For years, Eithen Leard struggled with a desire to feel normal, until a sudden realisation consumed him and transformed his mindset.
“What is normal?” the 18-year-old says. “It has a lot to do with your own self-approval.”
Eithen Leard in action for the Rollers.
Leard is on a fast track towards Paris 2024, now within striking distance of featuring in the Australian Rollers squad to battle for gold in the wheelchair basketball.
Fresh off an undefeated Asia Oceania Championships campaign in Japan to cement a place in France, the squad departs this Sunday for a final camp in Belgium. Next will be an invitational in Melbourne to narrow down the make-up of the Paralympic squad.
Leard’s journey started when he was three, his family moving from Mackay to Brisbane in search of better opportunities for him to thrive while living with a spinal cord deformity discovered at birth.
His father, Brett, was quick to take his son to witness his first wheelchair basketball clash in Auchenflower.
A competitive persona was created – Brett still recalls the days his son would push his wheelchair around the house shouting “I can run as fast as you”.
But Leard says there were definitely times he can remember when his dad would let him win.
“Then he didn’t give me a chance,” he says with a laugh.
“It humbled me a bit. I couldn’t have asked for a better support network. It’s mainly kicked in the last couple of years, but I’ve had that competitive mindset since I was young, playing basketball at an extremely young age.
“I’ve never wanted to lose.”
For Leard to truly embrace that trait took time.
But those early visions of world glory with a basketball in hand never wavered. In a news report from his childhood days, he looks down the lens of the camera and declares he will be an Olympian.
As he rose through the ranks, landing on the national radar in his mid-teens years before making his national debut at 17, Leard had begun to appreciate he was an athlete who belonged on the big stage.
His disability, he says, is no barrier to what he can achieve or how he perceives himself.
“Everyone, as human beings, is always yearning for approval. Growing up with a disability, I was always looking for that through the years, looking to be normal,” Leard says.
Eithen Leard is on the cusp of being a part of his first Paralympics at just 18.
“But at a certain age, I realised it had a lot to do with what you think of yourself. When you’re out in public worried what people are thinking of you, it has a lot to do with how you perceive yourself in a room of all different kinds of people.
“If you put me in a room of able-bodied athletes, how do I perceive myself? Do you deserve to be in that room or not?
“So many people grow up insecurities, and it’s – not pushing it to the side – but you need to accept it and roll with the punches and figure out how you want to see yourself rather than other people.
“If you haven’t figured out how you see yourself, what’s the point of worrying about how other people see you?”
Leard’s outing in Japan with his Rollers teammates proved do-or-die for their Paris hopes.
Failure to reach the grand final would mean another four-year wait to strive for the code’s biggest stage.
While he admits there was a “lingering fear whether we could actually do it or not”, he says that by the time the first whistle sounded, the squad attacked the competition with “such confidence that we never really had a second option”.
Leard’s forthcoming final selection hurdle has given him the chance to appreciate the “surreal” journey he has been on since his international debut at the World Championships in Dubai less than two years ago.
Always with one eye on the future, Laird – the youngest member of the Rollers – is eager not to get too far ahead of himself before he hears his name called.
But with the Brisbane 2032 Olympics and Paralympics on the horizon, he admits that can be easier said than done.
“As much as people like to think they take it day by day, there’s always thoughts about doing things in the future and what the future will look like,” Leard says.
“You always wonder how things will turn out in the future, and I think 2032 is definitely always in the back of my mind.
“But Paris is the bigger picture, and getting there.”