As Louise Sauvage pushed to the starting line for the final of the 800m at the 1996 Atlanta Paralympics, the stadium was silent.

But not in anticipation – the stands were virtually empty.

“I could almost count on my fingers and toes the people that came to the stadium to watch,” Sauvage says.

“It was extremely disappointing, and especially for a country like the US, I probably expected different.”

The Paralympics is the pinnacle of sport for athletes with disabilities and the US missed a chance to promote them that year.

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Sauvage, now 50, would become one of the first Paralympians to become a household name in Australia.

Across four Games, from Barcelona to her final showing in Athens in 2008, Sauvage won nine gold and four silver Paralympic medals, and broke world records in the 1,500m, 5,000m and relay races.

Yet she, and many Paralympians, were struggling to get the recognition they deserved.

Including me — I competed in swimming at the Atlanta Games, also in front of almost empty stands.

The only people who cheered us on at the pool, aside from our coaches and games volunteers, were family members who had flown over to watch.

Like Sauvage, I was upset by the lack of public support.

“It was unfortunate, I don’t think the education was out there and no one really knew what the Paralympics was,” Sauvage says.

The disappointment was especially bitter for Sauvage because she had something to compare it to when she competed in a demonstration event at the Olympics, just a few weeks earlier.

“I experienced the Olympic Village, which was phenomenal, I’d never really experienced anything quite like that,” she says.

“All the different facilities and everything that was offered to the able-bodied athletes, it was amazing.

“Coming back for the Paralympics was very, very different, unfortunately.”

Wilting plants, rubbish bins not emptied, and a lack of clean sheets and towels in athletes’ rooms, made for an unwelcome start to the games for the Australian team.

Walking through the gate that separated the athletes’s village from the pool, I remember the intolerable stench of rubbish coming from under the spectator stands.

Since 1988, the Olympic host cities have also hosted the Paralympics, a huge step forward for equity, but Atlanta missed the mark spectacularly.

Perhaps it was teething issues, or perhaps it was emblematic of the many challenges the movement has faced across its now 64-year history, particularly when it comes to women and their participation in Para sport.

As the excitement from the first gender-equal Olympics dies down, it is worth noting, as far as the Paralympics has come, this feat has yet to be achieved.

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Through the stories of Sauvage, Elizabeth Edmondson, Libby Kosmala, Julie Russell and Annabelle Williams, we can peek inside the movement’s tussles with inclusion.

These women were at the forefront of the Paralympics and alongside their peers experienced gender disparity, sexism, inaccessibility, a lack of visibility and media coverage, and funding shortfalls — resulting in minimal coaching staff, training camps and support.

But they were also there for the turning points, the cut-through moments where athletes travelled on accessible buses for the first time, designed their own race chairs, and London opened its heart to the Games, where a record 2.7 million tickets were sold.

The Paralympics, through the lens of women, has been a ride of contrasts.

‘I’m a woman, and I’ve shot well’

It can seem surprising to some that a movement that champions inclusion in sports would try to exclude on the basis of gender.

Whilst Libby Kosmala’s impressive 44-year Paralympic history is filled with multiple successes, it was unfortunately also underscored by sexism in the early stages of her career.

Shooting, considered a ‘gentleman’s’ sport, was about to get a shakeup at its first Paralympic hit out.

It was 1976 and the Games were being held in Toronto, Canada.

Kosmala was one of only three women competing in the sport at the games, out of a field of 37 athletes.

She was leading the competition in the mixed rifle shooting event after two days but wasn’t allowed to watch the other competitors due to a lack of space in the venue, relying on her coach for updates.

At the end of the three-day competition, Kosmala was declared the gold medallist.

But officials told her it wasn’t possible that a woman had won, and some of the men she was competing against lodged a protest against her win.

“I had to show them my ID card,” she says.

“I said yes, I am a woman and I do shoot, and I’ve shot well.”

To prove that she was as good, if not better than the men in the competition, she showed the officials how she shot her gun.

Kosmala repeated her impressive performance, putting to rest any ideas of cheating.

It was a difficult time for Kosmala, but it’s this Paralympic gold medal she holds most dear.

Kosmala represented Australia at 12 Paralympics, from Heidelberg in 1972 to Rio in 2016, across several sports, but primarily in rifle shooting.

During her long career she won 13 medals, nine of which were gold.

