THERE AREN’T MANY athletes in the world who can swim faster than Rowan Crothers. You’ll notice we said ‘athletes’ and not ‘para-athletes’. That’s because regardless of whether they’re able-bodied or not, few swimmers can rival Crothers’ speed. His time of 23.25 seconds in the S10 50-metre freestyle from the Tokyo Paralympics was not only enough for him to win gold by a sizeable margin, it also would’ve placed him 43rd out of the 74 athletes who competed in the event’s Olympic equivalent event in Paris last month. So yes, Crothers is fast.
Crothers has an invisible disability. He was born 15 weeks prematurely and as a result, developed cerebral palsy. This impacts his coordination and motor skills throughout his entire body, but in his legs in particular.
Crothers’ condition affects him daily, but it’s not something you’ll notice immediately upon meeting him. Nor does it prevent him from pulling off athletic performances most people wouldn’t be able to dream of replicating. “Disability is just a spectrum of ability,” Crothers tells Men’s Health. “Everyone has things that they can and can’t do, and what I really want to see is Australia supporting everybody and helping us all do the things that we want to do.”
Not long after he was born, Crothers’ parents were told he would struggle to ever be independent. Athletic endeavours were out of the question. But as a Paralympic gold medallist, world champion and Commonwealth Games gold medallist, Crothers has made a habit of exceeding expectations. Speaking to him, you get the sense that Crothers doesn’t like being told what he can’t do. Heading into Paris, he has a few more expectations he’d like to exceed, but he’s not limiting his goals to winning gold medals.
At Tokyo 2020, Crothers won gold in the S10 50-metre freestyle and silver in the S10 100m freestyle. While the 50 metres has been his favoured event in the past, Crothers is switching his focus to the 100 metres in Paris. “My big performance goal at the Paralympics is in the 100-metre freestyle, I’d love to swim under 50 seconds,” Crothers says. “Everything I’ve been focusing on over the past couple of years has been about putting my body in a position to swim 49 seconds.”
No para-athlete has ever broken the 50-second threshold in the 100m freestyle, no matter their classification. The world record in Crothers’ S10 classification is 50.64 seconds, which is the fastest time recorded in any para classification. Crothers swam a 50.70 to win gold at the 2022 world championships, but to reach his latest goal, he’ll need to shave almost a full second off his personal best.
There’s no use questioning an athlete on why they aim to do anything, because the reasoning would usually be incomprehensible for the average person. Why, when they’ve already achieved so much, do these athletes put their bodies through daily torment to continually improve and strive for more? You or I would be unlikely to understand. But for Crothers, the answer goes beyond personal motivations and vanity. He has always been an overachiever, consistently exceeding the expectations laid in front of him by doctors, specialists, classmates, teachers, commentators and even the general public. He thinks others can too, with the right support.
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During his early childhood, Crothers’ life was consumed by forecasts of his limited physical and mental ability. “I remember going through some tests and seeing different specialists that basically placed me within the bottom one per cent of the Australian population in motor skills, cognitive function, problem solving and communication skills,” he says.
Eventually, Crothers’ parents grew tired of the pessimism. “Every time my mum and dad saw one of these reports from a doctor that basically said I wasn’t going to be capable of achieving anything in life, they said, ‘Why are we only getting the worst possible outcome?’”
Switching their perspective, Crothers and his family consulted with a team of therapists and specialists with the aim of helping him become the best he could be. “We would have multiple sessions every week with physiotherapists, occupational therapists and speech pathologists to build a plan that my mum and dad would then execute,” he says.
Crothers first encountered swimming as a result of this plan, but he didn’t take to it straight away. “I didn’t enjoy it at all at first,” he says. “I needed a teaching aid in the pool with me at all times because I refused to let go of the side and had a big fear of drowning.”
