It’s our monthly look back at the Sydney 2000 Olympics and Paralympics! This time, Jill looks at the Olympic equestrian eventing competition, including venue construction, difficult quarantine processes, and a vastly different competition format than you see in today’s Olympic eventing. Course designer Michael Etherington-Smith got tapped to build the courses, and his cross-country course, which you can still see courtesy of CrossCountryApp, had Aboriginal and Australian influences.
After a stellar performance at Atlanta 1996, a new version of Team Australia had the opportunity to take its third gold medal in a row for the team competition. Legendary equestrian Andrew Hoy and TKFLASTANI Phillip Dutton were part of the crew backed by an immense crowd of hometown supporters. Would they pull through and
Plus, in the individual competition (which was held separately from the team event–wrap your head around that one), a medal-drought was ended and tragedy ensued on the cross-country course.
Although we’ve talked about Sydney 2000’s Olympic sailing competition, this is our first time looking at the Paralympic sailing events. Sydney 2000 was the first time sailing was included in the Paralympics. If you’re wondering why you didn’t hear about para sailing at Paris 2024, that’s because the sport has been dropped from the Paralympic program. Alison has the details on why the sport is currently not included in the Games.
Para sailing at Sydney 2000 had two events: three-person sonar keelboat, and the single 2.4m keelboat, both set at the picturesque Sydney Harbor, like the Olympic competition. Teams could be mixed gender, but not that many women competed. Check out the racing:
Plus, one other very important sport had its debut at Sydney 2000: Wheelchair rugby. Alison looks back on the development of the sport, which originated in Canada. Then she breaks down that first Paralympic tournament, which involved a lot of crashes and some unfortunate hair dyeing. Check out the gold medal game between the USA and host nation Australia:
For a complete list of sources used in this episode, visit here.
Thanks so much for listening, and until next time, keep the flame alive!
TRANSCRIPT
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403-Sydney 2000-Equestrian, Para Sailing, and Wheelchair Rugby – Oh My!
Jill Jaracz: Hello and welcome to another history episode of Keep, the Flame Alive, the podcast for fans of the Olympics and Paralympics. If you love the games, we are the show for you. I am your host, Jill Jaracz, joined as always by my lovely co-host, Alison Brown. Alison, hello, how are you?
Alison Brown: I had a professional excuse to watch more wheelchair rugby.
I’m great.
Jill Jaracz: Well, Sydney was the first time that wheelchair rugby was on the Paralympic program, right? Yes it was. Alright, well we will get to that ’cause I’m sure it was a lot of fun. So,
Alison Brown: So many videos. So much crashing.
Jill Jaracz: Well, and I bet that the play was different too. Right? We’ll get to that.
Okay. Excellent, excellent, excellent. Well, we are talking, wheelchair rugby. You’ve also got parasailing, which is no longer on the Paralympic program.
Equestrian Eventing at the Sydney 2000 Olympics
Jill Jaracz: And I got equestrian for, uh, the Olympic side. So let’s get into it. I decided to just stick with eventing ’cause that was enough.
Alison Brown: It’s so amazing to me.
Whenever we tell an equestrian story, there’s always 15 more stories we could have told.
Jill Jaracz: Oh yeah, totally. And. Every time I look at, as I was doing the story, I’m like, oh yeah, that happened over in dressage. No, no, you cannot go there. ’cause then we’d be here for hours.
But I, I do wanna talk first about the construction of the equestrian venue. Because there was nothing there. Sydney had to build an equestrian venue. They didn’t really have anything that was world class. So they built the Sydney International Equestrian Center at Horsley Park, which is 40 kilometers west of Sydney.
Okay. The Eque. Yes.
Alison Brown: Stop right there. Did you just say it’s Horsely Park?
Jill Jaracz: Horseley Park, yes. And everybody I heard talk about this just said it with no. it was nothing non, very nonchalant about the whole thing. So yes, it’s there at Horsley Park and it was in an area of the Sydney suburbs or exurbs that had nothing.
Nothing was there. And course designer, Michael Etherington Smith, said on the eventing podcast that the land was rough.