If ever you wanted a definition of a Paralympic legend, Kosmala is it, but she has had to battle against gender stereotyping from the get-go.

In what should have been her first Games, the 1968 Tel Aviv Paralympics, Kosmala, then a swimmer, was accidently left off the team by the organiser.

Instead, she was asked to join the team as its secretary, reduced to taking notes at team meetings.

And while she enjoyed her time at the Games, it was hard to watch knowing she could’ve done better than some of the athletes she saw competing.

“I was a little horrified, and I thought if I was part of the team I could be in that pool, swimming and bringing home medals,” Kosmala says.

The now 82-year-old has seen immense change in the Paralympic Games over her 44-year career.

The shooting program has grown from being overwhelmingly represented by male competitors, to now including 12 individual men’s, women’s and mixed events in rifle and pistol.

“Men dominated the shooting, and they have done all the way along, but the numbers increased dramatically after 1976 for women,” Kosmala says.

She also feels the movement has changed broader attitudes towards disabled women, reflective of its vision for a more inclusive future through Para sport.

“I think we’re accepted a lot better now; I think the movement has changed the world.”

‘Swimming in the ad breaks’

Paralympians may feel more accepted now, but the battle for inclusion has been keenly felt across most generations in the fight for increased media coverage.

With a front row seat to this fight, Annabelle Williams knew the Paralympics were special long before the moment she anchored her team to a gold medal in the women’s 4x100m relay race at the London 2012 Games.

As the swim team travelled from their training camp in Cardiff to London, UK Channel 4 billboards lined the motorway.

“In the centre of every billboard, it just said ‘thanks for the warm-up … meaning thanks to the Olympics for the warm-up’,” Williams says.

Channel 4 shifted the dial forever when it came to broadcasting the Paralympics, hosting more than 300 hours of coverage and committing to more than 70 per cent of the presenting team being disabled.

It was clear that something shifted in the attitude towards the Games.

It was a far cry from the early stages of Williams’s career, when she experienced the lack of media coverage for athletes just like her.

In 2004, Williams attended her first Olympic swimming trials as a spectator, not realising that disabled athletes were also competing at the competition.

Williams, who had regularly watched the national championships on TV, was shocked to discover that disabled athletes were “swimming in the ad breaks”.

The lack of coverage was normal for athletes, including myself – I remember competing at the Open Nationals during the 90s, being one of those swimmers shuffled out of the way of the TV cameras, so they could focus on the ‘real deal’ — the Olympians.

We were Schrödinger’s Para athletes — there and not there at the same time.

“It’s hard to describe that feeling where you have swum at a national championship, often qualifying for a major benchmark, breaking world records and doing personal best times, and then feeling like you’re being a hindrance,” Williams says.

“No one was sort of interested in watching.”

But they should’ve been interested; Williams would go on to win bronze in the 100m butterfly in Beijing and, of course, she took home gold for her part in the relay team’s 2012 medley success.

Looking back, Williams recognises the massive impact the London Games had on the way the media looked at the Paralympics

“The primary thing about being a Paralympian is that you’re an elite athlete, and I think that now we’ve really started to see that that’s been the focus from the media,” Williams says.

“And then those athletes got a profile and gained social media followings, which I think has had a significant impact on the growth of the movement.”

Taking the swimming world by storm

But social media is a far cry from how our earlier Paralympians shared news of their successes.

With little to no media coverage at all, swimmers like Elizabeth Edmondson relied on telegrams to relay their results home.

Only 14-years-old at the time, Edmondson took the swimming world by storm at the second Paralympic Games, held in 1964 in Tokyo.

As the leaves turned in the crisp autumn air and Mt Fuji emerged from the mist, Edmondson became the youngest gold medallist for Australia in the Paralympics.

The record was only broken by fellow Paralympic swimmer, 13-year-old Maddison Elliott, in 2012.

Edmondson could be regarded as one of our greatest swimmers; but no one knew who she was or what she had achieved.

“There wasn’t much publicity about Paralympic Games or anything [back then],” she says.

“My parents were sent a telegram the day after I had competed to say that I’d broken three world records and got three gold medals.”

Limited media wasn’t the only issue, with the early years highlighting the support athletes like Edmonson missed out on.

The set up and protocols of the Australian team in the 60s was very different to what we see today, or even what I saw during my own time on the squad.

