WA Hall of Champions: Eight-time Paralympic gold medallist Priya Cooper earns legend status

Eight Paralympic gold medals. Eight world championship gold medals. And just eight laps to go. Priya Cooper scanned the stands at Sydney Olympic Aquatic Centre, as she did before every major race, and found her mum Dawn in the crowd. She could make out her partner Rod Bonsack and his son Zed. She could breathe again. One of Australia’s greatest swimmers knew this was it. Her last Paralympic final in her signature event, the 400m freestyle, at her home Games, the 2000 Paralympics. Cooper stared down lane four and visualised herself swimming fast. The pain in her shoulder from overtraining was real. It had cost her a medal in the 200m individual medley when she couldn’t get her butterfly stroke back. “I just tried to refocus. I pretty much knew the 400 was my only opportunity. I swam in the morning in the full suit. And it just killed me. But I qualified first,” Cooper told The West Australian. She ditched the suit along with her doubts as she walked on to the pool deck for the final. “I thought ‘We are here and we are doing this’ and I just got on that block and said to myself ‘I am going to go as hard as I can go and get out as far as I can go’.” Five minutes, 11.73 seconds later she touched the wall for a ninth gold medal, seven seconds and far away from Heidi Andreasen from the far away Faroe Islands. As she turned for the final time at 350m, Cooper experienced a subaquatic sensation. “I was far enough out that I knew I would win. I was under water and I could hear the crowd go absolutely crazy,” she said. “I think could even pick out Rod’s son Zed. “I slammed into the wall. I can remember looking up and seeing (Prime Minister) John Howard clapping. And I knew where my family were and I looked across at them and I thought that’s it, I’ve done it … job done.” Born with cerebral palsy, all Cooper wanted to do in her formative years was dance. “I desperately wanted to be a ballerina and I desperately wanted to be a dancer on Young Talent Time. I love music and I can’t sing and I can’t dance but I used to watch it and dream and say ‘Wow, imagine that kind of life?’” “Mum would never buy me a tutu. I made my own in the end. She made me do ballet in pink bathers. I wonder whether that was a sign.” It was in the swimming pool in the backyard of their Lesmurdie home where Cooper had an epiphany of sorts. “I discovered that in the pool I was free,” she said. So she joined the swimming team at her school, St Brigid’s College “They were so accepting,” she said. “They were all able-bodied and I would race them and get nowhere. But they saw I was so committed so they gave me my own lane,” Cooper said. “I hate mornings but I would get up every morning before school and train,” she said. Her first race was a 50m freestyle in F-division. She finished sixth but experienced winning. “I raced and I just loved it,” she said. “Mum always encouraged me to do whatever I could. I played netball. Did all the carnivals. They made me captain of the netball team and I was in charge of oranges. But I didn’t care. That is the really awesome thing about sport. I was involved. “It never bothered me that I wasn’t a star. That is the message I want to get across. Sport unites people. It brings people together. And it doesn’t actually matter what role you play. You don’t have to the hero. We all play our part and we all make a difference.” Cooper did become a star and she did make a difference. Inducted to the WA Hall of Champions in 2006, she will be elevated to Legend status on Monday night at Crown Casino. “It was just so important to our lives to realise we can achieve regardless of what other things we have got going,” she said. Cooper swam at three successive Paralympics in the S8 classification, collecting three gold medals at Barcelona in 1992, five in Atlanta in ’96 and one in Sydney. She won a total of 26 medals all up, at the Paralympics and world championships. She had mentors to turn to for sage advice such as Frank Ponta and Phil Jose, and a seasoned coach, Matt Brown, in the lead up to Atlanta. Cooper was dealing with a heavy dose of performance anxiety, and with the help of Brown and the West Australian Institute of Sport, learnt to deal with the weight of expectation. “In Barcelona, I was a 17-year-old who didn’t know what was going on. I was an unknown who popped up. By Atlanta you are the one who no one wants to talk to. And I like to talk,” she said. “I had to take myself away. I did that with lots of Hoodoo Gurus music. It was a real challenge. It was just the expectation. The Paralympics were known by that point. “I couldn’t work out whether it was fun or work. It was the balance between expectation and what I wanted.” Cooper drew inspiration from 1991 when she watched on TV Queensland teenager Hayley Lewis win an individual gold in the 200m freestyle among four medals at the world championships in Perth. “I love Hayley Lewis. I still love her. I will never forget watching that. She was a distance freestyler like me. She was 15. I was like ‘Who is this and what is this about?’ It ignited something in me.” Cooper, 49, will share the joy of her elevation to Legend status with her husband Rod, a Paralympian, their children Olivia, 17, and Harry, 15, and stepson Zed, 30. “What it actually means to me is a level of acceptance of the Paralympic sports,” she said. “I hope it inspires others. There are no limits as to what you can do.”

WA Hall of Champions: Eight-time Paralympic gold medallist Priya Cooper earns legend status

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