Para-Athletics High Performance Overview
If you missed Andrew’s recent presentation on para athletics and the road to Brisbane 2032, you can watch it above or lap up the key messages below.
At its core, Andrew’s message to coaches was simple. You are not an able bodied coach or a para coach. You are an athletics coach. The tools you already use to build sprinters, throwers and wheelchair racers are the same tools that can take a para athlete from school meets to a home Paralympic Games.
From rehab to high performance
Andrew begins by tracing the arc of para athletics from its early days after the Second World War, where competition was created as rehabilitation for injured veterans, through to the modern Paralympics with almost four and a half thousand athletes from one hundred and seventy countries.
In 1960, the first official Paralympic Games hosted about four hundred athletes from twenty three nations. By Sydney 2000 that had grown to nearly four thousand athletes and just over a thousand track and field competitors. Paris saw more than eleven hundred athletes in athletics alone, representing one hundred and fifty one nations. The medal table has tightened as well. Five gold medals in athletics placed a country around fifteenth in Sydney. The same haul in Paris moved you into the top eight. Andrew expects that five golds in Brisbane could put a nation in the top five.
For coaches this context matters. Para sport is no longer a side project. It is a fiercely competitive, global athletics system. The standards are rising quickly and Australia has set clear targets for medals and team size in 2032. The gap will not be closed by facilities or funding alone. It will be closed by more coaches deciding that para athletes are part of their coaching brief.
Athletes first, labels last
Andrew’s own journey into para sport came through coaching and strength and conditioning in the 1990s. A chance connection with wheelchair racer Louise Sauvage led to a request to help with her gym work, then to coach her outright just after she had returned from Atlanta with multiple Paralympic gold medals.
He admits he was internally full of butterflies, but he did what good coaches do. He stayed outwardly confident and was honest about what he knew and did not know. Louise’s response was blunt encouragement to get up to speed very quickly.
The important detail for coaches is how he framed his role. He did not see Louise or fellow wheelchair great Kurt Fearnley as “wheelchair athletes”. He saw them as athletes. He looked at the biomechanics, the energy demands, the progression of training, and then he adapted those ideas to their event and their equipment. The label came second. The performance question came first.
For Andrew, the defining skill in para coaching is problem solving. You are still working with principles of overload, recovery, rhythm, posture and force, but you must be willing to look in different boxes for solutions. That mindset is as useful in a junior able bodied squad as it is in a Paralympic camp.
What T11 sprinters can teach your squad
One of the case studies Andrew shared was the T11 one hundred metre event for athletes with the most severe visual impairment. T11 runners have extremely low or no light perception and compete wearing eye shades. They race with a sighted guide, tied by a short tether, and must finish ahead of the guide. Each pair uses two lanes.
Coaches in this class manage layers of complexity that go well beyond starting cues and max velocity mechanics. The athlete must trust the guide completely. The guide must be fast enough to train and race at world class level, and disciplined enough never to cross the line first. Daily life logistics are part of the performance picture. Many athletes cannot drive, need transport support, and perform strength work in gyms they cannot visually navigate.
Despite these challenges the event has moved from around 12.50 seconds in Sydney to 10.82 in Tokyo for the champion from Greece. That improvement has happened in about twenty years. The same time drop took more than a century in the Olympic one hundred metres.
Andrew expects that to win T11 in Brisbane the champion will need to be between 10.60 and 10.75. Coaches in his discussion group even argued about whether a visually impaired sprinter could one day break ten seconds, with the main question being whether you could find a guide fast enough and committed enough to go on that journey.
What does that mean for your coaching?
The technical model still matters. Block clearance, posture and relaxation are still your bread and butter.
Communication is performance. Clear cues, consistent language and trust between coach, athlete and guide are non negotiable.
Logistics are training load. Transport, equipment and daily living demands can affect readiness just as much as a hard rep.
If you can manage those layers in a T11 squad, you will see your able bodied coaching sharpen as well.
A javelin thrower with a blade and the art of asymmetry
The second event Andrew highlighted was a javelin thrower with a below knee amputation who uses a prosthetic blade as the lead leg on the runway. His distances have climbed dramatically, from the high fifties to over seventy metres in a relatively short span. Some experienced throws coaches in Andrew’s network believe that an athlete with this set up might one day out throw the able bodied world record.
