Paralympian Fraser Sharp lived his motto of “anything is possible” – representing his country despite a devastating accident in his teens leaving him with lifelong brain damage. His sporting career is now coming to a close, and he and other Kiwis badly injured as children are struggling to survive on ACC compensation below minimum wage.
Before his accident, Fraser Sharp aspired to be a police officer.
A popular, social student at Auckland’s Avondale College, another possibility for the 16-year-old was to make a career from his sporting ability.
Sharp’s lung capacity, leg drive and mental toughness made him a key member of his school’s cycling team.
On a Wednesday afternoon in April 1993, Sharp was training with two schoolmates, heading down Moire Rd, which connects West Harbour with Massey.
A driver coming the other way misjudged the cyclists’ speed – about 85km/h – and made a righthand turn into her driveway.
Sharp was on the inside and had nowhere to go. He struck the car, was flung high into the air, and landed helmet-first.
His fibula, tibia, arm and skull were smashed, and he suffered severe abrasions. The frontal lobe area of his brain was permanently damaged – an injury that altered his happy, outgoing personality and, 30 years later, still greatly limits his life and ability.
“It was an accident,” Sharp says. “But an accident that changed my life forever.”
After a month in a coma, he woke unable to walk or talk. Sharp’s fierce determination fuelled a remarkable recovery, and he was soon back on his bike and competing.
In the following decades, he finished an Ironman, competed and lived overseas and represented New Zealand as a Paralympian – an inspirational story profiled on television and in print.
His motto was “anything is possible”, but that no longer feels true. At 48, Sharp recently gave up competing, and the physical effects of his brain injury are worsening – nerve spasms and tremors jolt his body during our interview.
He cannot work, and survives mostly on ACC “loss of potential earnings” (Lope) payments, given to New Zealanders badly injured as children (most have lifelong brain and spinal injuries) and who cannot work as adults.
Currently, Lope is set at 80% of the minimum wage, or $740.80 a week before tax.
Sharp gets $620 in the hand from Lope. That rises to $714 with a separate independence allowance, also paid by ACC and in recognition of his high impairment (assessed at 65%).
There have been ongoing concerns that Lope is unfair compensation for people denied the chance to ever have a career.
As a result, in 2008 payments were increased to 100% of the minimum wage.
However, this was reversed to 80% two years later, after National came to power and amidst concern about ACC’s books.
The impact is felt by people like Sharp. A world that was wide open before his accident, and which he remained an active part of through cycling, narrowed to a room in his 78-year-old mother’s Tauranga home.
Since his accident, Sharp’s biggest wish has been to be normal. He’s self-conscious about the indented scar across his head and normally wears a hat to cover it up.
“When I look in the mirror, [the scar] is the first thing I see,” he says.
“I like to fit in with the average Joe Bloggs. And I can’t, and part of the reason is income. A lack of income cuts my socialising, it cuts meeting a partner, it cuts so many things.
“My whole life was built around my sport for so long. I’m really missing the social interaction.”
A gruelling recovery
Sharp was in a coma (not medically induced) for 28 days after his accident and semi-comatose for a further 10.
If he survived, doctors warned the 16-year-old’s parents he might never walk again, and would have significant brain damage and little use of his right arm and leg.
His parents made his room in a rehabilitative facility on Sutherland Rd, Pt Chevalier, as close as possible to his room at home, including posters of cyclists Greg LeMond and (pre-disgrace) Lance Armstrong.
“It was very traumatic,” says his mother, Gaylene. “He was skin and bones, and they had to open up the skull to release a hematoma.
He couldn’t verbalise or talk. One day I was talking about some truffles … and he smiled and rubbed his stomach. I thought, ‘Oh yes, he knows full well what we’re talking about.’”
Sharp relearned everything – speech, holding his head up, walking, and using his arms and legs. His father, Kesson, spoon-fed him.
“His progress was quite amazing as he was so determined to get over all the physical and mental defects in as little a time as possible,” Kesson, who died in 2022, later wrote.
“When he was learning to walk again he insisted that he did each exercise two or three times instead of the required once, this attitude was evident in all aspects of his recovery. He even got the physio to tape his foot (leg was in a half plaster) on to the pedal of the cycle exercise machine and pedal away – this was before he could even walk.”
The memory of his dad reteaching him to tie his shoelaces is fresh in Sharp’s mind, as are the “silly rhymes” he repeated as part of speech therapy.
“My vocabulary has improved tremendously since then, but I still have problems where I can’t get the right word out,” he says. “It’s on the tip of your tongue, but you can’t say it.”
He returned home to Glen Eden five months after the accident. The following month he attended Avondale College part-time, to relearn socialising skills.
