Wheels On Fire

The Age

Friday June 13, 1997

CAROLINE OVERINGTON

IT IS a common misconception that people who use wheelchairs cannot walk. In fact, many can, but so badly they simply don't bother. Louise Sauvage, the champion wheelchair-racer, once walked and probably still could, except that she decided walking was more trouble than it was worth. As a child, she hobbled along on callipers and crutches and then, at 12 years of age, simply gave up.

"Walking is inconvenient," Sauvage says. "Awkward, slow. At high school, what are you supposed to do with your bags and books? I didn't have my hands available. I couldn't keep up with my friends."

So she took to a wheelchair like a kid on skates and never looked back, except to see how close her competitors are, which is usually not very. Sauvage, 23, once an awkward teenager with an unsteady gait, is now the fastest woman on wheels in the world.

"I had a feeling I could be successful, so I always wanted a chair," she says, slapping the wheels of the model she has parked in front of a table at a hotel restaurant in St Kilda.

The transition was far from easy, however. "Everybody pushed me to keep walking," she says. "In those days (the '70s, in Joondanna, Western Australia, where Sauvage was raised and her parents still live), everybody thought that if you could walk, you should. It was like there were two worlds, with disabled people in one, and able-bods in the other. If you were in the disabled world, you had to do whatever you could to join the other world, even if it meant hobbling along when everybody else was running. Hospitals, doctors, everybody wanted you to walk."

To some extent, Sauvage is glad they did. She values her experience as "an upright" - being the same height and getting around in much the same manner as her peers, albeit more slowly. Sometimes, Sauvage even wishes she could still walk, "just to get around the kitchen, maybe". But, after 10 years using a wheelchair, the muscles in her thighs and buttocks have wasted and she cannot stand, let alone take steps.

"Maybe I could build myself up again, but I'll never find out," she says. "I don't really need to walk any more."

Not, at least, to keep up with her friends. At the Barcelona Paralympics, in 1992, Sauvage won three gold medals (in the 100, 200 and 400 metres) and, at the last world championships in Berlin, she won every event she entered: the 800, 1500 and 5000 metres and the marathon. In March last year, Sauvage told Inside Sport magazine that her three immediate goals were to win a gold medal at the Atlanta Paralympics, the 800-metre demonstration event at the Atlanta Olympics and the apparently unwinnable Boston Marathon.

Mission accomplished: Sauvage won a total of five gold medals in Atlanta (one at the Olympics, and four at the Paralympics) and on 21 April, at her fifth attempt, she won in Boston. "I had a feeling this would be my year," she says, which is perhaps why, when the marathon started, all eyes were on Sauvage. She was singing.

"Wheels on fire ... burning down the road ..."

"I'd been trying to win the race for years," she says, "and every time I sort of knew I wasn't going to win. But this year it was different. Maybe only athletes understand, but sometimes you just feel invincible."

For four consecutive years, Sauvage had been beaten in Boston by the unofficial queen of wheelchair racing, an American woman called Jean Driscoll. Each time, Sauvage had managed to stay with Driscoll until they reached the marathon course's infamous Heartbreak Hill.

"They call it that because, believe me, it does break your heart," Sauvage says. "Climbing that hill, she'd just blow me away."

This year, it almost happened again: at the base of Heartbreak Hill, after racing side by side for almost 32 kilometres, Sauvage glimpsed Driscoll's wheels moving further and further ahead.

And Sauvage thought: No. No. No bloody way.

"I said to myself: I'm not being beaten. I'm not going home for the fifth year in a row having to tell people that she beat me on the hill."

She starts to smile: "And now I don't have to."

Sauvage won the race. She leant a little further forward in her chair, gripped the wheels tighter, pushed harder and, to her surprise, the ground slipped away beneath her: within seconds, the two women were again side by side.

With seven kilometres left to race, Driscoll, desperate to shake Sauvage, took a corner too sharply, caught a wheel in a tram track and fell out of her chair.

At first, the young Australian was thrilled. She pulled away and, by the time Driscoll had righted herself and begun chasing, the race was as good as over. Only later, she thought: what a shame! "I was really angry," she says, "because I wanted it to come down the straight, so I could outsprint her and really prove that I am the best."

LOUISE SAUVAGE was born with a spinal condition called myleodisplasia, which means that, although she can feel her legs, she has only limited control over the lower half of her body.

As a baby, she dragged herself around with her arms but, later, like many wheelchair athletes, she took to exercise for rehabilitation. "My mother wanted me to get fit for life," she says. Sauvage's first sport was swimming, but she soon became obsessed by wheelchair racing: the whop, whop sound that the wheels made on the track and the feeling of wind rushing over her face.

Then, in 1987, when she was 14 years old, Sauvage had surgery to correct curvature of the spine. Two metal rods were screwed into her back, one first through her chest and a lung. "It's still not perfect," she says, "but at least I sit straight."

The operation kept Sauvage out of sport for two important years. "When I look back, I don't know how I did it," she says. "Sport absorbs so much of my time ... I can't imagine life without it."

AT THE age of 20, with one world record already under her belt, Sauvage moved to Melbourne. She soon became a familiar sight on Victoria's boulevards and freeways, pelting down Beach Road from Sandringham to St Kilda with the wind at her back or, in winter, her broad shoulders hunched over her racing chair, her hands too wet and slippery to hold the wheels.

