James Turner (athlete)
James Turner
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| Personal information | ||||||||||
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| Nationality |
 Australia
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| Born |
22 May 1996 Sydney, New South Wales |
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| Sport | ||||||||||
| Disability class | T36 | |||||||||
| Event(s) | 800m | |||||||||
| Coached by | Brett Robinson | |||||||||
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Medal record
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James Michael Turner OAM (born 22 May 1996) is an Australia Paralympic athlete and soccer player with cerebral palsy. He has represented Australia as part of the Australia Paralympic soccer team, the ParaRoos, and was its player of the year in 2013. At the 2016 Summer Paralympics, he won the Men's 800 m T36 in a world record time of 2:02.39.
James Turner was born on 22 May 1996. He has cerebral palsy. He grew up in Diamond Beach, New South Wales. In 2015, he commenced a Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Wollongong.
Turner played 7-a-side soccer as a midfielder for New South Wales starting in 2009, and for the Australian national 7-a-side team, the ParaRoos, in 2012. By November 2013, he had 16 caps, and was named Pararoo Football Player of the Year at the 2013 FFA Australian Football Awards night on 13 November 2013. The head coach of the ParaRoos, Paul Brown, said that "James has pace to burn and he gets forward on the overlap to worry defenders in their third. He has the potential to be one of the best players that Australia has ever produced if he stays on the path that he is at present". Unfortunately for the ParaRoos, ranked tenth in the world, in July 2014, the Australian Sports Commission cut funding for the 7-a-side soccer program on the grounds that the team was unlikely to make the 2016 Summer Paralympics. After a public outcry, the team was revived with a new funding model in 2015. Despite the fund raising efforts, the ParaRoos failed to qualify for Rio.
Turner started with Forster-Tuncurry Athletics club as an eight-year-old and at the age of 15 joined the Hunter Academy of Sport AWD middle distance running program. In 2015, Turner turned his talents to back athletics on the encouragement of Athletics Australia, where he is classified as a T36 athlete. He was coached first by Marie Kay and from 2016 by Brett Robinson in Wollongong, New South Wales. At the Australian Athletics Championships in March 2016, he ran the 800m in 2:08.90, which was a Paralympic qualifier. In the IPC Grand Prix in Canberra February, he had posted an even faster time of 2.08.8. In August 2016, it was announced that had been selected to represent Australia at the 2016 Summer Paralympics in Rio de Janeiro in the 800m event. He was ranked number two in the world in this event in his classification.
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