Pod Insights ABC Rewind The paralympic journey | From rehab to elite | Part 1 About this episode Join wheelchair racing legend Louise Sauvage for the intriguing history of The Paralympics. The games had their beginnings back in 1948 as life-saving rehabilitation for World War 2 soldiers but today have become an elite sporting event watched by millions. Along that journey Australia radically changed the way the world saw athletes with a disability by treating them equally to the Olympic competitors at the Sydney 2000 games.
Louise introduces us to some Australian sportspeople with remarkable stories. Aboriginal wheelchair basketball player Kevin Coombs who went to five Paralympic games; wheelchair table tennis star and backbone of the Australian athlete community Danni di Toro and Ryley Batt who stubbornly refused to use a wheelchair as a child but is now a rugby champion.
Presenter - Louise SauvageProducer - Sarah AllelySound designer - Russell StapletonSupervising producer - Claudia Taranto
For a deeper dive into the history of the Paralympics check out the podcast series Unbroken https://hireup.com.au/unbroken/.
Transcript 5,038 words · 17 speakers
0:00 Speaker 00 ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more.
0:07 Speaker 00 Just a quick warning, there's some language coming up that some listeners might find offensive.
0:16 Speaker 01 Record crowds have witnessed some great performances. The Paralympians proving to a worldwide audience they are legitimate athletes.
0:24 Speaker 02 Australia's Paralympians continue along their golden path in Barcelona.
0:27 Speaker 03 Star of the pool so far at these Paralympic Games, Australia's Siobhan Payton of the ACT, gold number four.
0:36 Speaker 00 The Paralympics is the world's third biggest sporting event. On Rewind, over the next two episodes, Paralympian Louise Sauvage tells the story of how Australia shaped the Games.
0:47 Speaker 04 I've competed in four Paralympics. I've won nine gold and four silver medals. And one of the highlights of my career was being chosen to light the Paralympic cauldron at the Sydney 2000 Games.
1:02 Speaker 04 The Paralympic Games have changed a lot since the days of rehab for World War II veterans. Today, Paralympians are high-profile, elite athletes.
1:12 Speaker 05 I wheel down the street and any town I could be in, they come up to you and go, "Are you Riley Batt?" They're seeing you as a role model, they want your autograph, they want photos.
1:21 Speaker 06 Australia changed the way that Paralympic sport was conducted in that Australia was the first country to treat its Paralympic athletes as elite athletes.
1:32 Speaker 04 The triumphs, the scandals and the challenges. This is the Paralympic journey from rehab to elite.
1:40 Speaker 07 Wheelchair star Louise Sauvage looks set to add to Australia's gold medal tally.
1:44 Speaker 02 And leading the way, 18-year-old Louise Sauvage with three gold medals and a silver.
1:53 Speaker 04 I didn't know what I was getting myself into when I turned up at the 1992 Barcelona Paralympics. I was 17 with no expectations. And because I was a new kid to wheelchair racing, nobody else put any expectations on me either. But...
2:10 Speaker 08 With gold already in the 100 and 400 metres, plus silver in the 800, Savage had broken the world record in qualifying for today's 200 final. She'd lower the mark even further for her third gold of the game.
2:22 Speaker 02 A spectacular ceremony has marked the closing of the ninth Paralympic Games in Barcelona. The Games have been an outstanding success for Australia.
2:31 Speaker 04 I didn't grow up watching the Paralympics because they weren't on TV. But the Games have ended up being my life. This year, I'm going to Paris as a coach. I now train wheelchair racing stars like Madison de Rosario. But how did the Games begin?
2:47 Speaker 06 The Paralympics came out of rehabilitation of soldiers in the Second World War with spinal injuries.
2:53 Speaker 04 Tony Nah is a historian of the Paralympic movement.
2:56 Speaker 06 A doctor called Ludwig Gutmann, who was a refugee from Germany, was given the task of creating the first spinal unit to rehabilitate soldiers with spinal injuries. Gutmann's rehabilitation hospital was at Stoke Mandeville. It was attached to the Stoke Mandeville Hospital in England. People with spinal injuries didn't have the use of their lower limbs, so they needed to develop the upper limb strength. Archery was a really good sport. Any wheelchair sport. So they tried things like wheelchair polo. Apparently, that got a bit dangerous. And until then, those soldiers had a really short life expectancy. Most of them died. And they died pretty horrible deaths because they got bed sores, and they turned to sepsis,
3:41 Speaker 06 and they died from blood poisoning in a fairly short time. And Gutmann saw that there was another way. And he saw that people could be rehabilitated. And his aim, as he said, was to turn those soldiers into taxpayers. So basically, to give them their lives back.
