THE START LINE
Your Para Sport Journey
Begins Here
After the Paris 2024 Paralympics, Anu Francis went to dinner with a friend who urged her to take a DNA test. What happened next transformed her sense of identity, belonging and safety.
On a sun-kissed day in June, after driving from Bathurst where she had just finished her university exams, Anu Francis waited near the surf club at Sydney’s Freshwater Beach to meet the brother she never knew she had.
“He just rocked up. He was walking along with his dog and I was like, ‘That’s him’,” Francis said.
The two embraced with an eerie familiarity.
“It felt like someone I hadn’t seen for ages. It was like a hug from a really good mate. ‘I’ve never met you before in my life’, yet it didn’t feel that way at all.
“We went for lunch and spent a few hours together, talking about all sorts of things, talking about our family life, how we were brought up.
“He asked me how I got into sport. ‘You’re a world champion, right?’ It was really wild.”
“When my friend and I were driving back to the airport, I was like, ‘What the hell just happened?’”
Francis represented Australia at the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games, will enter the World Triathlon Para Championships this weekend as the reigning champion in the women’s PTS2 classification and is a strong contender to win gold at LA28. Yet, what she has gained through sport can never be measured in medals.
Since making her international debut in Wales in 2022, where she reunited with her aunty after nearly 20 years, Francis has been on an emotional and transformative journey of discovery that has brought her into contact with her father for the first time and revealed she had two half-brothers. It also reconnected her with childhood friends and wider family.
“This stuff feels so much bigger than sport,” she said.
“If I’d never done triathlon, if we’d never had that race in Wales, I may never have reconnected with my family in England and then I never would have had that connection with my mum’s friend who urged me to do the DNA test.
“I thought it was magic enough just reconnecting to my family in England. It felt so special going back to where I’d spent all my summers up until I was 10 and reconnecting with those friends.
“But then suddenly to have that lead on to meeting my brother and knowing who my father is, which is something that I’ve wanted ever since I was young… We would be in primary school making Father’s Day cards and I was always like, ‘Who am I writing a card to?’ So, I think it’s huge, just to understand where I come from.”
This extraordinary story intertwining family, Para sport and self-identity begins in Cairns on September 15, 1995, where Francis – “a Christmas accident” – was born. The relationship between her parents was brief and ended before her father knew her mother was pregnant. Francis would be brought up by her mother, Hazel, alone.
“Throughout my whole childhood I always wanted to know who my dad was,” she said. “My mum always said to me, ‘When you’re 18, we’ll find him’, so I kept that in the back of my mind.
“When I turned 18, my ‘classic’ mum was like, ‘OK, open up Facebook and type in ‘Buddy’.’ I asked her, ‘Have you got a surname?’ and she said no.
“I thought, ‘Wow, OK, what a start… I don’t think this is going to happen as easily as we thought!’ So, it just went on the backburner.”
Your Para Sport Journey
Begins Here
In 2022, Francis was due to fly into Heathrow en route to Wales for her first international Para triathlon and contacted her aunt Jane in London to see if she would like to catch up first.
“I hadn’t seen her since I was 10,” she said, adding that she and her mother stopped their yearly trips to England after her grandparents had died.
“She said she’d pick me up from Heathrow and drive me over to where I was racing. Suddenly, through sport, I got to see my aunt for the first time in 18 years.”
A month later, Aunt Jane and her partner, whom Francis had never met, came to Portugal to watch Francis compete and, the following year, Francis visited them again in London, tying in visits with long-lost childhood friends.
In 2024, Hazel came to Paris to watch her daughter compete at the Paralympics, reuniting there with her sister Jane after nearly two decades.
“It was a really special time,” Francis said. “But it also got me thinking again about my dad.”
After the Games, mother and daughter travelled to London. There, a meeting with one of Hazel’s close friends, a lady named Lindsay, would prove the sliding doors moment, sparking the chain of events that led Francis to discover her unknown closest relatives.
“Lindsay was adopted and had recently done a DNA test because she wanted to find out who her birth mother was,” Francis said.
“She managed to find her birth mum which she said was the most special thing she’d ever done.
“So, we were out to dinner in London, she was telling us this story and she started saying, ‘I really encourage you to do a DNA test. Even if you don’t get along or whatever, at least you’ll have answers’.
“It was really important having one of mum’s trusted friends saying this because mum was still quite resistant, but you don’t realise how weird it is to live your life not knowing half of where you come from.
“I didn’t have a name, a photo, or anything to go with. It was important having her perspective and I felt like it gave me a bit of backup, helping my mother understand why I was so interested in this.”