It was a place to buy and use drugs. It was a place where you dumped your old car. A place with a lot of rough land, which ain’t great for horses to land on and lots of snakes. What,
Alison Brown: uh, what is with the Australian Olympics and putting Olympians in physical danger? You know, first we have the alligators that they’re talking about for Brisbane, and now we have snakes,
Jill Jaracz: not, not just, not just Olympians, spectators.
Because Ether Dean Smith said, if I, if I remember this correctly, he remembers watching kids roll down the hills on the course. And he’s like, but there’s snakes out there. And they’re just like, nah, well, whatever.
Alison Brown: They grow ’em different down there.
Jill Jaracz: They do. They’ve, they very much do. So the, they built this. Immensely huge facility in about two years. They finished it in September, 1999, so they could have test events and they spared no expense because they wanted a world class facility in Australia as a legacy program, and they put in 37 million Australian dollars to build this facility and 8 million more for the parkland around it.
So it has 17 training areas, one indoor arena, an open air stadium, and land for eventing. And although. It’s a world class venue, but they said during eventing at Sydney, there were issues with footing, which is the surface, which, you know what just went on my list and surface talk. What’s good for horses?
Oh my gosh. I didn’t even get into the. The, footing in the stadiums because there’s all sorts of stuff you can put down. But know that listeners, that’s on my list, so hopefully we will get to that in the foreseeable future. There were also black services that didn’t blend in well with the obstacles, so it didn’t look great.
what made the design tougher was that Sydney was the second and last games where in eventing. The team and individual events were two separate competitions. So right now Oh, that’s
Alison Brown: right Now they basically run it once and account twice.
Jill Jaracz: Yes, exactly. So, and it was a long course, so they had like four different things to do in the cross country, which we’ll get to in a second.
and not only was it two separate events for individual and team, they had to do it on two different horses.
Alison Brown: What?
Jill Jaracz: Yes. You had two different horses if you were doing the team and the individual eventing.
Alison Brown: Okay, keep going. I, I don’t even know what to do with that. Which meant
Jill Jaracz: there were also two different cross country courses that designed because the team went first and the teams could, the, the individuals that were also part of a team. Could not have an advant that much of an advantage over individuals who were writing individually.
So there were elements that were similar, but then they’d veer off and do something different, or you took a different approach or something like that. so all in all, for this event alone, not including dressage and show jumping, we are talking 96 writers. 96 horses, plus 15 reserves for a total of 111 horses for this event.
And there were 266 horses at equestrian in total at Sydney. So you think about what kind of grounds they need for that, just to house them overnight. Right. And so the other element in this is Australian quarantine.
Alison Brown: Oh, that’s right because the last time Australia had the Olympics in 1956, the e equestrian took place in a whole other country because Australia said, we don’t want your dirty horses.
Jill Jaracz: Exactly. But they, let them in this time. But it was a long, long process. So horses had to spend two weeks in quarantine in Europe, and then they got shipped to Sydney and they were in isolation for two more weeks. Before they could get outta quarantine. So the process started August 7th, August 23. They took a 30 hour flight from Frankfurt.
They landed on the 25th and quarantine ended September nine, and they had one week before the competition began.
Alison Brown: Well, this is something we need to look at for Brisbane because are they going to do this kind of draconian measures again?
Jill Jaracz: Right. So you also have isolate. Oh my gosh. They, I was listening to a few podcasts and, just when I thought about the isolation procedures, because of course if the, the horses needed to work out still, but you had to go in and you had to like change clothes and be like, perfectly clean going in and coming out, and it was just a huge long process for this.
So the magnitude of the event, the long quarantine, the amount of money they spent. Really started to make sense because of how many horses they needed to take care of in this process. the, the structure of eventing was tough. So you had day one dressage, day two. Cross country, four phases of cross country.
You have phases one and two, which were 14.3 kilometers of roads and tracks. Stage three was a steeplechase, which was 3.1 kilometers of racing grass surface. And then the cross country obstacle course, which was 30 obstacles requiring 45 jumping efforts, and that had to be completed in a set length of time.
Now after 2000 phases, one through three got phased out, and all we have is the cross country obstacle course as the cross country portion of eventing. Then you have day three, which is show dumping. To determine the winner of the event, you had the lowest number of combined penalties Win teams are four people and four horses.