3:58 Speaker 04 And a significant part of Dr Ludwig Goodman's rehab programme started just before the 1948 Olympics.
4:05 Speaker 06 They needed to exercise. Of course, young men being young men, if you're exercising, then you want to turn it into sport and you want to turn it into competition. And pretty soon, they found that the best way to introduce exercise was to create sports that the people with spinal cord injuries could play. And that was the beginning of the Paralympic movement.
4:26 Speaker 04 The first Games were held in Stoke Mandeville at the same time as the Olympics were opening in London in 1948. Four years later, the Games were open to international competitors and were held every year. I actually competed in the Stoke Mandeville Games in the 90s.
4:46 Speaker 06 The Stoke Mandeville Games grew, and Goodman had a vision that the Stoke Mandeville Games would become the Olympics for athletes with a disability or people with a disability.
4:57 Speaker 04 In the mid 50s, another doctor in Perth set up Australia's first spinal injury unit. He ended up becoming a founder of the Paralympic movement. Sir George Bedbrook was an orthopaedic surgeon who used sport and exercise to revolutionise how we treated spinal cord injuries. Bedbrook led Australia's first team to the 1957 Stoke Mandeville Games, and then our first Paralympic team to Rome in 1960. This was the first time the Paralympics were held in the same city as the Olympics.
5:29 Speaker 06 The founders of the Paralympic movement, Ludwig Goodman and George Bedbrook, their attitude was very much that it was a participation event and it was a rehabilitation event.
5:41 Speaker 04 But some athletes saw it differently. For them, it wasn't about participation, but about competing and winning.
5:48 Speaker 06 There's so many good stories about the 1960 Rome Games. The participation by Daphne Hilton, or Daphne Senior as she was then, and she was Australia's first female Paralympian, and she won 60% of Australia's medals. So she was a legend. She was a pretty amazing person. I can remember asking Gary Hooper, who was another member of that team, how competitive Daphne was, and he said, "Well, I wouldn't have liked to compete against her."
6:14 Speaker 04 "Oh, I was treated as one of the blokes."
6:18 Speaker 04 I don't know, I just went along, just went along as it came. That was Daphne when she was donating her memorabilia to Paralympics Australia for a history project.
6:27 Speaker 06 So she was often the only female on wheelchair basketball teams. And by all accounts, she gave as good as she got. She was a pretty tough cookie. Probably swimming would be her main sport, but she won medals in, I think, five different sports at the Paralympics.
6:44 Speaker 04 So Daphne was the only woman representing Australia in 1960, and Kevin Coombs was the only Indigenous athlete. Uncle Kevin went to the first Paralympics to play wheelchair basketball. A few months before he died in 2023, he met with producer Sarah Allely.
7:02 Speaker 09 We took off in a turboprop jet. Took, took five days to get there, would you believe? Because they didn't know how disabled people were going to travel, when people are standard today.
7:15 Speaker 04 How did it feel? And what was it like to go to the first Paralympics back in 1960?
7:21 Speaker 09 Well, it was very good, but the accommodation wasn't very smart at all. Was it on the second floor? And people had to drag us up and no lifts. And it was shocking. A lot of army blokes used to be on standby for us, but you would have thought, they'd have thought that through a bit better, but no.
7:39 Speaker 04 And how were you treated as a person with a disability and also as an Indigenous person travelling at that time?
7:46 Speaker 09 Well, a lot of my teammates, because I was probably the best basketball player in Australia, wheelchair basketballer, and they respected me and they supported everything I did.
7:58 Speaker 04 And at least in Italy, he could join his teammates at the bar. Back home, he wasn't even allowed to go to the pub because in New South Wales, Aboriginal people were banned from bars. But not everyone around the Paralympic village in Rome welcomed Kevin.
8:12 Speaker 09 Well whilst we were in Rome and Zimbabwean couple were there in a bar one night. He said, you could hear him, because he was sitting too down for me where I was sitting. I was having a cold beer and he said, "They're opening the bars for niggers now." Nearly created a storm between my teammates and him. And I told, I said, "No, no, don't get involved, boys."