“At lunchtime I would just go out and sit in a field by myself. [After school] I’d get on the bike and take the frustrations out on the road – just miles and miles.”
In 1994 he redid sixth form, and in August won the Auckland individual time-trial junior men’s 40km race, just over a year since the accident.
That achievement was profiled in a front-page Herald article, which noted, “As with many people who suffer brain damage, the 18-year-old survived his critical injuries with a completely new personality”.
“I used to be a real outgoing guy. Now I try to be, but I’m not,” he told the reporter.
That transformation was hard on his family.
“His fuse was pretty short, and he could blow his stack quite easily,” Gaylene says. “There were stages where I was reluctant to leave him at home with our daughter, even to pop across to the neighbour’s, because of the anger and frustrations that occurred.”
They got specialist help from neuropsychologist Peta Levin.
“We are indebted to her and her husband. He was also a cyclist and triathlete, and Fraser could really relate to them. He would open up. She was amazing,” Gaylene says.
Levin, who retired three years ago and has remained close to the family, says Sharp’s traumatic brain injury happened at a crucial time in adolescence, when frontal lobe functioning was developing, including the ability to self-regulate moods and behaviour.
“He became very much more rigid in his thinking. In part, that also facilitated his ability to be so determined and fixated on his cycling. I think he would have always been a competitive cyclist, but it kind of drove him.
“I couldn’t hold him in higher regard in terms of his determination and courage.”
Other help came from Kevin Roberts, who was chief operating officer with brewer Lion Nathan and would later lead global operations of advertising giant Saatchi & Saatchi.
The Lion role put Roberts in contact with a cross-section of New Zealand 1990s society – “in pubs with working class folks, ex-All Blacks who have nowhere else to go,” he says – and those in areas such as police, sport and education.
Their number included former Avondale College principal Phil Raffills, who convinced Roberts to support, with both time and money, a new programme run with police, called Turn Your Life Around, which still exists and helps students avoid a pathway to crime, through intensive mentoring and support, including financial.
An English teacher, Brigid Carroll (now a professor at the University of Auckland Business School), was the liaison and asked Roberts to include Sharp.
“She said, ‘This lad is a good boy, and he’s back on his bike. He’s got real stuff, he’s got true grit.’ So I met this lad, and I liked him, and that was kind of it,” says Roberts, who took Sharp to events and began a mentoring relationship that continues to this day.
“The only thing he could do, honestly, was ride a bike. It was hard for him to communicate, it was hard for him to socialise, it was hard for him to remember, to articulate, to write, at that stage, but, man, he could ride a bike.”
Carroll remembers Sharp’s peers being shell-shocked after his accident.
“I don’t think any of us doubted he would return to cycling although it must have taken incredible courage to do so.”
After leaving school, Sharp studied sports science and worked in outdoor recreation. He kept racing, but after a crash on the 1999 Tour of Southland – in which Sharp broke his collarbone for the third time since his brain injury – Roberts convinced him to take a break.
He saved money to work at a summer camp in the United States, then crewed super yachts, sailing across the Atlantic and eventually living in Antibes, a resort town between Cannes and Nice on the French Riviera.
When superyachts docked between sailings Sharp would go onboard to clean. For the first four seasons, his home was a tent in a campground, with his bike chained around a tree. Sharp gained a reputation for hard, thorough work and eventually moved into his own apartment.
He worked on boats belonging to billionaires including Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Russian oligarch and former owner of Chelsea Football Club Roman Abramovich.
“I wasn’t reliant on anyone. The money was good. People would go out and booze it up. I would finish the work and get on my bike,” he says.
“The riding over there is out of this world. I was well known as ‘the crazy Fraser’, out there cycling huge distances. The injury made me a bit different, but I still had energy and zest.”
Sharp entered triathlons, and in 2013 completed his first Ironman in Taupo. In the same event the following year he rolled his ankle but completed the marathon run on painkillers.
He gained media attention, including from Attitude Pictures. A producer asked Sharp if he’d considered the 2016 Paralympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
“I was like, ‘Are you serious? I’ve got my arms, I’ve got my legs.’ I never realised.”
Sharp was classified as a C2 rider, which includes athletes with a loss of co-ordination at a low level in the arms and body, and moderately in the legs. The new para focus coincided with a realisation he wouldn’t cope with the demanding superyacht work for much longer. His brain injury meant he couldn’t progress from physical jobs.
Sharp moved home after 14 years. The loss of independence was jarring – back to his parents’ place, and now reliant on minimal ACC payments.
