Innovation and inner strength: the stories behind Australia’s Paralympians
The Tokyo 2020 Paralympics open on Tuesday night in Japan, with 179 Australian athletes competing across 18 sports – the largest travelling team sent by Paralympics Australia. Anticipation is high after the Covid-19 postponement last year and the success of Australia’s Olympians earlier this month.
Australia has long been a Paralympic powerhouse – topping the medal tally at the Sydney 2000 Games and finishing in the top five at every subsequent Paralympics. More of the same is expected in Tokyo.
Ahead of the Games, Guardian Australia made half a dozen visits to the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra to spend time with some of the athletes, coaches and staff collectively going for gold in Tokyo.
Emily Tapp (triathlete)
‘I think my accident has opened different doors’
Emily Tapp likes to joke that her mother, Traci McHours, always “secretly wanted a gold medal in the family.” During Tapp’s childhood, that aspiration seemed far-fetched. “I probably wasn’t on the trajectory to become an Olympian pre-my accident,” she says. “I played sport at school, but I wasn’t a budding athlete.”
In 2011, not long after Tapp had finished high school, her life changed in an instant. Competing in campdrafting, an equestrian sport, her horse fell in uneven ground. Tapp suffered a spinal injury and was left paraplegic. (Later this year the High Court will hear Tapp’s appeal in a case over whether the campdrafting association is liable for damages, quantified at almost $7m.)
“I’m still on a learning curve from that experience,” she says. “You know, it’s massive, [for] anyone that goes through something as significant as that, but yet again, I think you can always find a silver lining.”
The silver lining for Tapp has included two world championship titles, a Commonwealth Games silver medal and an opportunity to compete in Tokyo. “I think my accident has opened different doors, and para-sport being one of those,” she says.
Tapp began her journey into the world of para-triathlon three years after her accident, with the spark of inspiration coming from an unlikely place. Visiting the United States to attend a rehabilitation clinic, Tapp met a quadriplegic man who was training for a half-ironman. “I was just astounded,” she says. “I was like, ‘he is someone with a lot less function than I in his daily life, and yet doing something far greater than I’.”
Para-triathlon made its Paralympic debut at the 2016 Games, but Tapp’s category, PTWC-H1, did not made the cut. Instead, the Northern Territory athlete had been set to represent Australia in Rio in athletics. Then another disaster struck. Having moved to Canberra
to train at the AIS, Tapp suffered significant burns after coming into contact with an oil heater. She made it as far as a pre-Rio staging camp in Florida, before being sent home to recover. “It was a bit of a disappointment,” she admits.
But five years later, Tapp will be flying the Australian flag in Tokyo, after her triathlon category was included in the Paralympic program. Tapp’s discipline involves a 750m swim, a 20km ride on a recumbent hand cycle bike followed by 5km in a wheelchair.
At each transition, Tapp is assisted by a “handler”, Fabrizio Andreoni. The triathlon coach helps Tapp remove her wetsuit at the first change and then transition from the bike to the chair at the second. The pair have developed a strong bond, despite them only meeting during competition (Andreoni lives in Albury). “It’s nice to have him there – I’m like, ‘Oh, it’s race week, we’re away.”
Post-Tokyo, Tapp will spend her two weeks in hotel quarantine contemplating her future – she is studying dual degrees at the University of Canberra. The 30-year-old admits to feeling apprehensive about the isolation. “I’m a bit of an extrovert,” she says.
But first, Tapp has her eyes on gold. Asked if a medal in Tokyo would vindicate her hard work, the Paralympian has no doubts. “That not eating cake for a little while was worth it?” she jokes. “No, let me rephrase that – I had some cake last night. Not eating chocolate for about 12 months will have been well worthwhile.”
Jaryd Clifford (runner), Philo
Saunders (coach)
‘One gold is the dream. Anything else is a bonus’
Not many athletes can say that they broke a world record by accident. But for visually-impaired runner Jaryd Clifford, it is no humble brag. In April, Clifford was pacing his friend and training partner Michael Roeger at a qualifying race in Sydney. When Clifford sat down after 36km, his coach Philo Saunders had a message for him. “[I told him:] ‘You just have to get up and jog around, you’ll break the world record for your class,’” says Saunders. Clifford did as instructed and duly broke the world record. “So that’s why I finished a marathon,” the 22-year-old laughs.