There were no pre-game competitions or camps; the swimmers arrived in Tokyo on the Saturday, attended the opening ceremony on the Sunday, and began racing on the Monday.

“It was short and sweet and to the point,” Edmondson says.

“There was no pressure on you in those days and my coach wasn’t there, it was basically a manager and one physio.

“There were no pep talks or anything and no one was cheering for you in the crowd.”

Recognition of her achievements was hard to come by, and Edmondson says people didn’t understand the concept of the Paralympics.

“I don’t think they really comprehended what I was famous for,” she says.

It wasn’t until 2000 that Edmondson feels Australia really got behind the Paralympics.

When her daughter’s school wanted to do a display about the Sydney Games, Edmondson was finally able to take hold of her Paralympic identity and own it.

“I said, hang on a minute, I can bring a few things in, you know, my blazer, my gold medals and everything,” she says.

“I’m so much prouder now, to acknowledge it, and I will now introduce myself, I am Elizabeth and I am a Paralympian.”

‘Clever athletes’

Just as Sauvage, Williams, Edmondson and Kosmala were front and centre battling media inequality and sexism, Julie Russell was at the forefront of the fight for accessibility.

An all-rounder, Russell competed in five Games, in a multitude of sports including track and field, wheelchair basketball and powerlifting.

She won silver and bronze medals in pentathlon, shot put, discus and javelin.

And while she’s more than proven her athletic prowess, for Russell, it was the drastic change in technology and accessibility during the 80s that stands out.

Russell laughs as she described what it was like for her at her first Games at Arnhem in the Netherlands in 1980.

“It was all just a bit of an adventure really,” she says.

Ramps had been installed for access to buildings, but the now 73-year-old remembers the showers were large cubicles in a temporary tentlike structure.

Despite disjointed accessibility in the athletes’ accommodation, getting to and from the competition was revolutionary.

“They had set up a transport hub with platforms and ramps up to them so they could then just wheel straight onto the buses,” Russell says.

“This is 1980, and I’d never seen anything like that before.”

It wasn’t just transport changing the way athletes were catered to and supported. Improvements in chair technology were seeing athletes racing harder and faster.

“In the beginning I did my racing in a day chair just like everyone else did,” she says.

But at her first international competition in 1979, Russell started to see innovation on the track that would lead to the types of racing chairs we see today.

Athletes started to lower the seat of their chairs, dropping them between the wheels more, and playing with the angle of the wheels to gain more speed.

But all this innovation and experimentation was too much to bear for some of the officials.

“[Athletes] started experimenting with three wheeled chairs, but the powers that be said, ‘no, you can’t, a wheelchair has to have four wheels’,” Russell says.

Athlete rebellion drove the ingenuity many needed to excel in their sport.

“So, the clever athletes just put the two front wheels really close together so that effectively it was one wheel,” Russell says.

“It all was towards improving performance, if you could get half a second over somebody, that meant you got the medal, and they didn’t.”

Eventually, the officials had to give in, resulting in the racing chairs we see athletes like Madison de Rozario racing in today.

“They saw that that was a stupid rule, so they changed it, and you could have three wheeled chairs and it’s now progressed to the much lighter specialised frames that all came in after I was racing,” Russell says.

For Russell it was exciting to see the global Para sports community embracing change, driving progress and laying the pathway to ingenuity on the track and for improved accessibility in sports venues and athletes’ village.

“These days when you go to Paralympics the accommodation is purpose built or very well adapted to the needs of disabled people; so, lots of positive changes,” she says.

‘Brave enough to do it’

Since the launch of the first official Games held in Rome in 1960, women like Sauvage, Edmondson, Kosmala, Russell and Williams have been laying down a legacy for those to come.

For Sauvage, the Paralympics are a celebration of ability, a platform from which we can highlight differences and challenge the way that people view disability.

She saw this in the way Sydney put on the Games, four years post Atlanta.

“I think [Sydney] probably set a standard that was to follow from those games onwards, I was very proud more than anything of Australia putting on such an amazing show,” Sauvage says.

It’s a feat that could not have happened without the inclusion athletes have fought for over the history of the Games.

“The first Paralympians really were phenomenal, and they paved the way for all of us,” Sauvage says.

“I’m forever grateful for those people that went to the first games and to really, I suppose, put it on the map and were brave enough to do it.”