Code Words podcast: Wheelchair marathon champion Madison de Rozario on trolls, triumphs and 2032

De Rozario, this week’s guest on the Code Words Podcast, is one of the world’s best athletes.

She pushes through the pain barrier daily in preparation for the seven or so wheelchair marathons she does a year among other track events.

The medals and trophies are piling up. Two Paralympic golds. Three World Championship golds. Two Commonwealth golds. First ever Australia to win a New York Marathon.

Her plate is full. When not training, or travelling, her diary is brimming with sponsor commitments and speaking engagements.

Just last week in Sydney, hours after hopping off a plane from a third-place finish at the Boston Marathon, she held a room captivated about her rise from a wheelchair-bound kid unsure about the world around her, to becoming a confident, brilliant athlete, who doesn’t see her disability as any kind of barrier.

In the audience were some teenage powerchair football players. They left inspired. Everyone did. She has that ability.

But you can’t please everyone.

It was five years ago, but de Rozario vividly recalls an encounter she had with a male nonbeliever in her chosen craft, after returning home from London with the 5000m World championship gold.

“I remember coming back from the World Champs, and there was this guy telling me, ‘Ah, well you’re not the best in the world’,” de Rozario told the Code Words Podcast.

“I couldn’t work out where he was coming from. He was like, ‘The men are quicker.’”

“Same dude, five minutes later, then tells me ‘the wheelchair marathon is not nearly as impressive as the running marathon’.

“I’m like why? It’s the same distance, same course?

“He’s says the whole point of a marathon is it’s an endurance event. It’s hard, they are out there for over two hours, you are just there for an hour forty.

“By now I say ‘is being faster, or slower, better?’

“He couldn’t tell me that.”

Needless to say, de Rozario got away from the man with the prehistoric outlook, but it’s an attitude she realises she’ll never totally escape.

“We love men’s able-bodied sport, and that’s the reality of it,” de Rozario says.

“And that’s fine, that’s not my audience, I have no interest in swaying those views, but it’s something we run into a lot!”

De Rozario is more interested in realising her own potential.

At 28, she figures she’s around the halfway point of her career, which could stretch all the way to Brisbane in a decade’s time.

“When they announced the (2032) Games are coming back to Australia, there’s a big part of me that says I could still be racing in 2032. That’s roughly the plan.

“If it ever stops giving me everything that I want from it… it’s not allowing me to grow, and keep moving the right direction, I’ll step away and find something else.

“But loosely, I’d love to make it to a home Games. That would be unreal.”