8:36 Speaker 04 But Kevin pointed out the Zimbabwean to his team manager the next day.
8:41 Speaker 09 I said, "That's him." And he went over and grabbed him and pulled him up by the front of his shirt and he said, "Don't ever do that to one of my team members ever again." And he was just about to take a swing at him, but a lot of people jumped in and stopped it.
8:57 Speaker 04 Kevin Coombs was a legend. He left a real legacy and gave back a lot to the Paralympic community. He grew up in Bell Ranald in Western New South Wales.
9:07 Speaker 09 Back in 1953, that's when I had my accident. I got shot in the spine by a nine-year-old. I was 12, he was nine. We were going through the floodwaters and just shooting rabbits in the floodwater. And I think we walked through it up to our knees and it was getting a bit tiring. These two nine-year-old cousins of ours were sort of tagging along and we were saying, you know, "Rack off you little fellas." And I put the gun down, my gun down. And I heard the click click and he didn't know I'd left the bullet and it hit me in the back.
9:48 Speaker 09 It was about that far away from my spine, just came out through my ribs, just under my heart. Missed a lot of vital organs and that paralysed me. And I've been a para ever since. And in those days, if you were a para, they washed you in the morning and left you at night, till the next day.
10:13 Speaker 04 Kevin spent two years recovering in the Austin Hospital Spinal Unit.
10:18 Speaker 09 And I'd be sitting in me own mess because they didn't know what a catheter was or anything like that, because the doctor used to come and do handstands on me stomach to express the urine out of me bladder.
10:32 Speaker 04 But it was Uncle Kevin's lengthy hospital stay that connected him with basketball. It was a rehab activity. Decades later, he would go on to be responsible for major changes in public health. Kevin worked in government for years with a focus on Aboriginal community health. He was proud to have set up a statewide hospital liaison programme after seeing Aboriginal people avoid treatment.
10:57 Speaker 09 I said, "Well, a lot of Aboriginal people won't go to hospital because they've either sent out the backyard or on the veranda."
11:06 Speaker 04 Kevin received an Order of Australia in 1983 for his work.
11:10 Speaker 09 I've played in five Paralympics and it's opened a lot of doors for me in the workforce.
11:21 Speaker 10 If commitment, determination and perseverance are the signposts to success, Australia is poised for something very special from its Paralympic track and field starts. After finishing in third place at the Atlanta Games, they are now the number one ranked team in the world and are aiming to cement that title in gold on home soil at Homebush Stadium in October.
11:45 Speaker 06 It's possible to see a number of turning points in the Paralympics, but Sydney Games was definitely one. And Australia changed the way that Paralympic sport was conducted in that Australia was the first country to treat its Paralympic athletes as elite athletes and train them as elite athletes.
12:03 Speaker 04 As well as being a historian, Tony Nah was a sports administrator and worked for Paralympics Australia for 20 years.
12:11 Speaker 06 The concept was to prepare the athletes the same as able-bodied athletes would prepare. So to give them the same level of coaching, same level of sports science support, sports medicine support, the intensity of preparation and the focus, to be blunt, on winning. And before that, I think there was a... And many other countries in 2000 still operated on it. It was a rehabilitation activity and it was participation. And so even in 2000, there were a lot of athletes who still felt that they should be on the team because they played sport and they had a disability. And we were looking to change that.
12:50 Speaker 10 Australian officials are hoping for big crowds at the Sydney Paralympics and promise all the drama, passion and excitement of an able-bodied event.
12:58 Speaker 11 There is certainly no attitude of like, oh, good element, they're disabled, they're having a great go. This is all about elite performance. These are athletes first and foremost and we treat them like athletes and we expect the same if we had Cathy Freeman or Lynford Christie on our team.
13:12 Speaker 06 I'd have to say that in 2000, one of the things that Australia did was about the sport. The fact that it's limited by numbers and that you have to qualify, to me, it's nothing but an elite sporting event.
13:23 Speaker 12 Most of the support from my family encouraged me to do whatever I wanted to do and not really turning around. Well, I suppose a lot of people turned around and said to me, well, you can't do that. And being a very stubborn person, I would turn around and say, well, watch me, I'll prove you wrong. You say I can't do that and I'll go out and do it now.
