Cameron Leslie ready for London

Swimmer Cameron Leslie was, quite simply, shocked as a cheer ran through the crowd in Beijing four years ago.

He had just smashed the world record at the end of the men's 150 metre individual medley at the Paralympics.

Leslie expected maybe a bronze finish, but definitely not a gold - let alone a seven-and-a-half second lead on his closest opponent.

But not this year; he's going to London to win.

And the pressure is intense.

This year the New Zealand Paralympic team has tasked itself with bringing home 18 medals, and with 28 athletes heading over from this corner of the world, the figures are, by the Chef de Mission's own admission, ambitious.

"We're taking a whole lot of individuals that are right up at the top of their game. Yes it's still ambitious, but without putting too high a pressure on it we do have some individuals that are likely to deliver more than one medal," Chef de Mission Duane Kale said when speaking to APNZ just over two weeks before he heads to London to begin preparations at the village.

"It's a lift on Beijing where we had a task of 13 and came in tantalisingly close at 12, so there's some unfinished business."

Paralympic New Zealand sets the target of 18 medals, and have received $5.5 million from High Performance Sport New Zealand over the past four years.

It is the funding which gets the team to London, so the pressure to achieve is high and the team is under no illusions about what will happen if they can't reach the 18.

"The reality would be that it will have implications on future funding," Kale explains.

"So depending on why that may be, and I'm certainly not planning that speech at this point, if that became the case we're going to have to sit down and seriously review what is it that went wrong, why we end up where we are and now we need to go and have a talk to High Performance NZ and explain and we have to take stock."

And for Kale, who is the first Chef de Mission to take the team to two consecutive Paralympics, this is where it gets personal.

"You'd probably have a big clean out and we'd have another go at it, or someone else will have another go at it."

Kale, who at the age of 22 learnt he had a benign spinal tumour which effected his walking and categorised him as a medically incomplete paraplegic, made his name in the pool, winning four gold medals, a silver and a bronze at the 1996 Atlanta Paralympics.

In Sydney's 2000 Paralympics, he was the manager of New Zealand's swimming team, and then in 2008 at Beijing's Paralympics, Kale served as Chef de Mission.

To the unknowing eye a medal haul of 18 could seem daunting - especially when it's been predicted that the New Zealand Olympic team will be going for only 10 medals.

But the team has been hand-picked with the medal podium in full view.

It's a team with experience behind them.

Between the 28 athletes, spread over seven sports, there have been 18 medals already won at previous Paralympics.

And those who are yet to win a Paralympics' medal have won their fair share of titles in their respective sports championships.

At 13-years-old the youngest team member is swimmer Nikita Howarth, while sailer Jan Apel is the oldest at 61.

For Cameron Leslie, 22, his first Paralympic medal came last year when he came out of nowhere to take out gold and smash the world record in the 150 metre individual medley.

As soon as he hit the wall at the end of the pool in 2008, Leslie knew what his next mission was.

"I guess it can kind of define a true champion to defend a gold medal, defending a world title, so as soon as I won my gold in Beijing it's what I wanted to do, to show it wasn't a one-off."

Leslie, who has been swimming for about 12 years, was born with a quadruple limb deficiency; his legs stop above his knees, while one arm has one finger and the other stops just below the elbow.

It's a congenital disorder that doctors have struggled to explain; his siblings have not been affected, nor will his children.

He doesn't deny that training is hard, made all the more gruelling by his disability.

"It's going really well, but at the same time I'm really looking forward to it being over."

His disability means all his training sessions work on the top half of his body.

And with 11 training sessions a week - three on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday and one on Thursday and Friday - it's understandable that he describes training as "punishing".

When he's not in the pool or at the gym he's training in the Wheel Blacks team - the national wheel chair rugby team.

For the past three years he's also been working towards a communications degree in journalism at Auckland and will graduate just two weeks before heading to Europe to prepare for the Paralympics. He has also been appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit along the way.

He says his disability could have been a blessing in disguise.

"If I didn't have my disability I wouldn't be the person I am today, that's for sure and I probably wouldn't be swimming, I'd probably be playing rugby," he explains.

But despite his achievements, he says his training is kept quite separate from able-body swimmers' training sessions.

"Aligning the disabled athletes and the able-body athletes is still something to happen, that's across the board, it's not unique to swimming."

The able-body athletes would have as much to learn from the disabled athletes as people like Leslie would learn from his able-bodied counterparts, he believes.

"None of them have had to go through the same difficulties as what Paralympic athletes do. When I started swimming I was getting dirty looks from people in the public ... they [able-bodied] don't have to deal with that sort of, I guess you'd call it emotional things."

While there is generally a greater acceptance of disabled people in society, there is still a way to go, Leslie says.

He hoped he would see the complete change in his lifetime, but is hesitant to say it will happen that quickly.

The change in attitudes is also something Kale has witnessed.

"We're seeing some fairly significant individual sponsorships, so corporate entities are starting to see the benefit of contributing to athletes, whether they be an Olympic athlete or a Paralympic athlete."

When he looks back on his time as a swimmer in the Atlanta Paralympics he thinks paralympic athletes today are incredibly lucky.

"I think there's probably still difficulty at a New Zealand level as to how do we compare paralympian sport to other sports. We seem to manage to be able to compare a rower to shot putter to a swimmer.

"We will make that psychological shift at some point, I don't know when it is, but we will make it."

This year South African runner Oscar Pistorius will become the first double amputee to compete at the Olympics after he was included in South Africa's 4x400-metre relay team and the individual 400 metres.

It's a decision which has met harsh criticism, but Kale thinks this might be the start of a real shift towards athletes being recognised for their ability, not disability.

"Recognising the best of the best and where they go and compete - and if some can make that transition [from Paralympics to Olympics] and there are a few that are right on that verge - and Oscar is clearly one of those - I think it's fantastic, but it will be controversial."

Last year shock-jock Michael Laws said on his RadioLive programme that it was crazy that disabled sports people could compete for the Halberg Awards - which recognises disability sporting excellence.

He went on to say "if you have had your legs chopped off, you shouldn't be in there at all".

It met harsh criticism from people around the world, with even International Paralympic Committee president Sir Philip Craven weighing in.

He hit out at the comments, saying he was "absolutely disgusted".

"His derogatory comments are an insult to all athletes within the Paralympic movement who train for long hours each day to compete at the highest level."

Two-time Paralympic cyclist Fiona Southorn, 44, who is also competing in this year's games, says the support for disabled athletes is getting better.

"As far as probably the funding goes, it's not up there with the able-bodied events, but in saying that, it is getting better and I think that's just a progression that needs to keep going," Southorn, who has a limb deficiency in her left arm, says.

And she thinks it will continue progressing.

"A lot of people do comment and say our Olympics is the real Olympics as opposed to the first one."

It's a sentiment Leslie shares.

"It's a running joke in the Paralympic Village that the Olympics is just a warm up to the Paralympics, it's the curtain raiser to the main event."