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The enormous roar that greeted Australian athletes as they entered the stadium for the Opening Ceremony of the Sydney Paralympics meant more to Paul Bird than perhaps anyone else.
Bird was Chef de Mission of the Australian team, a post he held also for the 2004 Games. He’d been Deputy Chef de Mission in 1992 and 1996 and was again in 2008.
Back in 1988, he’d been a section manager after having competed at Arnhem in 1980, where he won a swimming gold medal. In New York in 1984, he added another gold and silver to his ledger.
Across all those years Bird experienced an array of Paralympic ups and downs. But, of all the injustices and inefficiencies he’d encountered, none seemed as wrong as the earliest.
At the 1980 Games, Bird was part of the amputee section – which was separate from the wheelchair section, which was separate from athletes with vision impairment, which was separate from the cerebral palsy section.
“We flew to Holland as ‘a team’ but I didn’t know anyone else in the team,” Bird said.
“When we arrived, we were housed separately. Our amputee group was in a building by ourselves; we were looked after by our manager and a coach and that was it. We never really joined the other athletes.
“The really terrible thing was that we weren’t included in the Opening Ceremony because the only athletes allowed to march were those in wheelchairs. We were a divided group of athletes pulled together by disability, not by sport.”
A similar dynamic existed in 1984 when athletes with spinal cord injuries competed at Stoke Mandeville in the UK and athletes with other impairments competed in New York.
Bird later became involved in management, but only for the amputee group. For Seoul, Barcelona and Atlanta, there were four section managers for each Games, each representing a disability, rather than the team as a whole.
Even at Paralympics Australia Board level, Bird’s role was confined to representing amputee athletes.
Things needed to change, he believed, and the way to do it was to bring sports in as members.
“Rather than just wheelchair sport or amputee sport or blind sport or cerebral palsy sport, the goal was to bring together ‘one team’ – we are one team and we have one culture.
“We started putting that in place in the three years before Sydney. We did it with a range of educational opportunities and groupings together of managers, coaches, section managers and others. We wanted to make it about sport, not about what kind of disability an athlete had.
“As we worked towards it, it began to rearrange the way the athletes saw themselves – you are an athlete first, not someone with a disability. Let’s have you be judged as an athlete.
“It transformed things at other levels, too, in that it put sport at the forefront of decision making, rather than things being dictated by particular impairments.
“The result put us on track to be where we are now, with Para-sport firmly situated in the Australian psyche.”
The fruits of Bird’s toil were displayed for the first time at the Sydney Opening Ceremony. But the benefits of his one-team approach continued throughout the event, perhaps no more clearly than at Ansett House, a tent which was set up across from the then-recently built Novotel Hotel at Sydney Olympic Park.
It was where Australia’s Paralympians and their families could meet and relax. Press conferences and other media events were staged there in what became a daily ritual during competition.
“We set up a table outside, where our athletes were signing autographs for the public,” Bird said.
“Something I’ll never forget is that no matter what time of day it was, there was a massive line of people – kids, families, parents – all waiting to meet the athletes. They were getting their autographs on anything, shirts, programs, anything they had with them. It was amazing. We were absolutely gobsmacked.
“Then you’d come around the corner, look down the corridor between the main stadium and the other venues and it was a sea of people every day. I’d never seen anything like it.”
At Ansett House and far beyond, the public’s hunger to learn about the athletes’ stories and sports was unceasing. The media responded with an insatiable appetite for interviews, results and information.
“We knew ticket sales had gone well but, beyond that, there was really no indication this was coming,” Bird said.
“You couldn’t get into the venues. I remember wheelchair rugby, even for the preliminary rounds, you couldn’t get a seat. Same with swimming. We’d never experienced that anywhere in the world.
“Previously it was more rent-a-crowd. In Seoul, for instance, there were lots of people, but they weren’t really paying customers, they were bussed in, given flags and told to make noise. They weren’t the general public wanting to come to the Games.
“Barcelona enjoyed some good crowds but in Sydney everything gelled, and the public couldn’t get enough of it.
“It was a great outcome and a big learning curve for everyone in our team. But I think that was the key thing for me, that we were really one team.”
By David Sygall, Paralympics Australia.
Published 18 October, 2025.