13:42 Speaker 04 That's me speaking to the media when I was in my twenties. I'm a pretty determined person. Nothing's changed there. On my journey, I was really encouraged by my family. For Dani Dettore, her Paralympic journey came out of a chance meeting when she was a kid.
14:00 Speaker 13 I play wheelchair table tennis, have done for the last few years. I've come from wheelchair tennis for a long time and yeah, I love sport. My journey started probably the day I had my accident, really. I had an accident in 1988, which put me in the spinal unit in Melbourne. And I had the incredible fortune of having Sandy Blyth as my recreational officer.
14:23 Speaker 04 Sandy Blyth was the captain of the men's wheelchair basketball team, The Rollers, when they won gold at Atlanta in 1996.
14:31 Speaker 13 And he was this beast of a human and the wheelchair was the last thing you really noticed about him. And... You know, he not just talked about life, you know, with a disability, but life in terms of a physicality and how you can still be quite, you know, ferocious and you can still kind of go out and go after the things that you want in your life.
14:49 Speaker 04 Danny had been playing tennis before her accident. She was actually playing at a state level.
14:55 Speaker 13 He's like, oh, there's a pathway for, you know, wheelchair tennis. And I guess my first time I tried wheelchair tennis, I was still in hospital and it was horrible. I was in a cast, like pretty much from my neck all the way into my hips and I couldn't really move. And it was really frustrating and really the last thing I wanted to be doing, to be honest.
15:12 Speaker 04 How old were you then?
15:12 Speaker 13 I was 13, you know, I went obviously from being running around, climbing trees to not doing that. But also the little things like the lack of control of your own body, whether it's bladder or bowel. And then there's all these levels of pain and then there's all these things that you could never have imagined that you're having to learn and unlearn and relearn. And often you're being told, you know, what you're not going to have again, what you you can't do, what is going to change for you. And sport becomes one of those places that you can actually control some of those things. You feel like there's things you can do and there's possibility in things and there's improvement in things.
15:49 Speaker 04 There's a temptation from the able-bodied world to treat people with disabilities as fragile. But basketballer Sandy Blythe thought differently.
15:57 Speaker 13 I remember Sandy, like the first time we ever was in hospital and we did an outing. So, you know, we catch a train and there's all these people in wheelchairs jumping on a train and everyone's freaking out because it's the 80s and no one's seen more than one person in a wheelchair do anything ever. And so, you know, we're all there and my mum's there with me and it's the first time I've left the hospital. And we went to the art gallery and Sandy thought it would be hilarious in the foyer of the art gallery to tip me out of my chair. And it just took me two seconds to get back in my chair and punch him in the arm, right? He wanted to show my mum that not only could I do those things really, really quickly, but but I was fine, you know. And so in a way, what an asshole.
16:37 Speaker 13 But actually it was a really good learning for my mum and it was very empowering for me to be able to punch him pretty hard.
16:45 Speaker 04 I love Danny. She really is the best. Danny sees things from a very different perspective from others and I appreciate that. She's the most warm and accepting person I've met. Danny was the perfect team captain for us at the Rio Games in 2016. She was a huge support to all the athletes there. Being an elite athlete can take its toll. And by that stage in her career, Dani had seen the worst of it.
17:12 Speaker 13 It's those kind of pressures of being on the road for 15 years straight. And it was kind of happening just before Sydney Paralympics. Like I'd been number one in the world for just over two and a half years. And I was worn out, you know, I might have had like a week off in those three years. Like the tour just never really ended, you know. And, and I think everyone just kind of kept expecting that I would just show up. I would just churn it out and Sydney Paralympics would just be a no brainer and I'd get a gold medal. And I was being very vocal about how I was really struggling actually on a tonne of levels. And that was met with a lot of different things from complete indifference, just ignoring it,
17:53 Speaker 13 literally calling me weak, no support was offered and I just had to figure it out.
18:00 Speaker 04 Now Dani's credited widely with being a bit of a rock, a connecting force for the Australian Paralympic community.
18:07 Speaker 13 You can win medals and you can be number one in the world. But actually the thing it's given me is really great people that I love and I lean on and I most connect to and they most understand my experience.
18:19 Speaker 04 Dani's brought former Paralympians back into the fold so we can all recognise their value and how they've contributed to the version of the Paralympics we enjoy today. Dani's good at using her people skills.
