The Mad Max game for those with life skills
Australia's spirited Paralympic rugby players are primed for gold in Beijing. Yvonne Pecujac reports.
THE roar from the court is deafening. Players shout as they dive for the ball. Arms pump and jaws clench. Bodies strain to push free from the tangle of arms and legs. There's an almighty heave and the bodies scatter. The ball sails overhead and the men ram their way down the court in search of a goal.
In wheelchairs that look like they came straight out of Mad Max, even training sessions look like a demolition derby. The hubcaps on the battered metal chariots gleam like battle-scarred shields.
The players freely admit murderball, or wheelchair rugby, can be brutal. First played by quadraplegics in Canada in 1977, it's a game of speed, aggression and tactics. Spills, stacks and snarls are common but that's part of the play: blocking, jamming, trapping and shepherding your opponents away from the ball.
"It's brutal all right," says the team's mechanic, Chevvy Cooper. "They flip over, tear the wheels off, smash into each other. See that chair over there? It's two weeks old." The battered wheelchair looks like it's been done over by Jeff Fenech. "They can attack pretty hard and it's not like they're going slowly. There's a guy in Sydney who can get from one end of the court to the other in 5.5 seconds from a standing start. He does about 30-35km/h. You hit him when you're doing 20 and you're having a 50km/h collision in a wheelchair."
National competition is intense, but all rivalries are shelved when it comes to overseas challengers.
All eyes are on Beijing where the world champions, the US, must defend their title at the Paralympics, which begin on September 6. Although Australia is ranked second, players say the difference between the top six teams is so close the gold medal could by anybody's.
Greg Smith is one of 11 who will make up the team headed for Beijing. The 40-year-old is an enthusiastic convert to murderball. After 15 years as a track athlete, he hit a wall. With three gold Paralympic medals, two world records and an Order of Australia medal under his belt, it was time for a change.
Smith put his solo career aside for life as part of a noisy, boisterous murderball team whose players had all been through something as life-changing as his own experiences.
His story is the kind that makes you think about fate. Almost 23 years ago, a Daylesford farmer and his son found Smith's twisted car wreck in their field. Then only 18, he had fallen asleep at the wheel and had managed to hit the only tree in the paddock.
An army recruit, Smith had driven overnight from Sydney barracks to Puckapunyal. At the last minute he decided to push on home to Ballarat.
Most of the players on the court have lived through the unimaginable: broken necks in skiing accidents, spinal injury from diving into shallow swimming holes, industrial disasters, mine collapses, car smashes — events that took just seconds to occur but often years to recover from. And they admit some people never recover from their trauma — the despair is too big.
For Smith, the road to recovery became the athletic track, with its long hours of training, travel and competition.
It's a far cry from the crush of the murderball court. "You get the wind knocked out of you," he says of the full-body slams. Despite the intensely physical play, Smith sees no need for helmets or padding. "That's for wusses, isn't it?" he smiles. "Once you break your neck you're not really going to break it again."
The team's coach, Paul Angel, who is the only "walker" in his family of four, cuts in: "Words like courage, bravery and inspiration are often used to talk about people in wheelchairs but that really only applies to getting over the trauma, if at all. The rest of it is just about living your life and getting on with it."
This brand of pragmatism permeates the team. Their sense of humour is black and funny and often centred around their limitations. "If I wanted to get down on my knees and pray to walk it would take me five hours to get down there and 10 hours to get back up," says Marg Angel, the coach's wife, who has been in a wheelchair all her life.
Angel turns up to every training session, keeping scores and helping out with the hundreds of details that keep the teams playing and on the road. She is puzzled why a sport as thrilling as murderball has such a low profile and despairs that, like the athletes, the sport is cloaked in stereotypes.
"When the Paralympics are on we get an hour of TV coverage a night. People just don't get the opportunity to make up their own minds about it," she says. "During the 2000 Sydney Paralympics people would come out of curiosity on day one and then come back because it was exciting to watch. The first media reports would all talk about the athletes' injuries but by day two or three it would be the wins and achievements that were being highlighted.
"We want people to see the person, not the disability. Wheelchairs are just a way of life, but not a defining one. It's just one small part of them."
