Paralympics: Golden pair feeling shortchanged

CHRIS RATTUE finds our medal-winning paralympians are angry at the lack of TV cover.

They travel and train together and now they are winning gold for New Zealand together.

Paralympian Rachael Battersby scored her second gold medal of the winter Games at Salt Lake City in the giant slalom, giving her and fellow Cantabrian Steve Bayley a total of three golds and two bronzes - with each having the slalom event to go.

Their success though has been tinged with anger. The 23-year-old Battersby said last night that she was "close to tears" over a lack of television cover in New Zealand.

The Bayley and Battersby story began in the mid-1990s.

The 30-year-old Bayley was a ski fanatic before he lost a leg in a 1994 car accident.

They linked up when Bayley was checking disabled skiing and met Battersby, who had suffered a paralysed arm falling from a car when she was four and later had it amputated.

Bayley and Battersby endure the slippery slopes of their sporting careers as a team.

That involves training in Colorado for half a year. Their Sports Foundation money of $10,000 each was cut to $7500 this year, even though they are the sum total of our team at the winter Paralympics.

A season in Colorado costs them $23,000 each.

"I owe everything to my mum Julie," says Battersby, whose parents separated when she and her three siblings were young.

"Mum is the brains behind my fundraising and she's done everything to help my career.

"I've had so much help from friends and family. This wouldn't be possible without them.

"We've run sausage sizzles, I've walked the streets selling pens, done pizza deliveries. Just anything."

It was after an initial season overseas that Battersby decided to have her paralysed arm amputated.

"The first coach I met overseas said that's got to go. I wish I'd done it years earlier," she said.

"It used to be dead weight flopping by my side and when I was a kid it would get caught in things when we played. It made me look disabled.

"I came home and told mum 'I'm getting it chopped off.' I'm so much more confident now."

She was distressed to hear that television reporting of her gold medal win in the high-speed downhill used five-year-old footage of her competing in New Zealand.

"It was like clap, clap the handicapped," she said.

"Steve and I are in the least disabled categories. If people could see the footage from here they would have so much respect for what we do.

"It is scary and dangerous. I don't think we get the funds and recognition for what we do.

"I haven't trained seven years for this to have five-year-old footage shown. I almost cried."