A reigning world champion in the T13 class 1,500m and 5,000m, Clifford – and coach Saunders – had not anticipated entering the marathon in Tokyo. “We’ve had a lot of conversations about running a marathon in years to come, but I think in his mind, [and] in my mind, maybe it would have been in Paris,” says Saunders. “It wasn’t in our plan, but it didn’t really shock me – Jaryd is a pretty phenomenal athlete.” After claiming the world record, Clifford will go for all three in Tokyo. “One gold is the dream,” he adds. “Anything else is a bonus.”
It is indicative of Clifford’s prodigious talent that he will enter the Tokyo 2020 marathon as an after-thought and yet still be among the favourites. Identified as part of a Paralympic talentsearch, Clifford quickly became a world class runner. As a teenager, he finished in the top 10 in Rio in 2016 in both the 1,500m and 5,000m. Three years later, he won his dual world titles. “I’m definitely one of the people to beat [in Tokyo],” he says. “But that doesn’t really add any pressure to me at all, because I already wanted to try and win a gold medal.”
Clifford was diagnosed with juvenile macular degeneration when he was a toddler. “Sometimes I can miss stuff,” he says. “It’s not like a black thing or a blur – it’s like, kind of just stuff isn’t there? So sometimes I will find that – things in my central vision, I won’t even know I can’t see something there, until it moves into my periphery. It’s hard to explain, but it’s just not there.”
He competes by himself in the 1,500m – partly because, while running in a pack, he can manage with the help of his peripheral vision, and partly because there is no-one who can keep up. “I’m pretty much forced to go solo because we’re only allowed one guide runner, and my PB is 3.41, so it’s a bit tough,” he says. The slowest runner in the Olympic final ran 3:38, so unless Clifford had an Olympic finalist guiding him, a guide would only slow him down.
In longer-distance races, the rules permit interchangeable guides – roles filled by coach Saunders and Clifford’s friend Tim Logan. Clifford says that the benefits of running with a guide – connected to him with a tether – are threefold: risk mitigation, navigation and energy conservation. “Honestly, sometimes when I have guides around me, even in training when there’s no tether, it allows me to switch off the hyperconcentration that I usually need,” he says.
All of which means that Clifford has a particularly strong bond with his coach Saunders. “Philo being a best mate, a coach, a training partner and a guide – that’s just how it is,” he chuckles. Clifford is part of a close-knit training squad of about a dozen under Saunders’ tutelage. “We’re more than just training partners,” the coach says of his squad. “We’re friends.”
Just 22, Clifford knows that he could have a lengthy career ahead of him – he even cites the Brisbane 2032 Olympics as a possible target. But since he first took up the sport, Clifford has had Tokyo on his mind. “I actually don’t really remember a time when Tokyo wasn’t something I was thinking about,” he said. “It will mean the world just to tick that box.”
Yuriy Vdovychenko (swimming coach), Iryna Dvoskina (athletics coach)
‘It’s always hard. But this year will be harder’
Despite being married, and working at the AIS together, Iryna Dvoskina and Yuriy Vdovychenko do not see much of each other. “I start earlier and finish late afternoon, Iryna starts training sessions a bit later,” explains Vdovychenko. “So we’re saying goodbye to each other at 6:30am and then hello at 7:30pm. Then maybe one hour and we go to sleep.” But sometimes, when gaps in their calendars overlap, the pair find time for a stroll around the AIS’s leafy campus. “We can walk together when we have time between sessions,” says Dvoskina.
The Ukrainian duo are the AIS’s power couple. Dvoskina is an athletics coach, working predominantly with para-sprinters, while Vdovychenko coaches para-swimmers. Each is renowned for their expertise – since joining the AIS in 2003, Dvoskina has coached athletes to a remarkable total of 63 medals across the Paralympics, World Championships and Commonwealth Games. Vdovychenko, meanwhile, oversees some of Australia’s best para-swimmers, including Ahmed Kelly and Timothy Disken.
Dvoskina, 62, and 55-year-old Vdovychenko have known each other since childhood. They started dating while working together at a sportsfocused university in Dnipro, Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union) and have been together, in life and in sport, ever since.
“One of my athletes, Evan O’Hanlon, said to me: ‘Coach, your job is your hobby,’” says Dvoskina. “He’s right! When we sit in on the weekend at our dining table making training programs and just talking to each other about what we’re going to do, it is just a joy for us. We ask each other questions – ‘what could you do for this, what could you do for that, can you look at this?’ We’re a good team.”