Win or lose in Beijing, the team will continue pushing their physical boundaries.
Murderball muscles into Paralympics
By Calum MacLeod, USA TODAY
BEIJING — Zhang Wenli hit rock bottom, quite literally, in 1994. Diving into shallow water, she broke her neck and became a quadriplegic, unable to walk and with reduced use of her arms. For the next 12 years, the former sports teacher felt trapped at home in eastern China — and useless. That is, until a violent sport — and its gung-ho American stars — changed her life.
Today, Zhang lines up against her heroes as Team China plays Team USA, the gold-medal favorites, in the opening battle of Murderball, aka wheelchair rugby, a clashing contact sport set to take the Paralympic Games by storm — and smash stereotypes about people with disabilities.
China is among the newcomers to the sport. When the country started to build a team from scratch in 2006, scouts in Zhang's eastern province of Shandong asked her to try out.
"I doubted I could play, the game seemed so fierce," she remembers. Then she watched Murderball. And again, and again.
"I've seen it dozens of times. I don't understand what they are saying, as my English is poor, but I can feel the atmosphere and understand the lead athlete's situation," says Zhang, 40, speaking in Mandarin. "They are saying, 'We are not patients or victims, we are independent athletes.' And now I am representing my country."
China has screened the film for its squad multiple times, team official Xin Yue says. "They love it. Many of our athletes did not think they could ever be independent and so strong in their bodies," he says.
Coach Wen Yan, 57, who sports a long ponytail and a longer history as a soldier and basketball coach to the military, says wheelchair rugby has been key to rebuilding the spirits and lives of her players.
"In just a few seconds, these people became disabled by serious accidents," she says. "Afterward, they felt depressed. They often underestimated themselves and felt inferior. But now, after training, they have recovered and wear a bright smile. We expect to come in last of the eight teams at this tournament, but we will show our spirit and enjoy the experience."
Cui Maoshan was depressed and hospital-bound in southwest Yunnan province when officials from China's federation for disabled people visited him last year. He broke his neck in 2006 in a fall at a building site. He had never heard of rugby, known as "olive ball" in China, let alone the wheelchair version.
Cui will play for his country in today's game after a year of full-time training. "I am not depressed now, but feel great and proud," he says. His only regret is that his wife and two children, back in their home village, have never seen him play. The cost of traveling to Beijing is too high, but he expects them to watch on television.
Mark Zupan, the U.S. team captain and tattooed Texan whose life, including his love life, is documented in Murderball, is delighted with the response to the film.
Murderball "bridges so many gaps that it doesn't matter what language you speak. The film brings disability to the forefront," says Zupan, 32, of Austin, who was disabled from an auto accident at 18. "Ten minutes into the film, you don't see the wheelchairs, you just see athletes."
Beijing student Zhang Peng, a volunteer at the wheelchair rugby training venue, agrees. "I used to think disabled people were a bit mysterious, and I had little contact with them. But once I saw them playing, I didn't think they were disabled at all. The game is so exciting. They are just like able-bodied people. I realize they are just like us and want equal treatment, not sympathy," he says.
Zhang, the only female player on Team China's 12-person roster, wants a photo with Zupan after today's game. "I worship him," she says.
Zupan warns that she will get no leniency on the court because she's a woman. "Girl or guy, if you're in my way, get out, or I'll move you out of the way," he says. There'll be trash-talking, too, he warns.
Zhang is unfazed. "I won't understand if any foreign player insults me. On the court, no one considers me a woman. The intensity and excitement is the charm of rugby," she says. "It will shock people that quadriplegics can play such an exciting game. That's what I hope the Paralympics will bring to China."
The sport, invented in Canada in the late 1970s by a group of quadriplegic athletes who wanted an alternative to wheelchair basketball, hit the headlines with the 2005 U.S. documentary Murderball.
The award-winner at the Sundance Film Festival showed audiences what wheelchair users can do and helped push the game globally into the fastest-growing wheelchair sport. Men and women can play on the same team in the game, which shows how sport and cinema can transcend language barriers. Nineteen countries field national teams.
Poster Comment:
Anybody making book on this yet?