18:32 Speaker 13 A big part of what we would talk about is that feeling that happens at the Games when you don't get the result you want. It's almost like you've contracted leprosy and no one wants to be near you. It's like, that's not, that's not how we operate. Like if you don't want to be around people, that's okay. But if you do, you don't have to be alone. It's not so much about sucking it up, the stigma is getting, I mean, I'm not saying that sport is the most psychologically safe place to be. It's getting better, there's a lot of work to do, but it's not where it was 20, 30 years ago. Where, you know, in my own case, I felt very open to talk about where I was at. But how that was dealt with was horrific.
19:08 Speaker 04 For the 2020 Tokyo Games, Dani was chosen again to be co-captain for the Australian team. This time with her mate Riley Bat. Riley's one of the world's top wheelchair rugby players.
19:21 Speaker 03 Well, now to the sport of wheelchair rugby, UNE, which did get underway today, sometimes known as murderball, this sport which makes its full metal debut here at Sydney 2000 after being a demonstration sport in Atlanta.
19:34 Speaker 04 Riley Batt was only 11 when Sydney hosted the Paralympics and just four years later, he went to Athens. By the time he went to his second games in Beijing, he was still only 19.
19:45 Speaker 05 Probably the first time in my life that I actually ventured out to watch other Paralympics sports, other than wheelchair rugby, and just was absolutely blown away by how fast some of these runners could run on the track and, you know, some of the passes they could do playing wheelchair basketball and I remember seeded volleyball, getting around on the court. It was just incredible and I think it was more of an eye opener for me and it was a time when I was trying to accept who I was and it really helped to see so many people out there with disabilities achieving so many life goals and just attacking their abilities.
20:29 Speaker 14 Their chairs are made by titanium steel and they use it as a blocking weapon to stop the, to stop the opposition from scoring. So the same as rugby, able-bodied is, they tackle, but in, in wheelchair rugby, they use their chair. And the bashing and the crashing is why they love it so much, is because a lot of them, before their accident or injury, were playing able-bodied rugby or IFL.
21:02 Speaker 04 That's coach Paul Kiteley. Wheelchair rugby is pretty wild to watch. Check it out if you haven't already. This high-performance rugby camp at Melbourne's Essendon Sports Complex gives you an idea.
21:17 Speaker 04 Riley Batt uses a highly specialised wheelchair to play rugby. But when he was younger, he refused to use any wheelchair.
21:25 Speaker 05 So I was born with a limb deficiency, so when I entered the world, it was a huge shock for my family, my mum and dad, and a huge shock for them that they had this new baby boy and it was missing legs and deformed fingers.
21:37 Speaker 04 But his family adjusted quickly. They challenged and pushed Riley right away.
21:42 Speaker 05 Yep, he's got some disabilities, but we're going to treat him as a normal boy. And I feel like I never really got, like, just wrapped in cotton wool and protected. They wanted me to experience a normal childhood and I think that sort of created who I am today. My grandfather was a huge influence in my life and I remember him telling me behind a boat at three years old. I'm 10 metres behind the boat, who knows if I could even swim, but he saw the enjoyment I got out of it and he saw what I could, I could do with my body and my pop also bought me my first ever quad bike and I was on it when I was about three and a half years old. Got it for the first time and my parents were really worried that I was going to fall off all the time, but I didn't get off that quad bike for two days straight. They're telling me stories and I sort of vaguely remember that I used to just go past
22:23 Speaker 05 the house and ask for a Vegemite sandwich with the crust cut off and because I didn't want to get off the bike and I used to wet my pants on the bike because I just did not want to stop. And I guess in my head I'm thinking, this is my independence.
22:35 Speaker 04 When Riley started school, he was learning to walk on prosthetic legs. But kids used to trip him over, so Riley came up with a better plan.
22:44 Speaker 05 Grade one at school, I said to my parents, I want to use a skateboard. So I used to sit on a skateboard and use my arms to propel myself around the schoolyard, around home. That was my motor transport.
22:55 Speaker 04 I had a skateboard too when I was a kid. It was much more fun than my wheelchair. But I wasn't allowed to use it at school.
23:03 Speaker 05 My parents tried to get me in a wheelchair at about eight years old after I used this skateboard for a bit because they obviously thought, you know, it's unhygienic. This isn't how he's going to be as an adult. So let's get him in a wheelchair. And I said to my parents, and I remember it clear as day, I said, you can go take me to somewhere where there's wheelchairs. You can get me one. There's no chance I'm going to use it because wheelchairs are for disabled people. So I guess. I didn't like the wheelchairs and I wanted to be like my friends on skateboards and that was the fun thing to do. My dad was a builder, so he built a bit of a skate park in our backyard. So all my friends would come over and we'd hit the half-pipe up. We had all these grinds and ramps and whatnot and it was just a cool thing to do.