They take the three best scores for each segment, so sometimes your score could count, sometimes they didn’t. And in the individual, individual that was your horse and rider had the lowest number of penalties wins. So of course, because it was a home games, the Aussies hoped to win their third gold medal in a row for the team.
And those first gold medals were important because that meant funding and consistency and training came about. And they developed a system even if a lot of Australian writers were scattered across the Globe. ’cause who was on this team was Philip Dutton. Because remember he was training in the US at the time when we talked with him,
Alison Brown: right?
He competed for both.
Jill Jaracz: Yes. He was on house doctor. He had won at Atlanta on, but now was on a different horse. There was Andrew Hoy on Darien Powers. They won together at Atlanta. They were on the team. back on the team after missing Atlanta was Matt Ryan on Kiba Sandstone and he was on the gold medal team at, at uh Barcelona.
he’s now on a different horse. And then brand new to the team is Stuart Tinney on Jeep Stir. And this is Stuart’s, uh, first of four games. He would go on to compete at 2004 and then 2016 and 2020. Not on the team who we met in Atlanta, Wendy Schafer, who had broken her leg two months before the games.
Remember her?
Alison Brown: Yes, I do.
Jill Jaracz: And then Gillian Walton, who famously had multiple falls in the cross country portion and, Got so banged up. She couldn’t use her arm, but she still finished because remember she said, you don’t go to the games to be a Ws. You go. Don’t go to the games to be a wimp.
Alison Brown: I do remember that as I think my favorite story from Atlanta and such an Australian quote.
Jill Jaracz: Oh, it was, and she was hoping to make, the team did not make the team. I think she had an, was working with a new horse and it just didn’t work out. And of it was tough. She was part of the opening ceremony, I believe. She came in with one of the flags. still beloved in Australia at that point. So the dressage portion of team is first Andrew Hoy gets the top score.
He has a record breaking 30 point 60, which. Helped catapult the Australians into first place. And after the dressage, Austria Australia’s in the lead, followed by Great Britain, who are just, just like three points behind. So it’s really close. Then Aus, then, USA, France and New Zealand going into cross country.
50,000 people show up. To watch cross country. This is a sellout. And of course everyone’s surprised, but not surprised, cause nobody, nobody knew if anybody would come and watch this, but they did. They packed the place, which didn’t help every horse. Let’s be honest. Some of ’em got jittery, This is something that is really cool.
Eventing Nation has a link to this app, which has recreated maps of different cross country of different, very important cross country courses. So they’ve got a map and then you could click on the different fences and see pictures and hear audio. From them. So it is super cool. We’ll have a link to that in the show notes.
This course is full of interesting references to local history. Like there’s one that’s, referencing a local farm stand and it’s full of fruit and veg. There is one called, uh, Powe Water Hole, who is named after a local aboriginal resistance fighter who battled the British in the 1790s, but he was captured and in 1802, the Brits executed him and beheaded him.
there were also many, fences that had Aboriginal references, including, uh, one that was like a snake that was really cool, but lots of really beautiful painting in them. Uh, there was a stockade. Of course there was one with giant spiders.
Alison Brown: Do you remember the, well, I’m sure you remember in Tokyo we talked about the naked sumo wrestler.
Yes. I’m not sure which is scarier. The snakes and the giant spider or the giant sumo tush.
Jill Jaracz: I think the giant sumo tush, because these are very, I would say tasteful, but the, the snake, the, the snake body is the, the top of the fence. So you can kind of, you see the head on one side, but it’s got that aboriginal painting all along the body.
So that’s really cool looking. And then the spiders are, um, it’s a fence. With a top rail, and then there’s bottom rail, and then the webs are in these holes, and then there’s a big spider there. So that’s just kind of funky.
Alison Brown: And the artist had plenty of snakes to work with
Jill Jaracz: right
Alison Brown: there.
Jill Jaracz: And then of course the end was the homage to, Athens and it was, uh, Hellenic Omega that they had to jump through.
So that was very, very cool. Still. Andrew Hoy had another fantastic ride that helped keep Australia on top. France sadly dropped to eighth place in the cross country portion. They had two rider retire, and then the other two withdrew from the show jumping portion and the team finished 10th.
