The Commonwealth Games-bound Australian on disability in sport, her late father and excitement ahead of Birmingham
ani Watson made her international debut barely six months ago. When she left Australia for the world para-powerlifting championships in Georgia she was ranked 30-something in the world. A week later, when she turned around and came home, she was in the top eight. If that signified a physical leap of quite some margin, the flight over offered some intellectual gains she has carried with her since.
It may be obvious by now that Watson does not subscribe to stereotypes. Yes, she is disabled, born with bowed tibia and femur bones which will never be fixed despite a series of “horrible” surgeries. But she is also an elite athlete who can comfortably bench press 130kg, an administrator at a Brisbane hospital, an Australian born in New Zealand with a Scottish mother and Polynesian father , and a proud gay woman with a “rockstar” wife without whom “I’d be a lost sausage”.
“We didn’t do a lot of leg stuff or anything like that because he didn’t point out my disability,” she says. “He didn’t really concentrate on that side of life, but I did a lot of upper-body stuff with him. He says you can only focus on what you can do at the end of the day. I can’t go and run a 100m sprint. But it blows my mind that I’m almost 40 and going to the Commonwealth Games this year and possibly Paris in 2024.
Over the years there have been numerous procedures, and when she was 31 she had an osteotomy. The surgeons sliced into her left tibia, removed a wedge of bone, swung her lower leg out straight and inserted a plate into the gap. Then broke her femur halfway up, pulled it apart, moved it around and attached a bigger plate to hold it straight.The idea was that her bones would grow into the spaces.
Watson chose the latter. Her progressively worsening disability was now severe enough to meet the para-powerlifting classification criteria. “Which I think is hilarious,” she says. “I was disabled enough now and I was like, ‘yay’. In May of last year she competed for the first time in Brisbane and in November announced herself to the world in Georgia with an Oceania record of 120kg in the +86kg category.