Angie Ballard competes at the 2011 World Championships warm-up meet in Sydney, January 2011 |
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| Nationality | Australia | |||||||||||||||||||
| Born | 6 June 1982 Canberra, Australian Capital Territory |
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Medal record
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Angela Ballard (born 6 June 1982) is an Australian Paralympic athletics competitor, who competes in T53 Sprint events. She won a silver medal at the 2008 Summer Paralympics and a bronze medal at the 2004 Summer Paralympics.
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Ballard was born on 6 June 1982[1] in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory.[2] She is a paraplegic as a result of an auto accident in 1989 when she was seven years old.[3][1][4] Following the accident, she was in hospital and rehabilitation for three months.[2] Her physical education teacher was one of the people who first encouraged her to participate in wheelchair sports.[5] Sports she tried after her accident included wheelchair basketball and swimming. Wheelchair athletics was the sport she liked best.[4] She attended Lyneham Primary School in ACT.[5] In 1999, she was a secondary school student living with her family in Bungendore, New South Wales.[3] On 15 September 2000, she earned an open drivers license and she can legally drive a car.[5] In 2001, she moved to Sydney to attend university.[2] As of 2011[update], she lives in Liberty Grove, New South Wales and was attending the University of Sydney to try to earn a Bachelor of Psychology. She has two cats, Monkee and Jaguar, and a dog named Angel.[1] Her heroes are Rob Gorringe and Louise Sauvage.[1]
Ballard is a Paralympian athlete competing mainly in category T53 Sprint events.[1] Compared to T54 athletes, she has less usage of her abdominal muscles, which means she cannot raise herself as much in her wheelchair to get a better angle to propel herself forward.[2] She first competed in athletics in 1994,[1] at the age of twelve.[4] Her first wheelchair for racing was a second hand one.[5] By 1997, she started taking her sport more seriously[4] and began setting records in Australian athletics for her classification.[3] A year later she was representing her country on the international stage.[1] By 2000, she held national records in the T53 100m and 200m events.[3] She was an athletics scholarship holder at the Australian Institute of Sport.[3] Early in her athletics career, Ballard and Louise Sauvage had the same coach and on occasion, the two would train together.[4] After Sauvage retired from competitive wheelchair athletics following the 2004 Games, she became Ballard's coach.[4]
In August 1998, Ballard competed at the International Paralympic Committee World Championships in Birmingham, England, where she was part of the gold medal winning Australian women's 4 x100m and 4x400m relay teams.[3] In 1999, she competed at Australia's Junior Wheelchair Nationals. She won earned five gold medals at those games and was honoured by being named the event's Female Athlete of the Games.[3] In 1999, she also competed at the 1999 Oz Day competition, where she finished second.[3] She was a 2000 Motor Accidents Authority Paralympian. [6] In preparation for the 2004 games, trained six days a week. Her training included going to Centennial Park and training on the hills there. It also included track work twice a week and doing weight training at least three times a week.[2] Having competed in Sydney, Australia in the 2000 Summer Paralympics in the T53 100m, 200m, 400m, 800m and the T54 marathon without winning any medals, she travelled to Athens, Greece for the 2004 Summer Paralympics competing in the T54 200m, T53 400m and T53 800m without winning any medals but did pick up a bronze in the T53 100m. She then travelled with the Australian team to Beijing, China for the 2008 Summer Paralympics where she again failed to medal in the T53 100m, 200m, 400m and 800m but along with her team mates achieved her best paralympic result in picking up a silver medal in the T53/54 4x100m relay.[1] Her goal for the 2008 Games was not to medal but to set a personal best.[7] At the 2008 Games, she finished fifth in the women's T53 100m event, seventh the women's T53 in the 200m event, seventh women's T53 in the 400m event, and sixth in the women's 800m event.[8] As of 2011[update], she was training to qualify for the 2012 Summer Paralympics.[1]