Madison de Rozario remembers what it feels like to dance. The Perth native was part-way through rehearsals for a dance concert at the age of four when she caught the flu. While her small body fended off the initial illness, de Rozario developed a rare autoimmune disease, and her body started attacking itself.
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The disease had worked its way up to her collarbone when she arrived at hospital in a critical condition. "They managed to pull the disease back down to my waist," she says. "But it attacked not my spinal cord but the syringomyelia [fluid] around it and it was permanently damaged."
The tiny ballerina was declared paraplegic just days later and taken home by her parents in a wheelchair. Through their devastation, de Rozario's parents, Dan and Renee, and sisters, Michelle and Stephanie, worked hard not to exclude her from family activities, including sport.
"I was in a chair from so young, and obviously both my sisters walk, but it took me a long time to realise there was any major difference with my body," de Rozario recalls.
"I would play soccer with my sisters – Dad coached and I'd be the goalkeeper. We played all through school, and I'd play, too, and it wasn't until the end of primary school that I started to notice a difference."
Her early teenage years were hard for de Rozario. She struggled with body image ("Not because of my legs but because of scoliosis of my back"), wore huge T-shirts to cover her curved spine and could never find pants to fit her legs. ("Size six pants are too big. I still have to get them taken in.")
It seems hard to believe now, but the Paralympic medallist hated wheelchair sports when she first tried them at age 12. "At first I was horrible at everything," she says. "I tried a bunch of things and I was so unco-ordinated. It was a disaster! I tried basketball and had no ball skills or co-ordination at all.
"Eventually I tried athletics and I wasn't good to begin with. It's really difficult to get the hang of it, because none of it comes naturally. Even for someone who's used to being in a chair, pushing an actual race chair is a completely different feeling. Mum was like, 'If you want to stop and try something new, we can do that.' But I was stubborn and I was committed."
Committed is an understatement. Within two years, under the direction of former Australian Paralympic athlete Frank Ponta, de Rozario had attained the upper-body strength and speed to be competitive in Disability Class T53 (distance racing) at a world level.
In 2008, the body she'd struggled with in her early teens delivered her the most phenomenal moment of her life.
Just 14 years old, she found herself heading into the Bird's Nest for the Beijing Paralympics Opening Ceremony. "It's all a massive blur, but as I walked in among our team of 400 athletes and staff, someone started singing Waltzing Matilda and then next thing you know everyone is singing.
"The stadium was 100 per cent packed. All I could see was the flashing of all of the cameras. It was honestly surreal, and something I don't think I will ever forget. [It was] an insane feeling of really being a part of something bigger. Part of a team, part of an entire movement."
De Rozario won a silver medal in Beijing in the T53/54 4x100m relay event. It was the first medal to take pride of place in a glass case that now contains six international para-athletic medals in total, including a gold from the T53 800m event at the IPC Athletics World Championships in 2015, and two silver medals from Rio last year (T53 800m and T53/54 4x400m relay).
The 23-year-old de Rozario now describes her body as "perfect" before elaborating that "the perfect body doesn't exist, yet we spend so much time trying to achieve it, as opposed to what our individual perfect body is. Your own perfect body isn't one specific thing. It will change and evolve with you. My body right now is perfect for what I want it to be."
She continues to train under the direction of Paralympic legend Louise Sauvage at the Australian Institute of Sport and has her eyes firmly on a place in the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic squad. She's proud of "pretty much my entire upper body; I'll see a photo of my back and think, 'Wow! That looks great.' " She also loves that she's found a sport that requires the use of all of her working muscle groups.
When quizzed on what she doesn't like about her body, she struggles to answer and decides eventually on its lack of symmetry. "Coming to terms with how your body looks and feels is really important," she says. "You can't get out of it; this is what you have to deal with. Feeling negative about something that is you 100 per cent of the time is a horrible way to be.
"I always go back to the fact that I am strong and that my body can do incredible things. Even if aesthetically it isn't perfect, that is so irrelevant compared to how I feel about it, and what I want my body to do."
THREE FACTS MADISON DE ROZARIO
She is obsessed with everything Disney, and has a "Neverland" tattoo on her right ribcage.
She's of mixed heritage. "My surname is Portuguese, but Dad was born in Singapore and is Eurasian and Mum is a blue-eyed, blonde-haired Aussie."
She ditches her wheelchair every chance she gets: "As soon as I get home, I'm out of it.