At least he had his cycling – Sharp finished 10th in the 2014 para-cycling world cup in Spain and won major events in Australasia. He was called into the NZ Paralympic team only two weeks before Rio, and still placed eighth in the men’s C3 road time trial. In 2022 he placed sixth in the Para Cycling Road World Championships.
Sharp received a base training grant from High Performance Sport NZ. ACC’s integrity unit quizzed him over that money, he says, causing him great worry and to seek legal advice.
(ACC says the $30,000 was flagged as personal income by Inland Revenue, and it took no further action after a conversation confirmed the funds were related to expenses.)
He says his other frustrations with ACC include not being proactively told of entitlements like home cleaning help that would have assisted his elderly parents (his mother is waiting for her second hip replacement, and Kesson suffered from multiple systems atrophy). Another is communication.
“I had a case manager, and I would get so frustrated with the system and what I was earning, and all this frustration would add up,” Sharp says.
“I wouldn’t curse or anything, but we were getting nowhere, and our phone conversations were exceeding their 45-minute time limit.”
For a year ACC made him put all his communications through an advocate, he says, who volunteered hours of her time for free. He says dealing with ACC’s bureaucracy, one step removed and with a brain injury, was immensely stressful.
“It took everything out of me, and made me feel worthless.”
Later, he suffered worsening dystonia, a movement disorder that causes his muscles to contract. That affected everyday life and his balance on the bike. Sharp eventually opted for deep brain stimulation surgery, which he hoped would lessen the condition enough for him to compete in the 2020 Tokyo Paralympics.
He still finds it hard to talk about the procedure, which inserted two electrodes into his brain to deliver ongoing electrical pulses and block the signals causing his symptoms.
Sharp remained conscious, so surgeons could determine they were targeting the right part of the brain. Local anaesthesia was given via painful injections above his right eyebrow, then holes were drilled through his skull.
“I would never wish that on anyone. Just hearing it, oh, it gives me shivers down my spine.”
The tremor reduced somewhat, but Sharp still struggles to use his right arm. When the Herald visits him at home he cannot hold his tea to his lips, and instead bends down to the cup on the bench.
After the horror surgery ACC sent him a letter explaining it was yet to decide whether the surgery would be covered, he says. It eventually did, but the delay was upsetting.
Sharp didn’t make the Tokyo team after Covid-19 disrupted qualifying races. He withdrew from consideration for this year’s event in Paris after a break-down in his relationship with managers at Paralympics NZ, which resulted in mediation.
Michael Griffith, a former director of coaching for Cycling NZ who trained Sharp after his accident, has seen the difficulties encountered by his friend, and also how he can become fixated on problems and perceived slights.
“You’re better to have a broken arm than you are a brain injury. Because people can see it. And Fraser appears fine, until he is not. It is stressful, tense situations can trigger it.”
ACC wanted payments increased, documents show
Last year there were 1630 claims involving loss of potential earnings (Lope), totalling nearly $4 million.
Government documents obtained by the Herald under the Official Information Act reveal ongoing unease about the Lope rate.
ACC and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (Mbie) produced a joint briefing in May 2018 for Iain Lees-Galloway, at the time a Labour MP and ACC Minister.
Mbie recommended keeping the status quo of 80% of the minimum wage, but ACC’s preferred option was to return it to 100%.
Lees-Galloway asked officials for more analysis and to test whether 80% of the median wage was a fairer measure of expected earnings. That resulted in a further briefing in June 2019, which was against using the median wage.
This would “create or exacerbate significant disparities between Lope recipients and other comparable ACC client groups (e.g. those injured early in their working lives, whose current incomes do not fully reflect their earnings potential) and those in similar situations receiving support through the social welfare system,” officials reasoned.
Mbie again wanted Lope kept at 80% of minimum wage and ACC preferred it to be increased to 100%.
At the time of the 2019 briefing, it was estimated that the 100% option would increase ACC’s outstanding claims liability (OCL) for the non-earners account by $238m. The OCL represents the amount of money that needs to be set aside today to cover the lifetime cost of existing claims.
The change would have added about $3 to a driver’s annual licence fee.
ACC argued that 100% of the minimum wage, “would more fairly reflect the minimum level of lost earnings for Lope recipients, had they entered the workforce”.
“Lope is the only entitlement that is assessed prospectively to compensate for unrealised earnings. It is, therefore, appropriate to treat it somewhat differently … the increase in compensation could better enable Lope clients, who may never be able to join the workforce, to have a higher quality of life, save money and access community activities.”
Lees-Galloway asked officials to prepare a Budget 2020 bid to increase Lope payments back to 100% of the minimum wage.
