When a mine blast took his legs, Curtis McGrath foretold his Paralympic future

It takes a particular kind of strength to be able to crack a joke through trauma.

Curtis McGrath was laid on a stretcher, bleeding and in shock. He had just lost both his legs in a mine blast while serving as a combat engineer in Afghanistan in 2012. As he was being carried by his squad mates, he quipped: he would go to the Paralympics.

“I knew my legs were gone, they weren’t coming back,” he says.

“It was a traumatic day for everyone, and if I could say something to hopefully alleviate that, that’s why I said what I said.”

At the time, it was a “promise of hope” rather than a vow to himself. But in the following months and years, he realised he had inadvertently foretold his future, and the strength he showed on that life-altering day has carried him to Paralympic victory.

Today, 36-year-old McGrath is Australia’s greatest para-canoeist. He won his first Paralympic gold medal in Rio only four years after his injury, then won another two in Tokyo, in both single- and double-paddle events.

“The skills I learnt in the military helped me to persevere, to keep going when it got tough and be quite resourceful,” he says.

Heading into the Paris Games, which kick off with the opening ceremony on Wednesday, McGrath knows he has a target on his back as he prepares to defend his titles.

“It adds a slight pressure,” McGrath says. “I’m just keen to represent Australia and do my best. But I want to win. I’m competitive.”

This year’s Games hold new significance for the Queenslander. His wife, Rachel, gave birth to their baby boy, Monty, on July 24. He was born with a heart condition and had to undergo open-heart surgery on his first day of life.

Leaving home was difficult, McGrath says, but he wants to make his family proud.

“It has been pretty tough, leaving … but it is very special and it does give a lot more meaning to the work and your sacrifices,” he says.

Ahead of the Paralympics, a new documentary about his rise, Curtis McGrath: Unstoppable, is airing Monday on Nine (the owner of this masthead).

McGrath will be competing towards the end of the Games, and says Australia’s Paralympic team hopes to achieve a similar position on the medal tally as the Olympians, who came fourth after the USA, China and Japan.

“The Olympic team did such an amazing job with the medals, especially the girls bringing home the bling.

“The Paralympic team used that as motivation, saw what was possible and … hopes to achieve similar results,” he says.

This year’s games will have 549 events across 22 sports. Each sport has numerous classifications to account for different degrees of impairment.

The Australian team’s chef de mission, Kate McLoughlin, is at the pointy end of a gargantuan period of planning.

The team has shipped 30,000 pieces of uniform and four six-metre containers full of resources, including sports equipment, massage tables, medical apparatus and food, including creature comforts such as Weet-Bix and Vegemite.

There are also close to 70 athletes who use a wheelchair daily, and that’s in addition to their competition chairs.

“It’s a big logistical exercise, considering that most commercial airlines will only take two to four wheelchair users per flight, and we have a wheelchair rugby team of 12 athletes, 10 of whom are daily wheelchair users, and that’s just one team,” McLoughlin says.

She says the Olympic village, where all the athletes are staying, is the most accessible in a long time: every room is wheelchair-friendly.

A challenge will be the transport to venues. During the Olympics, some athletes resorted to using trains because travel arranged by event organisers was hot and crowded. But for many Paralympians, this is not a simple proposition.

“There’s only one Metro line in Paris which is fully accessible, and it’s a good kilometre from the village. It’s going to be a lot harder for our athletes to have a back-up plan.”

About 40 per cent of this year’s athletes are Paralympics debutants, McLaughlin says. The remaining 60 per cent are excited to be performing in front of crowds again.

Australians to watch in Paris

Australia has 160 athletes competing in Paris. As well as McGrath, here is a small taste of the country’s extraordinary list of medal hopefuls to watch.

Madison de Rozario

Wheelchair racer de Rozario made her Paralympics debut in Beijing in 2008 at the age of 14 and has become a six-time Paralympic medallist.

She started using a wheelchair after, as a four-year-old, she developed a neurological condition, transverse myelitis, which affects the spinal cord.

With three silver medals under her belt after Rio, de Rozario became Australia’s Paralympic athlete of the year in 2021 when she took gold in the 800 metres and the marathon in Tokyo, breaking the Paralympic marathon record in the process.

