Madison de Rozario is one of Australia's most celebrated athletes, but she almost quit a decade ago. (Getty Images: Marco Mantovani)
There was a moment for Madison de Rozario when her life came sharply into focus.
The Australian wheelchair racer and Paralympian was on her way to the UK for the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.
The Minefield's School of Sport
Photo shows An illustration of a man in a singlet raising his fist in the air in celebration, a medal around his neck
But upon arriving in Newcastle, where the Australian team would prepare for the Games, she was rushed to hospital with deep vein thrombosis, a blood clot that had formed while on the plane.
"I didn't think anything of it. I thought, a blood clot sounds so small," de Rozario recalls, speaking on ABC Radio National's The Minefield.
But a scan revealed the clot was 40 centimetres long and worryingly close to her heart. Doctors advised the best course of action was to administer strong blood thinners to minimise the risk of a stroke.
It meant de Rozario couldn't move for several days. She was in a new country, without her family, watching her chance at racing slip away.
"It was quite an isolating, scary experience. I was 20 and being told that they couldn't guarantee this was going to work," she says.
"I spent so many days alone in hospital, just so, so scared and so unsure of what was going to happen."
At the same time, there was another niggling thought just below the surface: relief.
"I'd spent a while in the lead-up thinking I would be relieved for any reason that would take me out of this sport because I didn't think I loved it, but I couldn't see a way out of it," she says.
"[Racing] was all I knew, it was my entire life," de Rozario says. (Getty Images: Alex Davidson)
Barred from racing, she watched from the stands as her teammate and roommate Angie Ballard competed in the race that she, de Rozario, had trained for. It brought on a confusing mix of feelings.
"[Ballard] gave me the first chair I ever raced in; she's been in my corner since I was 12," de Rozario says.
"I watched her win this race that I thought I should be winning … I hadn't prepared for the mix of emotions that would come with someone that you love so much doing so well, but also the jealousy or the negative emotions that came with that."
After the race, she hurried to congratulate her friend.
"The first thing she said to me was to ask if I was doing OK and to say that must have been so incredibly challenging to watch," de Rozario says.
"I realised that I was surrounded by the most incredible people because of this sport that I had been beginning to resent.
"I remember coming back from that trip and thinking, 'I do love this sport … I can't let this go, but I can't keep going the way that I am currently doing it'."
Angie Ballard (left) has been a close friend of de Rozario since the start of her career. (Getty: Julian Finney)
The burden of early success
De Rozario grew up in Perth and began wheelchair racing at just 12 years old.
At 14, she made her debut as the youngest member of the Australian team at the 2008 Beijing Paralympics and left with a silver medal in the 100-metre team relay.
She went on to compete in the world's most prestigious sporting contests all over the world.
Now 31, she's won a clutch of medals — including two gold at the Paralympics and four gold at the Commonwealth Games — and has made history as a world record-holder in the Women's 800-metre event.Â
She also broke new ground as the first Australian woman to win the New York City Marathon and the first Australian to win the London Marathon's wheelchair title.
De Rozario attended her fifth Paralympic Games in Paris last year. (Getty Images: Michael Steele)
She has become one of Australia's most celebrated athletes, an outspoken advocate for disability, and has even had a Barbie doll made in her image.
But her early success was a blessing and a curse.
"[At 14,] I had no idea what I was doing. I was surrounded by the most incredible athletes and spent so much time trying to emulate them," she says.
"I definitely was shaping my entire identity around trying to be what I thought the sport needed me to be."
Her long-time coach, Louise Sauvage, appeared to young de Rozario as "almost the embodiment of what we think an athlete should be".
"I saw her as someone who was so fierce and competitive and who had this unbelievable desire to win that could overcome any physical barriers that may have been in the way.
"As I was growing up, I began to realise that maybe I didn't have those qualities — maybe I didn't have what it took to be that person."
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At 18, after she attended the 2012 Paralympics in London, she developed serious doubts about her career path.
"I kept turning up to training, kept doing what I was doing, but my heart certainly wasn't in it, and I felt myself begin to fall out of love with it," she says.
Then came the turning point in Glasgow.
"I had used sport as my identity and it had taken something as extreme as what happened at that Commonwealth Games to [be] the catalyst I needed to really work out how to live a life that I wanted," she says.
A radical pivot
De Rozario and her coach worked on changing her "entire approach to sport", pivoting away from an "extreme focus on success".
Rather than racing with the sole goal of winning, she said they would "set much smaller goals" that focused on her personal strengths and techniques. She also started viewing her losses as a credit to her competitors, rather than a personal failure.
Within six months of implementing her new training regime, she had won her first world title.
"[It] shifted everything about how I thought about the sport. And we stuck with that solidly for the next 10 years."
“Your body is going to give you so much; it's so powerful and strong and resilient and capable," de Rozario says. (Getty Images: Alex Pantling)
This change of mindset also affected how she thought about her body.
"There is this idea that as a person with a disability, there is very little pride to be had in your physical self," she says.
"There is this unease around it … where you're engaging with people who are thankful that they're not in your position or in your body. You do internalise [the idea] that your body isn't capable or worthy of value."
She has spent her career undoing the damage of those prejudices.
"[As an athlete,] you have to unlearn that. You have to have this respect for your body and give it the space to work for you," she says.
A marathon to remember
De Rozario is adamant that none of her success would have happened without her teammates, mentors and support staff.
"I feel like who I've become is almost a combination of all the people who have made me," she says.
She recalls the Tokyo Paralympic marathon in 2020, a breathtakingly close race that earned her her second gold medal of the Games. Due to COVID restrictions, the stadium was eerily empty.
"I could hear the commentary coming through the speakers, and I could also hear my coach's voice, my doctor's voice, my physio's voice, my engineer's voice — [they] were all there, up in the stadium," she says.
"Because it was so empty, I could hear their individual voices. It was one of the most surreal experiences."
As she tore towards the finish line, she was neck-and-neck with Swiss racer Manuela Schär. She summoned all her physical and mental strength.
"It was one of those [races] where you have to give absolutely everything: a sprint finish. The end of a marathon just takes absolutely everything from you," de Rozario says.
She won the race by one second.
"It was one of the first times that I crossed the finish line and didn't only feel relief. I was able to feel that pride, that excitement," she says.
De Rozario crossed the finish line of the Women's T54 Marathon just one second ahead of Manuela Schär of Switzerland. (Getty Images: Sam Barnes/Sportsfile)
Redefining success
The more medals and records de Rozario accrues, the less important they feel to her.
She still loves her sport, but now she loves her life, too.
"As I began to find more success in my career, I started to realise how terribly irrelevant it actually was," she says.
"You think that once you achieve this incredible thing that you spent years working for and sacrificing for, the reward is that you're somehow a better person or somehow more loved.
"I remember winning my first world title and then waking up the next morning and realising every part of my life was exactly the same, absolutely nothing had changed."
Now de Rozario's proudest achievements are not about her strength, speed, or resilience.
De Rozario now embraces her strengths and weaknesses as an athlete. (Getty Images: PA Images/John Walton)
"If I think about what I am proud of, it's not the times I've crossed the finish line first. It's not the gold medals that I won in Tokyo, despite [the fact] that I'm so happy with them," she says.
"I am so proud of the person that I had to become in order to do that.
"I could never race again, I could never win a gold medal again. But I get to remain the person that I made myself become, and I'm very proud of that person."
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