thought impossible until I discovered Para swimming.
Swimming and the Paralympic movement changed my life.
A wonderland of disability diversity
Growing up, I didn’t know anyone else who was disabled.
No-one else in my family had an impairment, and I was the only child we knew of with a disability at my school.
My parents tried their best to make sure that I was living a full and engaged life.
I attended mainstream schooling, went camping and horse riding with my Brownie troop, and tried to keep up in Jazzercise classes with other nine-year-olds at the community centre.
While I felt relatively included by my local community, I still felt disconnected because no-one understood my lived experience.
Nobody could understand what it felt like being unable to navigate inaccessible places, or being left out of things because teachers believed I wouldn’t be able to participate.Questions Paralympic swimmers get asked
Photo shows Sumeyye Boyaci dives backwards
As the Paralympic Games get underway in Paris, all eyes will be back on the pool at Paris La Défense Arena. Paralympic medallist Elizabeth Wright explains what it’s like.
All these exclusions told me something important — that I didn’t really belong in the non-disabled world.
Then at the age of 12, I discovered Para swimming.
I will never forget the first time I competed at a local multi-disability swimming event: it was a wonderland of disability diversity.
There were wheelchair users, people using crutches, calipers and walkers to get around, people with limps and wonky bodies.
There were people like me with missing limbs and prosthetic legs they would leave strewn across the pool deck.
All these bodies were seen as capable, as belonging in this sporting space.
Sport was what drew us together: the strength in our bodies and minds to swim as fast as we could and be competitive.
We had bodies we could be proud of.
What was possible
July this year was Disability Pride Month and it had me reflecting on my own journey towards feeling proud of my body.
My experience at the Paralympics changed my understanding of disability and what it could mean for someone like me who had grown up without disabled role models.
For too long, the narrative of disability has been held captive by tropes of pity and tragedy.
Disabled people are also often framed as inspirational just for existing, a narrative termed “inspiration porn” by the late Stella Young.
But at the end of the day, disabled people are human beings, with potential, skills, dreams and goals.
Being a Para swimmer legitimised my potential and what I wanted to achieve.
As soon as I heard that Sydney had won the right to host the 2000 Paralympic Games, I knew that I wanted to swim there and that it was a possibility.
The Sydney Games were a huge success for the Paralympic movement and really put Para sport on the map.
Over a million tickets were sold at Sydney, in a first for the Paralympics.
Suddenly, non-disabled sports fans were excited about the rough and tumble of wheelchair basketball and wheelchair rugby and impressed by the speed at which wheelchair racers whipped around the stadium.
In the pool, we had filled stands and people on their feet as Australian swimmers won medal after medal.ABC Sport Daily podcast
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What this level of validation did for the team and for the growth of Para sports across Australia was nothing short of remarkable.
With the Paralympics upon us again, it is an opportunity to look at how far the movement has come and how it has changed the way we view disability.
While disability pride still has a way to go, the fact is, sport is now a viable option for many disabled people. And it can be key to developing a sense of pride in their bodies and identities.
Approximately one in six people in Australia live with disabilities, with many wanting to take part in sport, but feeling there are limited opportunities to do so.
At a grassroots level, sport can be an important step to rehabilitation for disabled people, it can be a way back to community and social interaction, as well as increased wellbeing and self-esteem.
Sport helped me appreciate and feel a sense of self-respect and dignity about my body and as the Paris Games continue, I am excited to see disability framed as triumph on the sporting field.