Dvoskina and Vdovychenko started coaching para-athletes in Soviet-era Ukraine which, since the break-up of the USSR, has been a Paralympics powerhouse. Dvoskina recalls that she was not originally given much choice: “Nobody asked what we want in Soviet Union,” she says. “People tell me you will do this, you will do that. So I did it.” Vdovychenko, a former European Championships bronze medallist swimmer, began working with Ukraine’s Paralympics team in 1992.
The pair migrated to Australia in 2003, with Dvoskina landing a job at the AIS. She has been there ever since, while Vdovychenko coached locally at various swim clubs before joining the Paralympic swim team. The have grown to love Canberra. “The weather is similar [to Ukraine],” says Dvoskina. “We have four seasons here – I like the year-long variety.” Vdovychenko interjects: “But we don’t have six-months of snow here.”
The couple say that over their decades of involvement with Paralympic sport, it has come on in leaps and bounds. Dvoskina recalls attending her first Paralympics, in Atlanta in 1996, as Ukraine’s head coach. At the track, she remembers seeing wheelchair athletes surrounded by carers and parents, rather than support staff. “I just thought: ‘where are the coaches?’” she says. “It wasn’t professional. Now it’s very professional. It’s high performance sport – It’s not just active movement.”
But challenges remain – particularly in comparison to able-bodied sport. “It’s different,” says Dvoskina. “There’s no textbooks.” She uses the example of an above-knee amputee. “How we can develop hamstring, how we develop core?” Dvoskina continues. “It makes me think – how can I do it?” The diverse range of impairments adds complexity. In Vdovychenko’s squad, Kelly was born with severely underdeveloped arms and legs, while Disken has cerebral palsy. “The majority of athletes have different disabilities, different impairments, so you need to prepare different exercises for them,” he says.
The past 18 months have been particularly difficult. Just before our interview, Dvoskina has been told to keep her bags packed in case she needs to leave Canberra at a moment’s notice, due to border restrictions. She is unimpressed. “It’s always hard,” says Dvoskina. “But this year will be harder. It will be a big moment. We will try to do our best – as usual.”
Peta Maloney (sports scientist)
‘We need to think outside the box’
Australia’s Paralympians know all too well that Tokyo 2020 is going to be hot. Heat and humidity were major factors during the Olympics, with many athletes struggling in the conditions. In the coming weeks, the daily maximum is expected to hover in the mid-30s. But thanks to cutting edge strategies developed at the AIS, Australian Paralympians are heading to Japan well-placed to beat the heat.
“The initiative came about in this Games cycle,” says Peta Maloney, a physiologist on the AIS’s Tokyo Heat project. “We wanted to ensure that all sports had access to support they need to ensure their athletes could perform and thrive in that hot environment.”
Maloney will be the lead recovery physiologist for the team in Tokyo – a job for which the scientist from Wagga Wagga is particularly well-suited. Maloney has been at the AIS since 2013, first undertaking postgraduate research on thermoregulation and cooling strategies in para-athletes before becoming a staff member.
One of challenges Maloney and her colleagues face in preparing for the Games is a relative absence of research (her own work notwithstanding) on para-athletes. “Published evidence around what strategies work in para-athletes lags a little behind what we understand and know about ablebodied athletes,” she says.
While research on able-bodied athletes may provide a starting point, a range of impairments – such as spinal cord injuries and amputations – impact thermoregulation. “It’s a bit of testing, a bit of trial-and-error, and really individualising the strategies to suit [each athlete],” says Maloney. “We need to think outside the box to ensure the strategies we put in place are effective and useful.”
Speaking on a cold mid-winter day, Maloney laughs at the contrast. “This is not an uncommon challenge,” she says of preparing for the Tokyo sun in chilly Canberra. While some athletes have relied upon acclimatisation strategies, spending recent weeks in far north Queensland, others have acclimated at the AIS in saunas, spas and a nearby heat chamber.
With the help of a team at the AIS, and a wider network across Australia’s sporting institutes and universities, the efforts of Maloney and the Tokyo Heat Project will ensure Paralympians excel in the Japanese sun. “Lots of the challenges come from coping in the heat, performing in the heat and recovering from that thermal load,” Maloney adds. “[So our work] is all about heat management and what we can do to support them in that environment.”