This is not romanticism. It is applied biomechanics. The blade changes ground contact, stiffness, timing and rhythm into the throw. It introduces asymmetrical balance challenges on the run up and through the delivery.
For coaches, the questions become:
How do you design a run up that respects the athlete’s balance constraints and still accelerates effectively into the throw?
How do you sequence gym work to support the residual limb, hips and trunk, knowing that loading patterns differ from a two legged athlete?
How do you build confidence in the plant phase when the feel through the blade is different to a normal foot strike?
You do not need to know all the answers at the start. You do need to be willing to test, adapt and collaborate with the athlete, medical staff and equipment providers.
Two laps in one twenty seven
The final example Andrew shared is closest to his coaching heart. Wheelchair racing in the T54 800 metres. He tells the story of a teenage Kurt Fearnley phoning him after his last high school exam to announce that the car was packed and he was driving to Sydney to train full time. At that point Kurt was nowhere near the level required for the Sydney Games. A set up 800 in the domestic series, with help from Canadian training partners, snuck him under the 1.40 qualifying time by a tenth of a second. Months later he won Paralympic silver.
Today the class has moved on again. Racing chairs now weigh around eight to nine kilograms, cost in the region of fifty thousand dollars, and benefit from significant advances in design and materials. Athletes propel the combined mass of their body and chair with upper body and trunk strength alone. World championship winners are running 1.27 for the 800, and Andrew is confident someone will tackle two laps in about 1.22 by Brisbane.
The coaching implications are clear.
Technical coaching is non negotiable. Hand position on the push rims, timing, contact length and recovery have to be coached with the same attention you would give to foot strike in a middle distance runner.
Race modelling is evolving. Early wheelchair races were tactical with big last lap kicks. Now there are more front running efforts from the gun. Training needs to reflect this shift exactly as it does in able bodied middle distance.
Equipment literacy matters. Knowing how chair set up, tyres, gloves and track surface interact is part of your job if you want to help athletes reach the next level.
Again, these are not alien skills. They are an extension of what good endurance and speed coaches already do.
The coaching landscape and the Brisbane opportunity
Beyond the athletics examples, Andrew paints a picture of a coaching system that has changed significantly since Atlanta and Sydney. In the late 1990s there was a single employed para coach nationally. At Sydney 2000 roughly fifty five athletes were supported by ten personal coaches. At a recent major championship a similar team size travelled with thirty nine personal coaches and a group of employed para specialists.
Australia’s para uplift investment, combined with a home Games on the horizon, means this coaching cohort will only grow. Andrew’s targets are explicit. A team of forty five to fifty athletes in Brisbane, supported by at least forty personal coaches and around a dozen team coaches. The medal goal is five or six golds and fifteen to twenty medals in total.
Underpinning those ambitions is a broader participation picture. Andrew mentions teenagers with cerebral palsy running eleven and a half for one hundred metres or fifty one seconds for four hundred and making able bodied finals. He points to a young female jumper who has won her age group in able bodied triple jump while being developed as a para long and triple jumper.
For you as a coach this raises some pointed questions.
Are there athletes in your current squad who may be eligible for para classification but have never been asked?
If you had a para athlete walk into your group this week, would you feel ready to welcome them and start problem solving?
Are you open to the idea that your quickest route to a major championship could be through para pathways as much as through Olympic events?
First steps if you want to coach para athletes
Andrew closes with an invitation. There are one hundred and sixty four medal events on the Paralympic athletics programme, but the real number he cares about is how many coaches are willing to lean into the complexity rather than step back from it.
His practical messages to coaches are straightforward.
Treat para athletes as athletes first. Start with the event demands, then the individual, then the impairment.
See problem solving as a core coaching skill, not a nuisance. Equipment, classification and logistics are all part of the performance puzzle.
Ask questions early and often. No door is closed, no question is silly, and support is available through national bodies and experienced para coaches.
Consider the long view. An athlete you pick up in the next year or two could realistically progress to Brisbane with the right environment.
If you can coach a para athlete, Andrew argues, you can coach anyone. The reverse is also true. If you already care about technical detail, planning and relationships in your current squad, you are more ready for para coaching than you think.
Brisbane 2032 will come around quickly. The real question for coaches is not whether para athletics will be ready. It is whether you want to be on the warm up track when it arrives.
