Tina McKenzie
2012 Australian Paralympic Team portrait of McKenzie
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| Personal information | |
|---|---|
| Nationality |
 Australia
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| Born | 8 June 1974 |
| Sport | |
| Country | Australia |
| Sport | Wheelchair basketball |
| Disability class | 3.0 |
| Event(s) | Women's team |
| Club | Dandenong Rangers Stacks Goudkamp Bears |
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Medal record
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Tina McKenzie (born 8 June 1974) is an Australian wheelchair basketball player. She participated in the 2004 Summer Paralympics in Athens, where she won a silver medal; in the 2008 Summer Paralympics in Beijing, where she won a bronze medal; and the 2012 Summer Paralympics in London, where she won a second silver medal. After becoming an incomplete paraplegic as a result of a fall from a building in 1994, she took up wheelchair tennis and later wheelchair basketball. She joined the Australia women's national wheelchair basketball team, known as the Gliders, in 1999, and played her first international match at the 2002 World Wheelchair Basketball Championship in Japan. She has over 100 international caps.
McKenzie was born in Albury, New South Wales, on 8 June 1974. She had a brother who died at the age of 19 in 1997.
She left home in 1990 at the age of 16, and moved to Melbourne, where she qualified as a hairdresser and beauty therapist. By 1994 she was running a hair dressing store and managing seven employees. Her life was changed that year by a fall from a building in Melbourne in which fractured her third and fourth thoracic vertebrae, rendering her an incomplete paraplegic. She lay there for forty minutes before someone found her. She spent the next four weeks in the Austin Hospital in Heidelberg, and then another two and a half months in the Royal Talbot Rehabilitation Centre in Kew. She was forced to move back in with her parents, where she lived for the next five years, but within a year of her accident, she was managing five hairdressing stores.
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