Uh, it was a hot day. That day, several competitors were disqualified or they withdrew. Others couldn’t pass vet ex inspection before the jumping day, so that was also tough. after Cross Country, we are now looking at Australia’s in the lead. Still Great Britain has fallen back over 10 points, but they’re still in second still within shooting, uh, you know, shooting distance.
third is New Zealand, and fourth is USA. Show jumping. Final day. Beautiful day. It is 28 degrees Celsius, so just over 82 degrees Fahrenheit. Kind of hot, but okay. Jumping another sellout show. 20 to 25,000 people in the main arena. They are hoping. The home team will win its third goal, but jumping is Australia’s weakest discipline.
And that led to a little bit of drama. Australian Matthew Ryan led off crowd did not help him. He lost their entire lead immediately with penalties. Our sh Ani, Philip Dutton also had a tough round. He had three fallen rails and a time fault New Zealand. Who is sitting in third at this point. They have a miserable time.
Mark Todd. Oh my Silver
Alison Brown: Ferns. I
Jill Jaracz: know Mark Todd is the only team member to finish the course. Two others withdrew. Blythe Tate, who had won Individual Gold and Team Bronze in Atlanta. He was eliminated their completely out of it. They finish eighth. Then Australian. Stuart Tinney has a great round. So it’s going good.
Just one rail down and no time penalties, but it’s still neck and neck for Great Britain ’cause they’re having some good, good runs. And Pippa funnel is great. Britain’s last hope. She drops two rails, has three time faults. Andrew Hoy is up last for Australia. He basically has the gold, but then he knocks down a few rails.
Alison Brown: Does nobody wanna win?
Jill Jaracz: I guess not, but ultimately it’s ultimately, it’s just one of those days,
Alison Brown: you know, we’ve all seen competitions like that where just one person start. I’ve certainly seen it a ton in figure skating. One person falls and somehow it just kind of gets in everybody’s head.
Jill Jaracz: Yes, yes. But even though he had a couple rails down, does not matter.
They go on to win gold. They beat Great Britain by 14.2 points. Great Britain has a 14.8 lead point lead over the USA who got bro bronze in part because David O’Connor sh jumps cleanly and the crowd goes wild. It’s incredible. And, you know, it’s really weird to watch ’cause they do the, the medal ceremony right away.
And again, it is really, really weird when they have gold medalists announced first and then you have to watch silver and bronze like the switch over to making that crescendo for the gold medalist to get their, their award. Last was. A much better move.
Alison Brown: Now, was Princess Anne involved in the medal ceremony?
I don’t
Jill Jaracz: think so. I think it was somebody who was Australian, so everybody was, was, you know, super excited
Alison Brown: is Andrew Hoy the same equestrian who’s been competing like since St. Louis 1904? Yes. And is still going? Oh, yeah, that’s him. Okay. That’s
Jill Jaracz: him. That’s, that’s him. If you know one equestrian, because he’s been in half the Olympics.
Yes. It’s Andrew Hoy. So we’ll move on to the individual. Had the gold been awarded from the best performances in the team like we had, like we do it today, Stuart Tinney from Australia would’ve won. He didn’t even compete in the individual event, right? So this was basically won on day one. David O’Connor from the USA had an amazing dressage rod on, uh, gelding custom made, and after that, he was in the lead.
Never let it go. So let’s look at what happened next after the dressage. Uh, in second place is Marina Kinka from Germany on Long Shop, Heidi Auntie on Michael Moss. She is from Greece. She is the first athlete to represent Greece in equestrian. Really? Yes. That’s surprising. It is surprising, but maybe, maybe it’s an in individual event.
I don’t know. The, uh, the, uh, Sydney, official report was gushing about her, like, oh, this is the next great talent. Mark Todd from New Zealand was on I Spy two and Andrew Hoy, who is now writing on Swizzle Inn. after. The cross country event. This, uh, it was bad day. Cross country was a horrible day.
The course is nearly 15 miles long, 29 obstacles in the last 4.6 miles, so most of it is stacked at the end. 38 pairs started, 25 finished. Most of the withdrawals or eliminations are from falls, and the worst fall involves Mary Jane Tum Bridge of Bermuda. She’s riding Bermuda’s gold. The pair was in 21st place after dressage on the second fence.
