It was the Sydney 2000 Paralympics that set Kylie Gauci on her way to the top. She attended every day of the Games and was a spectator at Gliders matches. Kylie was so inspired by the squad’s performance against the world giants of women’s wheelchair basketball, Canada and the USA that she decided she wanted to play in international competition.

Kylie was attracted to wheelchair basketball at an early age – she loved the contact element of the sport as well as the many finer skills required at the elite end of the sport.

A towering presence in Australian wheelchair basketball, Brad captained the Australian Rollers to their gold medal in Beijing and silver medal in London. He is one of the few Paralympic athletes to make a living out of his sport and plays wheelchair basketball professionally in Italy, where he lives with his life for most of the year.

Brad was a sports-mad teenager who excelled in swimming, tennis, hurdles and his favourite code, AFL. As a teenager, he worked as a deckhand aboard a high-speed ferry between Rottnest Island and Fremantle, before losing his leg when he was 18.

Two years after he lost a limb in a machine accident in 1993, Justin Eveson used sport as the vehicle to overcome adversity. In 1995, he began competing in wheelchair basketball but instead decided to focus on a swimming career.

At Sydney 2000, Justin made his first Paralympic team in swimming. In front of his home crowd he brought home silver and bronze medals as part of the 4x100m medley and 4x100m freestyle relay teams.  

Not many athletes can lay claim to a Paralympic gold medal and a world championship before their 20th birthday. Then again, there aren’t many athletes like Dylan Alcott.

Dylan achieved the rare feat when the then 19-year-old was part of the Australian wheelchair basketball team which secured the 2010 World Championship after famously winning gold at the 2008 Paralympic Games in Beijing.