Paralympics: Push for gold as going gets tougher

BY GREG ANSLEY

SYDNEY - Ben Lucas is a legend.

Twice New Zealand Paralympic team captain and flag-bearer, holder of seven national records and 1994 Commonwealth Paraplegic Games marathon bronze medallist, Lucas last year won gold in the marathon at the World Wheelchair Games in Christchurch.

On Thursday afternoon, he lines up for the 10,000m wheelchair race at the Sydney Paralympics.

Next week he is back for the 5000m and, on the last day of the Games, the marathon.

His team-mates reckon he is a real medal prospect for New Zealand.

Lucas is confident, but hardly cocky.

"It's incredibly tough," he says of the competition.

"It's getting very congested at the top.

"The athletes are getting fitter and faster, and really it's a matter first and foremost of making sure you can get through to a final."

His competition, he says, is the rest of the planet.

"The Europeans are strong, there are pretty quick Germans, Americans, Mexicans - the Mexicans are very strong - the guys from Thailand have come out of the woodwork this year, the South Africans are fast, there are quick Australians ...

"Like I said, it's really congested up there."

Times are rapidly and repeatedly being shaved - 1m 35s off the world wheelchair record for 10,000m in the past decade, and 17s off the 5000m record.

The world's best time for (able-bodied) marathon running is about 2h 5m, Lucas says.

The world record for wheelchairs is 1h 20m over the same distance.

"I think they're banging out 10,000m on the [able-bodied] track at about 27m and they've done it on wheelchairs in 21m. So we're a lot faster."

But if the competition is tough, so is Lucas. As a teenager growing up in Blenheim, he did the lot - snow and water skiing, tramping, mountain climbing, sailing, fishing, diving ...

Then 11 years ago, he lost it all in a motorcycle accident that broke his spine. The first couple of days were hard, he says. "You think the world's going to end."

But Lucas considers himself lucky. The break low in the spine left him with fully functioning arms and upper body and he is even able to walk a little.

"Before the accident I did 10,000 things," he says. "Now I only do 9500 things."

Lucas, restless as ever, first tried a racing chair in 1991 after a friend he met through social basketball offered him the use of one. It was fun.

Four months later Lucas was racing in Japan, the money for the trip earned at a flea market in Blenheim and through raffles.

Even though he had no intention at that stage of focusing on one sport, he ordered a racing chair of his own after he returned the borrowed machine.

"I was really only aiming to do it for fitness, but then I would go and do a race, and then another race over the same distance - and that's where the personal challenge came in.

"I didn't start off thinking I'm going to be the world's best. It just sort of evolved that way.

"You get better and better and you see the lead pack and you think, if I work a bit harder I can catch them, and eventually I did.

"It's very rewarding."

In 1992, with less than a year of racing behind him, Lucas was selected for the New Zealand team for the Barcelona Paralympics.

Two years later he competed in the Commonwealth Games and in 1996 he captained the team and was its flag-bearer in Atlanta.

This year, again captaining the team and bearing the flag, the buzz is still there.

"You never lose the thrill of representing your country, wearing the silver fern. It's a fantastic honour and it rewards your effort as well."

But these are very different Games from his early competitions.

The equipment has advanced by quantum leaps through aerodynamics, plastics, carbon fibre and composite materials, pushing both athletes and times.

And the sport is far more professional, a natural progression as competition becomes more serious for both athletes and the media covering them.

"Everyone is getting faster and you are having to spend probably more money to travel, especially from New Zealand," Lucas says.

"It's a good thing, because we're out to prove ourselves as elite sportspeople. It's the way the world is going."

News coverage has been hauled along in their wake.

These Paralympics will receive three times the television airplay around the world as they did at Atlanta, and the size and depth of the coverage have ballooned.

New Zealand has sent newspaper, wire service and television crews, and team officials and athletes have been bombarded with requests for interviews from radio at home.

"I think it's because we are a lot more professional and because we're a lot more in line with able-bodied sports in our focus," Lucas says.

"When I first started you were treated as a human interest story but now the media is really focusing on the sports side of it. "That's really what we're about, what we like to focus on."

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