Australia at the 2004 Summer Paralympics
| Australia at the 2004 Summer Paralympics |
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| IPC code | AUS | ||||||||
| NPC | Australian Paralympic Committee | ||||||||
| Website | www |
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| in Athens | |||||||||
| Competitors | 151 | ||||||||
| Flag bearer | Louise Sauvage (Opening) Matthew Cowdrey (Closing) | ||||||||
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Medals Ranked 5th |
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| Summer Paralympics appearances (overview) | |||||||||
Australia competed at the 2004 Summer Paralympics in Athens, Greece. It was Australia's 12th year of participation at the Paralympics. The team included 151 athletes (91 men and 60 women). Australian competitors won 101 medals (26 gold, 39 silver and 36 bronze) to finish fifth in the gold medal table and second on the total medal table. Australia competed in 12 sports and won medals in 8 sports. The Chef de Mission was Paul Bird. The Australian team was smaller than the Sydney Games due to a strict selection policy related to the athletes' potential to win a medal and the International Paralympic Committee's decision to remove events for athletes with an intellectual disability from the Games due to issues of cheating at the Sydney Games. This was due to a cheating scandal with the Spanish intellectually disabled basketball team in the 2000 Summer Paralympics where it was later discovered that only two players actually had intellectual disabilities. The IPC decision resulted in leading Australian athletes such as Siobhan Paton and Lisa Llorens not being able to defend their Paralympic titles.
Leading Australian athletes included:
The 2004 Summer Paralympics, formally known as Games of the XXVIII Olympiad, was held from September 17 to September 28. The twelfth Paralympic Games, a total of 3,808 competitors (2,643 Men and 1,165 Women) from 135 countries participated. During these games 304 World Records were broken with 448 Paralympic Games Records being broken across 19 different sports. Addition of judo and sitting volleyball for women and football 5-a-side for men were included. The event was made possible through the help of 8,863 volunteers
Louise Sauvage lit the cauldron during the opening ceremonies for the 2000 Summer Paralympics in Sydney. In 2004, Sauvage carried the Australian flag into the opening ceremony stadium at what was her 4th Paralympic games. She has a Sydney ferry, a street and a pathway named after her, as well as numerous school sport houses around Australia.
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