They went down Bermuda’s gold, broke its leg and had to be euthanized. So not a great day. For horses or for riders because, uh, Roberto MTO from Brazil broke his pelvis and Nils Heinsen from Denmark bruised his shoulder and they both had to go to the hospital in the cross country, conky was eliminated.
So our German is out of contention. The other top contenders are clean. So we now are, uh, David O’Connor is still in first ’cause he went clean on the cross country. Uhdi from Greece is also clean. And then we have Mark Todd and Andrew Hoy. Andrew Hoy has had a clean cross country run, so that’s good.
He’s moving up, but still, it, it not looking good for him. Only 10 riders finished day two without any penalties. It’s, it’s a tough, tough, you talk about tough courses, this is a tough one. In jumping, the course seemed to be tighter than the team event course, and you have 13 jumps. They were also a little more imposing than the team once done.
Hoy, Andrew Hoy jumps cleanly Swizz in, who had been much vilified during the event. Apparently. How dare they be
Alison Brown: mean to the horse? No,
Jill Jaracz: I don’t. Well, he jumped boldly that day. He was Swizz in. That’s right. Mark Todd also jumps cleanly, but he has three time faults. anti CDIs. Had a tough round. She had 10 jump jumping penalties and a time penalty.
She ends up in sixth place and last jump is David O’Connor. He’s still in the lead, but if he knocked off two rails, Andrew Hoy would win. He knocked off one and then he almost had like this massive mistake where he got lost in the stadium. Almost made a wrong turn to the wrong fence. And if that happened, he would’ve been eliminated.
And that fence that he was supposed to go to was a solid wall and the crowd figured out what was going on and they started yelling the wall, the wall, the wall to help him. He claimed he did not hear them. He also claimed he was swiveling his head so much to find the next fence that he got a sore neck, but he figured it out indeed.
Finished with just the one down rail and eed out a 5.8 win over Hoy giving the US its first equestrian gold medal since 1984. um, against Andrew Hoy,
Alison Brown: who was
Jill Jaracz: also jumping in 84. So David O’Connor, that was his last Olympics. uh, he has been heavily involved with the sport since, um, his wife has competed in 2008 and 2012.
Andrew Hoy has done three more games. He’s done 2004, 2012, and 2020. He got the individual, he got the team Silver and individual Bronze in 2020. not bad for 20 years later
Alison Brown: when he was 106 years old.
Jill Jaracz: Mark Todd from New Zealand, uh, the official report said that this was supposed to be his last Olympics, but he came back in 2008 and did three more.
Had got team bronze in 2012, so these equestrians
Alison Brown: just can’t let go and I love that.
Jill Jaracz: I know. So the facility is still. Use today. And it seems to be in heavy use, not just for equestrian stuff, but also other events. Like you could have your wedding there, you can have your, your conferences there.
They’ve had fun runs and things like that. So seems like it was a good use of money. Everybody I listened to on podcasts. Kept talking about how wonderful these games were for equestrian and just how top-notch the facility was and how it was so good that Australia now has these world class facilities and, you can see it in the writing that’s coming up.
They haven’t done well in the most recent Olympics, but. I think they’ve, they at least have something that can home grow people rather than being forced to go to other countries. I don’t know. Right. And when it’s
Alison Brown: Australia, it’s not like, oh, we don’t have this here, but it’s in Canada. I mean, when you’re in Australia and you don’t have it, you’re probably going pretty far.
Jill Jaracz: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I’m sure that a lot of people still train and live. And are based in other places just because competitions are there. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t grow good talent back home. So that is a good thing for there. So, sources for me, were Associated Press Channel seven, eventing Nation, the Eventing podcast, the uh, Federation equestrian international, the horse.com.
New York Times olympics.com and the Sydney 2000 official report.
Sailing at the Sydney 2000 Paralympics
Alison Brown: Okay, well, I’m also gonna be talking a bunch about the host nation, in, in my two stories. So there were two new sports that became official medal events at the Sydney, 2000 Paralympics parasailing and wheelchair rugby. Both were listed as mixed gender events.