The increase never happened – something Lees-Galloway, who left Parliament in 2020, told the Herald remains a “massive disappointment”.
“I don’t recall the specifics of the process but I certainly met resistance from Labour and New Zealand First whenever I proposed any initiative that might have even a small upward impact on levies, regardless of the measure itself,” says Lees-Galloway, who is now campaign manager for The Opportunities Party (Top).
“Even proposing 100% of minimum wage was a compromise, in the hope of getting a small win for the people impacted. The principled approach would be to provide 80% of the median wage. While I acknowledge that comes with a hefty price tag, the current situation is unfair and unprincipled.”
That isn’t the view of former National MP Nick Smith, who was ACC Minister in 2010 when legislation made a swathe of cost-saving changes to ACC, including cutting Lope (for existing recipients, the rate was preserved or frozen for seven years, until it was eclipsed by 80% of the minimum wage.)
During parliamentary debate, Smith warned that accident compensation “has become financially unsustainable, and reform is required to secure its future for New Zealanders”.
“The underlying problem is that ACC has drifted from being a state insurer to being an extension of the welfare State. Changes in the accident compensation scheme are needed to make it affordable, to make it sustainable, and to make it fair,” Smith argued.
(Labour argued the Government was exaggerating problems with our “world-leading” no-fault scheme, which wasn’t in operating loss but had increased liabilities including because of accounting changes and as difficult economic conditions reduced the expected rate of return on its investments.)
Smith, now the Mayor of Nelson, told the Herald he had been tasked as minister with sorting out ACC’s more than $2b deficit.
“ACC is a levy-based insurance scheme and there has always been a dilemma in how you provide earnings compensation to people who aren’t earning, or earning little, not paying levies and making assessments on a theoretical basis of potential earnings.”
‘An eternal cycle of poverty’
The reduction of Lope received little media, political or public attention. Dunedin woman Leeann Barnett, who suffered a head injury when she was hit by a car at the age of 9, tried to change that when she submitted to Parliament in 2018.
“Personally, I have faced several occasions where I have been forced to use food banks, miss medication as I couldn’t afford to pay for it,” she told MPs.
“My mental health deteriorated, as did my physical health. I have become increasingly isolated from my community.”
Barnett, 50, borrowed money to fly to Wellington and make that plea in person – travel that exhausted her and brought on seizures. Her hope that effort would be worth it has faded in the six years since then, she told the Herald.
“As a group, we have been shunted into an eternal cycle of poverty.”
The Herald asked current ACC Minister Matt Doocey if he believed the Lope rate was adequate or fair, and if it might be increased.
“The ACC scheme is set up to pay fair, rather than full, compensation for personal injury, which means that compensation will not always cover all costs arising from an injury or its treatment,” he said in a statement.
“The Lope being based off minimum wage allows for weekly compensation to keep pace with increases to the minimum wage. Increasing the rate of Lope would enlarge the disparities between Lope claimants and those who rely on the welfare and health systems.”
Michael Frampton, ACC’s deputy chief executive for service delivery, says he sympathises with Sharp and his family over the ongoing impact of his accident.
In addition to Lope, over three decades ACC’s support has included home help, treatment, equipment, taxis, attendant care (including backdated payments), and the ongoing independence allowance (about $94 a week in the hand).
“I want to acknowledge that sometimes, despite our best efforts, we don’t always get things right and I was sorry to read about Fraser’s frustrations.
“We’ve worked hard with Fraser and his advocate to make sure he’s getting the right support from the right people. We’ve encouraged Fraser to select his own providers, so he can choose people he trusts to join his team and give him wrap-around support.
“We’ll continue to support Fraser throughout his life and we’re proud of his Paralympic success.”
A place to call home
Sharp now finds an escape by walking nearby bush tracks with a neighbour’s Rottweiler, Buddy.
Cycling on the open road uses too much energy – mental and physical – that he needs to navigate daily life. Lately, that’s included scraping together the finance needed to buy a home to call his own, drawing on life-savings grown through frugality and investment.
He will soon move into his own place – a two-bedroom unit with a yard for a dog of his own. After mortgage payments and other costs, he’ll have very little to live on and will need at least one flatmate.
Gaylene will, however, finally be free to downsize.
“Mum has been holding on to the house because I’m here, and I’ve got all my gear, and nowhere to go. That’s the love she has,” Sharp says.
He’s doing this article to raise awareness for others without that support.
“You’re made to feel like a burden,” he says. “It cuts you down.”
Nicholas Jones is an investigative reporter at the Herald. He was a finalist for Reporter of the Year at the 2024 Voyager Media Awards and has won numerous national media awards for his reporting and feature writing.