"In Perth, I used to complain about getting up at 6am because it's already 30 degrees," she says. "But in Melbourne, it was freezing. Then it would rain, and there's only one way back - through it. You can't see, your fingers are so cold, they hurt ..."

The pain was worth it. Sauvage now enjoys the benefits of being the best: her Top End racing chair is one of the finest available. Made of aluminium, it weighs just seven kilograms. She can can lift it with two fingers.

Sauvage is proudly independent. She earns her living as an athlete. Money comes from many sources: she is a member of the prestigious and well-paid Team National, she has recently recorded a new television commercial for Qantas and is a sponsored member of the Australian Institute of Sport. "I guess it makes me unique," she says, "because not too many athletes with disabilities can get away with not working for a living."

Sauvage spends a lot of time off the training track promoting her sport. As one of 20 Paralympic "ambassadors", she has her work cut out encouraging support for Sydney's Paralympic Games.

If Australia were not hosting the Olympics in Sydney in the year 2000, the Paralympics would be the biggest event this nation has ever hosted: bigger than the Melbourne Olympics, World Expo, even Brisbane's Commonwealth Games.

But what does "bigger" mean? Certainly there will be more athletes, support personnel and events. What is unclear is whether the Sydney Paralympics will have a larger attendance.

History provides few clues. In Barcelona, the Paralympics attracted enormous crowds; the main stadium was packed. Sauvage, then 19 years old, rolled into the arena asking herself: "What is everybody doing here? This is the Paralympics!"

Attendance in Atlanta was abysmal. There were many explanations, including poor transport, "big event fatigue" following the Olympics, and the Atlanta Braves returning to their home stadium after having been pushed out for the Olympics. The main problem, however, was the price of tickets. In Barcelona, the Paralympics were free. In Atlanta, adults had to pay $25 to see athletes they knew little about compete in events they did not understand.

In recent weeks, the organising committee of the Paralympic Games (known by the acronym SPOC) has decided the public will pay to see the Paralympics in Sydney. It was a difficult decision, but one the chief executive officer, Lois Appleby, defends. "First, we have to charge because we need the money," she says. "But, more importantly, the public should have to pay for the Paralympics, because it is a meaningful and important sporting event."

Yet the public baulks at paying to see a Paralympics. Traditionally, the argument has been that people without disabilities dislike paying because they are ineligible to compete, and the event is, therefore, irrelevant to them. The natural extension of this argument is that able-bodied people believe that if they trained hard enough, they could be Olympic athletes. If so, they are deluded. Most able-bodied people could not be Olympic basketballers because they are not tall enough. Most cannot be gymnasts, because they are not small enough.

More likely, the public is enthusiastic about the Olympics and apathetic about the Paralympics because one is considered sport and the other recreation, or rehabilitation.

THE FIRST Paralympics was a meeting of wheelchair-bound amputees, many veterans of the Second World War. They competed at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, in England, in 1948, the same year as the London Olympics.

Only recently (perhaps since Barcelona) has the Paralympics been considered competition for elite athletes. Standards are now high: the Paralympic record for the 100-metre sprint, held by Ajibola Adeoye, is 10.72 seconds. Donovan Bailey's world record is 9.84 seconds. Adeoye qualified for Nigeria's Olympic team, but was ruled ineligible because he could not start the race with both hands on the ground (he has only one).

Appleby believes that the key to attracting people to the Paralympic Games in Sydney lies in creating a "face" for the Games. If ambassadors are well known, the public will be interested in their endeavors.

SAUVAGE sees her role as both privilege and pleasure but, like most athletes, is not as comfortable in the spotlight. She worries that journalists will ask her "curly" questions and, when she speaks in public, her hands shake and her voice sounds, at least to her, as if it is wobbling.

Practice makes perfect, however, and Sauvage is getting a lot of exposure. Before Boston, the only people who seemed to care about her achievements were her parents, but now there always seems to be somebody wanting to talk to her. With new-found confidence, she encourages people not to tiptoe around her wheelchair. "The trouble is, people worry about saying the wrong thing, which means that I spend a lot of time making sure I don't hurt their feelings," she says. "So I encourage them to talk about the chair: what it costs (about $3,500), how fast we go (up to 50kmh), about my training, whatever they want to know."

There is one question, however, that she is often asked but still does not know how to answer. In Atlanta last year, Sauvage competed in the Olympics and the Paralympics, and won gold medals at both (the 800-metre wheelchair track race was a demonstration event at the Olympics, and part of the Paralympic program).

"People want to know: which means more?" she says. "I have mixed feelings. It was the same event, at the same stadium, against basically the same competitors, so it's hard to separate the medals. But the experiences were different."

Sauvage says she hardly ever feels uncomfortable, but at the Olympic Village she was acutely so. "I don't think they (the Olympians) knew why I was there. They all knew each other and had trained together; they were famous," she says. "I didn't know anybody. I hadn't been to their camps. I felt like an outsider, like they were thinking: hey, the Paralympics are next week - what's she doing here?"

Sauvage spent a lot of time just rolling around the village, staring at people she recognised from television. Famously, when she was asked how it felt to represent disabled people at the Olympics, she said: "I'm sorry, but I'm representing Australia."

"In the end, we all got to know each other, so it felt less weird," Sauvage says. "But even before that I didn't have a problem with my being at the Olympics. I knew I belonged because, even though they are more famous than me, I knew they were no more committed."

* Louise Sauvage will represent Australia in the 800-metre track race at the world athletics championships in Athens, in August.