There were no women in wheelchair rugby. There were two. Parasailing. Wow. So the parasailing included two competitions, the three person sonar, keelboat, and the single 2.4 meter keelboat. And in the sonar, athletes were assigned a point value based on their visual or physical impairment, and the total point value of the three sailors could not exceed 14.
So similar to what we see in in wheelchair rugby and wheelchair basketball. So you had a wide variety of disabilities,
so, uh, sailors in the single person boat could have physical dis disabilities classed from one to seven. And generally those were limb disabilities, amputations, cerebral palsy. You didn’t really see too many, athletes with visual impairments in the single person boat.
And I believe this was the same when you talked about the Olympic regatta where they sail in Sydney Harbor and you see Sydney Bridge and the Sydney Opera House. So of course the videos are fantastic to watch. And German Hiko Kroger dominated the single kill boat races. The tricky winds during the regatta were a real challenge for the small boats, but not for Kroger.
He won five of the seven races. In the 17 boat regatta securing the gold medal before the last race even started Yen Als Anderson of Denmark sailed a solid regatta to win silver. And American Thomas Brown captured the bronze in the last race by only one point against the pre Paralympics favorite Peter Thompson from Australia.
Jill Jaracz: Oh
Alison Brown: God. I love a home
Jill Jaracz: grown
Alison Brown: winner. So the three person sonar Races became a fight between Australia, Germany, and Canada. The host country produced solid results staying in the top three for all of two of the races, the nine races. And at the time, the rules allowed for the lowest score of the races to be thrown out.
So they had one sort of sketchy race and then everything else was 1, 2, 3, and one was a four. So they were very solidly the gold medalist by six points, but only one point separated silver and bronze with Germany beating out Canada on that last race.
Jill Jaracz: Oh wow. That one had to be tough.
Alison Brown: It’s fun to watch ’cause you get to see all the pretty things and the announcers get very excited even just at that end of the race.
’cause I, I, it was very hard to find videos of the sailing. When people get excited about a finish of a sailing race, they get really excited.
So honestly, the best part about the sailing was this Australian team and, and the characters involved. The skipper of Australia was Noel Robbins, and he was no stranger to high pressure racing. He had a broken spine. When he was 21 years old and that left him what was described as a partial quadriplegic, which mean, uh, which means he had limited mobility and strength in all of his limbs, but you would still see him walking or, uh, using a walker.
Didn’t stop him from continuing his racing. He had raced as a kid and he continued, and in fact was twice skipper of an America’s Cup entry kid outta town once in 1977 and once in 1981 and in 2000 by winning the gold medal at 55 years old, he is the oldest sailor to ever win a gold medal in the Paralympics.
Wow. Holy cow. Sadly, only three years later, he was struck by a car and killed on the streets of Australia. Yeah, it was. And he has been awarded posthumously, all kinds of honors, for this whole team, but, the Sailing Hall of Fame and the Order of Australia. So he was quite beloved, uh, in the sailing community in Australia.
His teammate, Jamie Dun Ross, became the first quadriplegic to circumnavigate Australia unassisted in 2010.
Jill Jaracz: Holy cow. That’s a long trip. That’s, I mean, Australia’s a big country.
Alison Brown: Exactly, and And I’m always amazed when people do any kind of sailing solo because that’s just lonely.
Jill Jaracz: Right, right, right. the, the whole idea of preparing for that and what you need to do and take with you supplies wise and gear wise and, and backups, like, uh, it, it just boggles my mind.
We
Alison Brown: had enough trouble packing for Beijing and, and Paris and the third member of that crew, Graham, Martin competed again at the Paralympics in 2008. And again, the three person sonar where he won bronze. So, as you mentioned at the top of the show, sailing is no longer in the Paralympics. It was removed, after Rio 2016 because the IPC declared that sailing did not fulfill the IPC handbooks minimum for worldwide reach.
So in Sydney, for example, there were 22 countries represented. Now for individual sports, the sport must be regularly practiced in 32 countries across three IPC regions and for team sports. And you could say the three person sonar is a team sport, you need at least 24 countries in three regions. Oh, wow.
Huh. But world sailing has not given up. They continue to work to expand participation and lobby to get back in the Paralympics. So with any luck, we will see them back in Australia in 2032. Uh,
Jill Jaracz: yeah, ’cause I remember they were lobbying heavy to get into back into LA 2028 and they didn’t get chosen. Only, uh, sport climbing got chosen.