That changed in 2008, after Crothers watched Australian swimmer Peter Leek – who also has cerebral palsy – win eight medals at the Beijing Paralympics. This presented an opportunity that Crothers hadn’t previously considered: elite para-sports. “If you have a look at what is promoted around the Paralympics, you’d think it’s only for amputees or people who require the use of wheelchairs,” Crothers says. “That’s what I thought. I didn’t know they were an option for kids like me. So, when I recognised that this was something I could do, I said straight away I want to swim and I want to be there someday.”
Following the Beijing Paralympics, Crothers started taking swimming more seriously. He began training not just for physiotherapy, but to see just how much he could achieve. But even still, his disability left him at a disadvantage. “Even when I was 10-11 years old, I was in the learners’ swim classes with the six-year-olds because I couldn’t kick yet. Even though I had more upper body strength and ability than everyone else, they still wouldn’t move me up because I couldn’t kick,” Crothers says. “Well, I still can’t kick properly and I’ve got bloody gold medals under my belt.”
Growing up in this environment showed Crothers the importance of supporting people with disabilities, including the ones we can’t see. He’s now an advocate for invisible disability inclusion and believes that a little extra support can go a long way. “I think that there’s a lot that can happen if we just try to support people and have a bit of faith in others,” he says.
We still have a long way to go in becoming a truly inclusive society for people with invisible disabilities, says Crothers. “There are times where I’ll be denied entry to a bar because people assume that I’ve been drinking because of my disability,” he recalls. “At concerts, where I need a seat in the accessibility section, I’ve been denied entry and looked at weird because I don’t use a wheelchair. Things like that happen everywhere and they can be really preventative of a more inclusive world.”
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Crothers’ breakthrough came at the 2013 para-swimming world championships, where he won gold as part of the 4×100-metre freestyle relay team and bronze in the S9 100-metre freestyle at just 15 years of age. A year later, he won gold at the 2014 Commonwealth Games and he was named to the Australian Paralympic team for Rio 2016 not long after.
By 2019, Crothers was recognised as one of the world’s best swimmers in his classification and was expected to take home some heavy hardware from the 2019 world championships. At the time, he was going all-in on swimming. “I had deferred from university, quit doing all my hobbies and everything else to just focus on swimming,” he says. “Physically, I was very fit, but mentally I was way too focused on one thing and I never had the time to take myself out of swimming.”
Crothers came away from the 2019 world championships with three bronze medals – an incredible achievement, but short of his goal of gold. This showed him the importance of finding balance in training. “As much as I love swimming, if all I think about is swimming, I’ll place too much pressure on myself, and when I get to the big dance I’ll crack,” he says.
Just because he takes a balanced approach to his routine, that doesn’t mean Crothers goes easy on himself physically. He’s in the pool nine times per week, often doubling up on his sessions with multiple swims per day. Here, Crothers points to his treatment at the Queensland Academy of Sport as further evidence of what can happen when people with disabilities are given the support they need. “These people don’t see me as an athlete with disability, they see me as a professional elite athlete preparing for the biggest competition of the year,” he says.
Crothers’ hard work paid off at Tokyo 2020, where he won a pair of Olympic gold medals and a silver. But now that he’s won every title there is to win, proven every point and exceeded all expectations, he’s still striving for more in Paris this month. Although, he’s placing less value on medals and more on making statements. So, why the focus on breaking the 50-second barrier?
“I see breaking the 50-second barrier as a symbol,” Crothers explains. “If I can do it, that might inspire other young kids with disabilities around Australia to break their own barriers and forget about the expectations other people place on them.
“What I really want to do is make the most of the opportunity after the race, where I’ll be on TV and will be speaking to possibly a few million people around Australia and around the world,” Crothers continues. “I don’t want to use that opportunity to talk about how great I am, I want to use it to raise positive messaging about the incredible things that people all around Australia, with or without disabilities, can do if they focus on the things they love and chase their dreams.” Having accomplished all he’s ever set out to do, Crothers is a living proof of his own concept.
INSTAGRAM | @rowan.crothers
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