Ben Wright was sitting in his living room watching TV when his future suddenly came into focus.

Perth athlete Louise Sauvage had already won seven gold medals and one silver at the two previous Paralympics. Now she was competing in her home country, at the Sydney Games in 2000.

“I saw Louise, who’s a track racer, just absolutely dominate,” Wright says of the two gold and one silver medal Sauvage added to her haul. “It was that point I decided that I wanted to be a Paralympian. I didn’t really play sport at that time, but I wanted to be a Paralympian.”

He was 13. Now Wright is a Paralympian just like Sauvage, albeit in a different field. He is the only Australian para-powerlifter to compete at four Commonwealth Games.

At the 2024 Paris Paralympics, Wright became the first Australian para-powerlifter to compete at that level since Hani Watson in London 12 years earlier. Placing seventh, Wright broke the Oceania record by lifting 192kg. With more training, he is confident he will be at the 2028 Paralympics in Los Angeles – this time for a medal.

Getting to this level was no easy feat. First Wright had to find his best sport. As a junior he did javelin, shot put and discus before switching to wheelchair basketball because “that was the poster sport at the time”. 

Wright played basketball for 12 years until he aged out of the junior program at 23. Having missed the Paralympics team, he wondered what sport could get him there.

In 2001, Wright had attended a junior multisport competition that included powerlifting. During his day off he had a go at lifting and to everyone’s surprise lifted close to the national record for his weight class. However, it was not until a decade later that Wright tried out formally.

His mother Carmel recalls the moment. “There were coaches from all the other states descending on him, wanting him to move because they wanted him under their wing,” she says. “But Ben was still fixated on this basketball and so he didn’t and at the time I kind of thought, ‘mate I wish you would’ and when he eventually decided to, I was really happy”.

Wright first joined the Australian team as part of the shadow squad, a group of eight athletes who trained with the elite squad, consisting of Paralympians Abebe Fekadu and Darren Gardiner. However, shortly after Wright joined both Paralympians retired and when they left so did the program’s funding.

To receive high performance funding from the Australian Institute of Sport, an athlete in the para-powerlifting program had to have won a recent medal and with medallists Fekadu and Gardiner gone, no athlete in the team had won a medal.

This was a huge setback. To qualify for the Paralympics, athletes must attend a sanctioned international competition each year and one of the two world championships during the four years leading up to the games.  Wright now had to fund his own training and travel for costly competitions. 

The not-for-profit association, Fostering Talent Together, helped Wright with some financial and emotional support, even flying to the Gold Coast in 2018 to cheer him on at the Commonwealth Games.  

Just 10 weeks before the games, Wright suffered a violent seizure that broke his back in four places, casting doubt on whether he would even be able to compete. Somehow he did, placing sixth despite the setback. 

This wasn’t the first time Wright faced a major obstacle. While he was trying to qualify for the 2016 Rio Paralympics, he blew out his shoulder. He had to have shoulder surgery and nine months of rehab, yet still returned to powerlifting. Last year, Wright also suffered two seizures in January and August, but pushed through to compete at the 2026 Commonwealth Games. 

“People would probably call it being strong willed,” he says. “But I honestly think stubbornness is what has led me this far.”

As he kept reaching his goals, Wright realised he could use his influence to make para-powerlifting more accessible to the wider disabled community. 

Wright’s family have been huge supporters, including his long-term partner Shauna Key, who he refers to as his biggest cheerleader. If she cannot attend his competitions, she will record from home. 

“You can’t hear the TV, you can’t hear the commentator or anything that’s going on just because she’s screaming at the TV so bloody loud,” Wright says with a laugh.  

“I love watching him do what he’s passionate about and achieve his goals, I support him because he supports me,” says Key, who is also a wheelchair user.

Key trains with Wright every Saturday at Integrated Support Solutions along with other people with disabilities.

Wright says the goal isn’t for these people to become bench-press champions but rather to improve their physical and mental health. 

“As a disabled athlete, I think it’s really important to find an environment and a community that is accepting, but not only just accepting, they see beyond your disability and the things that you can’t do,” Wright says. 

During these sessions, Wright is also learning to improve his coaching skills in the hope of continuing work in the para-powerlifting field as an assistant coach or other role after he retires as an athlete. 

“I’ve been doing this for about 15 years now, and so there are way more days behind my career than there are in front of my career,” he says.

“The goal very much now has kind of transitioned into still wanting to compete for myself and wanting to achieve the best that I can. But the focus is less singular and it’s more on helping develop the powerlifting program that we are working on Australia wide and then also what we do here in WA to try and get more people lifting.”

Asked what he is most proud of, Wright talks about how far the program has come. In 2024, funding for para-athletes in Australia was doubled, with an additional $54.9 million. This has allowed sports likpara-powerlifting to form larger communities.  Paralympics Australia announced 15 athletes, including Wright, would attend the 2025 World Para Powerlifting Championships in Cairo – three times larger than the team at the 2023 World Para Powerlifting championship in Dubai. 

He will be back at the World Para Powerlifting Championship in late November, this time in Bahrain. This competition is particularly important because he has to place in the top 15 to keep his funding. “We have a coach, we have a general manager, we have assistant coaches, we have a team physio and a team doctor as well,” Wright says.

The athlete hopes he has had some sort of influence on how the para-powerlifting program operates today. His mother has no doubt. “He’s literally created that developmental pathway for other athletes and gone out and actively tried to get people to come in, to the point that there now is a proper power lifting team,” she says. 

Wright is more modest. “At the very least I have planted some trees whose shade I will never get to sit in, but other people will get to benefit from.”