So I’m curious as to how they’ve beefed up since then. Because I know, I mean, much like equestrian. Boating people love their boats
Alison Brown: and much like equestrian boating is extremely expensive. That too,
Wheelchair Rugby at the Sydney 2000 Paralympics
Jill Jaracz: realtor rugby. Let’s get to it.
Alison Brown: So the other sport that was new was wheelchair rugby. it was first developed in Winnipeg, Canada in 1976 as an alternative to wheelchair basketball for people who were in wheelchairs, but with additional disabilities in their arms and hands.
They called it murder ball because of its physical full contact play.
And as the sport spread and it spread very quickly, the name changed first to quad rugby and then to wheelchair rugby, because I think calling competition’s murder ball might have been frowned upon.
So in 1993, the International Wheelchair Rugby Federation was formed, and less than a year later, the IPC recognized IWRF as the governing body for a wheelchair rugby. The IWRF held its first World Championships in 1995, and it debuted as a demonstration sport in Atlanta. This thing was growing very quickly in popularity and, and play across the world and.
Sydney 2000 was its official metal debut. No
Jill Jaracz: duh,
Alison Brown: right? I mean, the sport is fantastic. So in 1996, as a demonstration, sport USA won gold. Canada won silver and New Zealand beat Great Britain for the bronze. Just kind of tuck that away.
Jill Jaracz: Okay.
Alison Brown: So in the tournament in Sydney, you’ve got eight teams divided into two groups.
Group A is USA, Australia, Sweden, and Switzerland. Group B is Canada, Germany, great Britain and New Zealand. So as we started to talk about at the top of the show, again, gameplay was very different 25 years ago. You’ve got more straight on just crashing to crash, very smash mouth, very in your face. A lot less complexity in passing and tactics, but so much fun to watch.
So much speed. And honestly, the players looked physically bigger than a lot of the players we saw in Paris, and I think that’s just because they would just crash into each other. So you needed a little bit more brute strength and a little less finesse back in the day. So both the US and New Zealand went undefeated in pool play, and Australia won one game.
Very close to the US and Canada also had one loss to New Zealand. So the way, the tournament worked at the time, they skipped right from pool play to semifinals. Okay, so those are your four semifinalists. And in the semifinals, the US handily defeated Canada while Australia beat New Zealand by one.
Point. Ooh.
Jill Jaracz: And, and I have to say Canada. Oh, well, A I’m surprised that Canada is the home. I, I don’t know why I didn’t know this, but I feel like it’s a very American sport, but it’s also not surprising giving that ha Hockey is so big in Canada. I mean, this is
Alison Brown: Winnipeg. Yeah. So they need to do something inside that felt, I think like.
Ice hockey that would have that? No, because probably a lot of people who’ve been injured and become paralyzed in some way probably played hockey as a kid. Right. Well,
Jill Jaracz: yeah,
Alison Brown: and this was very appealing and I think it’s so interesting that the first countries that were really, really good are all these English speaking countries that kind of have a similar.
I don’t wanna say similar roots, but in many ways they do. You know, Canada, US New Zealand, Australia, all these, and even Great Britain was on top, kind of these Bri, great Britain and their original colonies. Right? And this sport really took on there. Now we have Japan and China and it’s spread, but the early days it was people who like smash mouth sports.
So in the bronze medal match, New Zealand defeated Canada 44 to 32, and the Silver Ferns went on to win the gold in Athens 2004. Again, beating Canada in the gold in that medal round game. Wow. Poor Canada. I know. Little sad, but you know what wasn’t sad? The gold medal game. So we’ve got the gold medal game happening on day 11 last day of the Paralympics, and the Australian team nicknamed the Steelers, including several members of their coaching staff, bleached their hair.
Oh my gosh. To a very, they had no toner, so this is a frightening shade of yellow. I couldn’t figure out if they did this at the beginning of the tournament or for the gold medal game because the, the videos were, were not in order. Okay. But if you weren’t bald, you were blonde.
And this is kids don’t bleach your hair at home. Just like today, the match between US and Australia was physical and very close. The score flipped back and forth the whole game. The biggest lead was Australia by three points in the third quarter, but the Americans bounced back and with less than 30 seconds to go, the US leads by one point.