We would be in primary school making Father’s Day cards and I was always like, ‘Who am I writing a card to?’
It took nearly two more years for Francis to finally bite the bullet and order a DNA kit. She took the test with little expectation. Then, one night in March, the results came back.
It turned out Francis had a 15 percent DNA match with a previously unknown first cousin. The match provided the cousin’s name and location and Francis made contact. Uncannily, it also revealed that the cousin had joined ancestry.com in September 2024 – the exact same time of the pivotal conversation Francis had with her mother’s friend Lindsay in London.
“I told her I was looking for my father and that, if she was my first cousin, it would mean that maybe one of her parents has a brother who could be my dad,” Francis said.
“I told her I’d been born in September 1995 in Cairns, I was a Christmas accident, and she said she’d call her mum and see if it rang a bell.
“She came back to me the next day and said, ‘I just got off the phone from my mum. I know who your dad is’.
“She said, ‘It’s one of my mum’s brothers. He goes by the nickname Buddy. He still lives in Far North Queensland’.”
The cousin told Francis that her father had one son who was two years older than her and another son around the same age.
“So, essentially, my new cousin reached out to my dad and said, ‘Surprise! We’ve done a DNA test and you’ve got a daughter’.
“My dad told my brothers about me and that same day the younger brother sent me a message on Instagram saying, ‘Hey, I think you’re my sister’. And so, we got chatting.
“It turned out he’s six weeks older than me, so we’re almost like twins. He said he lived in Sydney and I said, ‘I’m actually going to be in Sydney for uni exams in June’ and he said, ‘Come and visit’.”
Francis and her brother, Bede, got along brilliantly at their meeting in June. She also contacted their father and they now maintain a link on social media. A face-to-face meeting is planned for late October.
“I’ve learned a bit about him,” Francis said.
“He’s a set designer and he’s worked on Marvel movies and a bunch of different movies. All this time, I probably watched movies that he’s worked on and just had no idea. I’m so keen to learn more about all of that.
“There aren’t many photos of him online. I’d love to see photos of what he looked like when he was with my mum, what he looked like at my age, all that sort of stuff.
“I think with the age gap of a parent, it’s obviously going to be a bit different to what it was like meeting my brother. But I want to make it happen. I was so prepared to find out that my father had passed away and that I’d never get that chance to meet him. So, I think now I’m like, ‘Right, let’s get to this moment’.”
Francis said her father was aware of her achievements in Para sport and wrote encouraging comments on her social media posts.
Regardless of how the relationship may play out, just knowing who her father is after all these years has given Francis a sense of contentment that can only be truly understood by those who have grown up with such questions. Even if she hadn’t found her father, she said, meeting Bede, whose looks and character are so similar to hers, has had an enormous impact.
View this post on Instagram
“I’ve always wanted siblings and so suddenly finding out that – if that is all that I get from this whole thing, that’s great,” she said. “It’s like I’ve got a built-in best mate now to do life with.”
Reflecting more deeply, she said: “It’s really increased knowing who I am, but also my sense of belonging and safety.
“I only ever had my mum. She was my only family member, and that feels pretty scary sometimes. Growing up, it was always like, if something ever happened to mum, all of the legal documents were that I’d move over to England to live with my godparents over there. That’s quite like an unnerving way to grow up.
“You can’t go back and undo your childhood, obviously. But I think now as an adult, even just knowing I’ve got family that I can fall back on … I feel like it helps you know where your roots are. These safety networks make you feel more stable in life, which I never really had growing up.”
Given the way Francis’s involvement in high performance sport provided the catalyst for her discovering her family, would it be fitting if they all went to LA in 2028 to support her at the Paralympics?
“I haven’t thought about that, but that would be wild!” she said.
“That would be a full – full – circle, especially if I could win a gold medal.
“I think it is wild because it just shows that sport is so much bigger than swimming, biking and running.
“I just think, if sport had brought me nothing but bringing me back to my family – if I’d never become world champion, never gone to the Paralympics – what it’s done for reconnecting and connecting me with my family is something that I don’t think would have happened otherwise, which is really special.”
The 2026 World Triathlon Para Championships takes place in Pontevedra, Spain, from September 25-27.
Listen to Anu Francis Speak About Her Story Here:
Paralympics Australia is only able to continue doing its work driving the Paralympic Movement forward in Australia because of the generous support it receives from Government, Corporate Partners and donors.
The focus continues to be on delivering teams to each Summer and Winter Paralympic Games and supporting Para athletes as they enter and progress through the Para sport system and into their post-sporting careers.
"*" indicates required fields