With legendary wheelchair racer Louise Sauvage as coach, de Rozario will be competing in Paris in the marathon, 5000m and 1500m. She will also be a flag-bearer alongside swimmer Brenden Hall at the opening ceremony.

Chris Bond

Steelers captain Chris Bond was just 19 in 2005 when he woke up from an induced coma to find he had lost his left hand, right fingers and legs after surviving a serious bacterial infection and acute promyelocytic leukaemia.

He’d always been keen on rugby, and joined a wheelchair rugby team while in rehabilitation. By 2011, he was on the national team and has become one of the world’s best-known wheelchair rugby players.

The Steelers made history when they became the first wheelchair rugby team to win two Paralympic gold medals (London and Rio) plus a world championship in a four-year period.

In Tokyo, the team came fourth but they are a favourite for gold in Paris.

Daniel Michel

In Rio, Michel became the first athlete to compete in boccia for Australia at the Paralympics in 16 years.

Boccia is one of just two Paralympic sports that do not have an Olympic counterpart, the other being goalball.

Michel, who has muscular dystrophy, became hooked on the sport when he was a teenager. He claimed bronze in Tokyo, Australia’s first boccia medal since 1996. Today, the 29-year-old has never looked stronger and has his sights squarely set on winning the country’s first boccia Paralympic gold.

Alexa Leary

Leary was a 19-year-old triathlon star in the making when a cycling accident in 2021 changed her life. The crash resulted in permanent brain damage, blood clots and several broken bones.

As Leary learned how to walk and talk again, she looked to swimming to support her rehabilitation.

By 2023, she qualified for the Australian para-swimming team. Little more than a year after that, she has secured a place at her first Paralympics, where she will compete in 100m and 50m swims, having won gold and silver at last year’s world championships.

Vanessa Low

The 34-year-old reigning Paralympic long jump champion, who won gold in Rio and Tokyo, was a two-time Paralympian for Germany before she started representing Australia in 2019.

Low was 15 when she stumbled from a crowded platform into the path of an oncoming train. She survived, but lost her legs and sustained broken bones and injuries to her head and back.

Just two years later, she took up athletics and went on to make the German team.

Low became Australian when she met and married Paralympian, skier and sprinter Scott Reardon. After both competed in Tokyo, Reardon retired to start a family together. Low gave birth to their first son, Matteo, in June 2022.

Low, who is coached by her husband, has made a remarkable return to elite competition, winning gold at the world championships this year with a jump of 5.29m. Reardon and Matteo will be by her side in Paris.

Tristan Knowles

The captain of Australia’s wheelchair basketball team, the Rollers, is heading into his sixth Paralympic Games, making him one of our longest-serving Paralympians.Knowles, 41, has also represented Australia at five world championships, with a plethora of medals across both competitions.

Knowles was nine when he was diagnosed with bone cancer. The illness resulted in his left leg being amputated above the knee. The cancer returned at age 12, and he had 22 courses of chemotherapy and a lung lobectomy. After he was in remission, he started playing wheelchair basketball as a teenager.

Ameera Lee

Lee’s journey to the Paralympics began when her 15-year-old son, Huthaifa, encouraged her to take up archery. She decided to give it a go in 2016 during a school holiday program and never looked back.

Lee, a 50-year-old single mum with multiple sclerosis, started representing Australia at the world championships in 2018. She will be part of Australia’s biggest para-archery team in 40 years.

Nikki Ayers and Jed Altschwager

Ayers and Altschwager, who have known each other since 2017, have both competed in para-rowing at international level for some years now, but it wasn’t until 2023 that this pairing was made.

The duo won last year’s world championships in the mixed double sculls, and beat the world’s best time by 20 seconds.

Ayers’ journey to para-rowing started after she was severely injured playing rugby union in 2016. The 33-year-old dislocated her knee, severing an artery and a nerve in her right leg. She lost feeling in her foot and had 16 surgeries to undergo a knee reconstruction, remove dead muscle and repair three ligaments. A year after the accident, she started rowing.

Altschwager, 37, lost his lower leg in a workplace accident when an excavator crushed his left foot. In 2016, after three-time Paralympian Tim Matthews saw a video of him using a rowing machine, he was recruited to start para-rowing.

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