Having never touched a basketball prior the 2008 Beijing Games, Shelley Cronau is now set to achieve her dream of representing Australia at the 2012 Paralympics in London. It caps a remarkable story.

In 2007, Shelley fractured her skull and suffered a crushed spinal cord after falling down stairs in Surfers Paradise. It left her an incomplete paraplegic and with a brain injury from which she has since recovered. Shelley spent five months in rehabilitation and was inspired after watching the Beijing Paralympics Games.

Prior to June 2010, Guy Henly had never thrown a discus.  By May 2011, he had won gold at the Oceania Paralympic Championships as part of the Arafura Games in Darwin. It represents a man on the rise in field athletics.

Towering over his competitors at six foot eight, Henly entered the discus cage at the 2011 Arafura Games in his first ever international competition. He threw a winning distance of 39.07m on the first night of athletics competition. Still, Guy is not satisfied and plans to increase his distance past the 50m barrier.

In 2010, Rachael Dodds tasted elite athletic success when she broke the world record for the T35 200m at the Australian Athletics Championships in Perth.

Continuing her stellar breakthrough into senior athletics, Rachael won gold in the 200m and silver in the 100m at the 2011 IPC Athletics World Championships.

For Nicholas Hum, sport runs through his veins. Growing up, his father represented Victoria on the track while his grandmother worked in the Athlete Village at the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne. It will be exactly 56 years since the Hum family’s first brush with elite sport that Nicholas hopes to represent Australia at the London Paralympic Games in 2012.

One of the Australian athletic team’s youngest members, the London 2012 Games promises to be the experience of a lifetime for Georgia Beikoff. The talented all-round athlete is a recent convert to javelin but it hasn’t stopped her producing impressive results.

As the youngest member of the Australian athletics team, Erinn Walters has a blossoming career ahead of her. Known for her determination and dislike for failure, at just 16 Erinn has already enjoyed sprinting success at a national level in the T35 class, and heads to London confident in her abilities.

Describing herself as quiet, friendly and caring, Angelique Booth’s gentle nature is absent when it comes to achieving on the track. The vision impaired student from Sydney’s north shore made her international debut at the 2011 Athletics World Championships, contesting the 400m after an impressive year on the domestic athletics circuit.

For Jodi Elkington, sprinting runs in the family. The up and coming stars’ cousin is Jarrem Pearce, who became the youngest person ever to win the Stawell Gift in 2000.

Losing his leg below the knee after being run over by a truck, Stephen Wilson took up running as a professional sport and in 1997 represented Australia for the first time in Germany.

Roy Daniell is a family man who loves spending time with his wife and children. Both his boys (Ben and Charlie) love to run and the further the better. Endurance seems to be in the family blood.