23:47 Speaker 04 When Riley went to high school, one of the sports they offered was wheelchair rugby. It was for everyone, whether you had a disability or not.
23:58 Speaker 05 Then I remember all my mates who were very athletic people, jumping these wheelchair rugby chairs and bashing into each other and having an absolute ball of a time. And I sat back and just said to the teacher, I'm not getting in that wheelchair. I'm not doing it, that's embarrassing. Deep down, I think I really wanted to jump in that wheelchair, but I just couldn't over overcome that fear of people looking at me weird in a wheelchair.
24:19 Speaker 04 Then one afternoon, when he was at the beach on holiday with his family.
24:23 Speaker 05 I used to put my skateboard in the bushes and then crawl down the sand into the water and swam for a few hours and I crawled back up and went to jump on my skateboard to get back home and some bugger had stolen my skateboard. And so I really struggled to get home that day. I had to crawl and my mates had to help me, but it was at that time where I went, you know what Riley, let's have a go at this wheelchair. And I remember going to the school sport wheelchair rugby, jumping in the wheelchair rugby chair and for the first time in my life, I felt like I was on the level playing field as all my friends. And I guess because I had the upper body strength from years of using the skateboard, I actually was stronger than my friends and faster in the wheelchair than my friends, even though I've never used one. It was for once in my life, I felt like I could actually exceed in a sport.
25:06 Speaker 05 So it was an absolutely amazing feeling. And then I eventually made the New South Wales team and then got selected to go to an Australian training camp and as 13-year-old and got selected to the men's, at the time it was men's, open wheelchair rugby. And went and competed in Japan in 2003 as a 14-year-old and been playing for Australia now for 20 years.
25:29 Speaker 04 And winning Paralympic medals, two gold and one silver.
25:38 Speaker 04 Riley now coaches young wheelchair rugby players. He gives parents and carers a similar serve as Danny's mentor Sandy Blyth did. Riley thinks they should challenge kids more from the start, like his parents did.
25:51 Speaker 05 I'm from a small town of Port Macquarie, mid-north coast, New South Wales. And there's been a few kids coming through, you know, rocking up in an electric wheelchair, being told, you know, this is your life now. And there's nothing wrong with electric wheelchair, but I can see the independence in these kids and I can see they don't need that electric wheelchair. They can use a manual wheelchair and they need to keep that strength, they need to keep that fitness and being in a manual wheelchair, pushing, using your arms is huge. And that translates to school, that translates then, you know, the more confidence they get around school and getting around and being more independent, that then translates to their community.
26:29 Speaker 04 And in Australia, we're privileged to have these opportunities. As Danny Dettore says, "In many countries, people still don't get taught how to be independent and self-sufficient."
26:40 Speaker 13 It wasn't that long ago that people who acquired any sort of spinal cord injuries didn't live longer than six months. If my accident happened, if I was in a third world country, there's no way anyone would have helped rehabilitate me or helped me learn how to be independent and self-sufficient. There's no way, you know, I might not have lived this long. And I think part of what sport offers is, you know, the opportunity for people to feel confidence in who they are and being able to articulate that in really powerful ways.
27:11 Speaker 04 So sport has literally been life-saving. Next time on The Paralympic Journey, we'll hone in on the money, the media and the challenge of classification.
27:22 Speaker 15 The Spanish basketballers were stripped of their medals when it was revealed all but two players in Spain's gold medal-winning intellectually disabled basketball team should not have competed in Sydney. The Paralympic movement went into a tailspin.
27:36 Speaker 04 I'm Louise Savage. The producer is Sarah Alali. Supervising producer is Claudia Taranto and the sound engineer is Russell Stapleton.
27:47 Speaker 04 If you want a deeper, broader dive into the world of the Paralympics, including some great interviews with international players, check out Unbroken: The Paralympics and Its Record. It's a four-part documentary podcast hosted by Paralympian Annabelle Williams. Our producer, Sarah Allely, made it for hire up when she collected these interviews. The episodes can be found on the usual podcast apps.
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