The wheel on American Steve Page chair is damaged or loosed in some way and needs to be repaired, so they get a one minute timeout. It breaks the Steeler’s momentum on their comeback, and after the equipment time out, the US scored another try. Then Australian George Huck scored with less than nine seconds to go.
Leaving the US still ahead by one point, with only eight points, eight seconds left. The US just has to hang on to possession, but they can’t hold the ball for that long. You have to pass. Oh. Oh wow. This had to be incredible to watch. It was fantastic. Clearly the stadium or the the arena was full and loud and wild.
The US makes two passes. Successfully and they win the gold medal. 32, 31. Wow. What a debut for the sport. It’s everything we still love about wheelchair, rugby with more crashes and some very frightening blonde hair. But a couple of notable players I wanna mention, that were in this tournament, team Clan Canada, included Patrice Simard who competed in Sydney, 2000, Athens 2004, Beijing 2 0 0 8.
London 2012 Rio 2016. Wow. And Tokyo 2020. Wow. Gets better. He’s still playing on Team Canada, even though he was not named to the Paris team. He just played last month at the Regional World Championship qualifiers.
Jill Jaracz: Wow. That is incredible. Not just like keeping up the physical. Capabilities, but also looking at like how gameplay changed so drastically, especially with speed.
’cause you’re bashing into people less and moving a little bit more like the, the tactics and how you keep up with that physically. That’s incredible. And to maintain that on such a high level. Geez.
Alison Brown: And he is needless to say, absolutely beloved. In the Canadian wheelchair rugby world, and also seems like a really nice guy.
So it was fun listening to some interviews with this lovely little Quebec kabaka accent and just. Now I wanna watch him play more. And Brad Deley, who played for Australia in 2000 and 2004, became their head coach and is still their head coach from 2008. And he led to the the team to a bronze medal last year in Paris.
Wow.
Jill Jaracz: Man.
I guess I know what I’m doing with my afternoon.
Alison Brown: I have links. Don’t worry. I have links. So, sources for me are Paralympics, website, wheelchair Rugby Australia, USA, wheelchair Rugby, the United States Wheelchair Rugby Association. Paralympic Canada olympics.com. New Zealand Wheelchair Rugby Yachting World.
Australian Sailing, Australian Paralympic Committee, scuttlebutt Sailing News. Yachts and yachting and inside the games.
Jill Jaracz: Wow. Excellent. What an action packed. I’m exhausted just talking about it. I know. Holy cow. Between just the equestrian alone, and I mean, every event has stories.
Alison Brown: Every event and every story has a million stories.
We can go from that. Do you know Andrew Hoy is still jumping horses next week?
Jill Jaracz: Probably. I
Alison Brown: would not be surprised. Oh my goodness. Andrew Hoy and Patrice Simard should get together.
Jill Jaracz: They should. They, they absolutely should. Oh boy. Oh boy.
World Games coverage is coming
Jill Jaracz: Well, listeners, that’s gonna do it for this episode. Let us know what you remember from Sydney 2000.
Alison Brown: And we do love hearing from you. You can chat with us and other listeners on our Facebook group. Keep The Flame Alive Podcast. Email us at Flame Alive pod@gmail.com. The voicemail and text line is always open at 2 0 8 3 5 2 6 3 4 8. That’s 2 0 8. Flame it and if you need more Olympics and Paralympics in your life.
And who doesn’t sign up for our newsletter@flamealivepod.com. We’ll have a link to that in the show notes.
Jill Jaracz: Next week, uh, we will get into the World Games. The World Games has started, basically, and we will have week one coverage. So I am excited to be watching some different sports or different versions of Olympic sports, and we are gonna have fun.
if you’re watching World Games, just go. Find our Facebook group, even if it’s just for a couple weeks and hang out with us. ’cause we do have some World Games junkies there. I know. Listener Brittany’s excited listener. John is excited as well. And so we will have world Games chat there and it will be fun.
I, I’m excited and
Alison Brown: we’re gonna get a Chinese opening ceremony again.
Jill Jaracz: I know. very much looking forward to that. thank you so much for listening and until next time, keep the flame alive.