Para swim star out to make amends in Paris

There’s one moment in her glittering swimming career Rebecca McDonald really regrets.
But 12 years on, she now gets the chance to make peace with her lost opportunity, and ensure no other athlete suffers that same remorse.
McDonald (back then Dubber) was swimming at the 2012 Paralympic Games in London, where she was tipped to win a medal in her main event, the 100m backstroke S7 category. But things didn’t pan out as she’d hoped.
“I don’t know whether the nerves got the better of me, or if it was the undiagnosed elbow injury I’d been dealing with for 12 months,” she says. “But I came fifth in the final, which was obviously disappointing. I had my whole family in the stands, and I felt really awful. I was an absolute mess afterwards.”
After she’d climbed out of the pool and into her wheelchair, she moved through the mixed zone, where athletes stop to speak to media. “There was one guy there, who was with the New Zealand team, hold his mic wanting to ask me a question,” McDonald recalls. “I was so distraught I said, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t’.
“He said, ‘Not even just one question? Like, how was it?’ And I said, ‘No’, and just rolled off. Despite having media training, I refused to talk to the one person who just wanted to know how it went. He never turned up to the rest of my races.
“I look back on it now and think I must have come across like an absolute spoilt brat. Yes, we might put pressure on athletes who’ve just performed their hearts out but had a really tough time. But I learned quickly that if you don’t want to get a reputation for being difficult to deal with, you need to front up.
“Para sport struggles enough to get media attention, and to this day I really regret not taking that opportunity.”
McDonald returned four years later to win Paralympic bronze in the same event in Rio, and now she can pass on her wisdom to the 25 Kiwi Paralympians competing in Paris from next week. She’ll be there alongside them in her role as media and content liaison for the New Zealand Paralympic team.
“I want the athletes to understand that we’re there to support them, and that it’s okay to be honest and show emotion – even if they can only answer one question,” she says.
Securing her dream job has been part of a monumental few years for McDonald, since she retired from competitive swimming in 2019.
She’s just been appointed to the board of the new Sport Integrity Commission, Te Kahu Raunui. She’s balancing that with her day job with accessible communications consultancy All is for All, and her roles on the board of Arts Access Aotearoa and the Swimming NZ selection panel. And she’s had stints as a fashion model and a podcaster.
In all her posts, McDonald is calling on the skills she acquired during a decade as an elite athlete.
She had intended to compete at her third Paralympics in Tokyo in 2021. But after an ongoing battle with injuries, including elbow surgery, she chose to retire.
McDonald still pictured herself returning to the Paralympics, but in a different role. With a bachelor’s degree in communication studies, and experience as a contributing writer to LockerRoom and Attitude, she planned to be in Tokyo as a reporter.
“But with Covid restrictions, the closest I got to Tokyo was the TVNZ studio in Auckland, co-hosting the live coverage of the Paralympic Games, which was still an incredible opportunity to have,” she says.
This time around, McDonald will be on ground in Paris, working alongside the team’s media and content lead, award-winning television journalist Michelle Pickles (who worked at three Olympics and is now group media manager at Sport New Zealand).
McDonald, who was born with sacral agenesis where the bones in her lumbar spine never fully developed, knows it’s not a given that Paris will be “super accessible” outside the Games venues.
“But the International Paralympics Committee have been fantastic helping me navigate that, and my husband, Mitch, will come with me as my support person to help me get from place to place,” she says.
“It’s like a security blanket, knowing I can just focus on my job helping the athletes, and not stressing about whether the tube’s accessible.”
McDonald is acutely aware of the “incredible opportunity” the Paralympics give the New Zealand team of 25 to lift their profiles.  
“We haven’t quite cracked the code on how to keep up the coverage of our Para athletes outside the Games once every four years, so I’ll be supporting them to make the most of that visibility,” she says.
McDonald also knows she has a unique opportunity to bring the perspective of the disabled athlete to New Zealand’s first Sport Integrity Commission as a foundation board member.
The commission’s chief executive, White Fern and Football Fern Rebecca Rolls, says the success of the organisation – formed to promote and protect the safety, wellbeing and fairness of participants in New Zealand sport and recreation – relies on a diversity of voices.
“Becs brings so much through all of her experience,” Rolls says of McDonald. “She’s already a strong presence and contributes positively as a disabled woman, but brings so much more given her professional career, considered nature and the many lenses through which she experiences the world. We are all learning from her.
“As we finalise our Integrity Code this year, we’re grateful to be able to call on her input to ensure the code is as accessible and inclusive as it can be.”
Integrity in sport has always interested McDonald. “I was very supportive of Drug Free Sport New Zealand and their work when I was an athlete,” she says. “And I’m a person driven by values and principles, so it all makes sense in my brain.”
She recently graduated from the New Zealand Olympic Committee’s Wāhine Toa Leadership Programme, where she’d been working on a sports integrity project around safer environments for women to speak up in sport. She was approached by the Ministry for Culture and Heritage to put her name forward for the new Sport Integrity board.
“I think it’s an incredible opportunity to bring a different perspective and a different voice, and contribute my lived experience and understanding of integrity issues as a disabled person in sport,” says McDonald, who’s also co-hosted a podcast about disability, called What’s Wrong With You.
“I’ve been made to feel really safe to contribute, which is wonderful. It’s a really exciting time in sport and recreation for New Zealand, to have an independent entity designed to provide safer sport and recreation opportunities for all New Zealanders. Because not everyone wants to be a Paralympian or an Olympian, or participate in organised sport.”
McDonald is fortunate to have a boss in her day job who’s happy to wave her off to Paris. Entrepreneur Grace Stratton co-founded All is for All five years ago when she was a 19-year-old law and communications student. It began as online platform to make fashion more accessible and inclusive for disabled communities, and when Stratton – who has cerebral palsy – was scouting for models, McDonald applied.
“Coming out of sport, which had been my life for 15 to 20 years, I just wanted to separate myself a bit from ‘Rebecca the Athlete’ for a while. And slipping into my other identity as a disabled person seemed like a natural way to go,” she says.
Then as All is For All grew into an advocacy and accessibility consultancy, McDonald brought her communication skills to the business. Until earlier this year, she was also collaborating with strategy and communications company, SweeneyVesty.
“I’m so grateful to Grace for how she’s shaped me as a communications professional, but also building in two really important parts of my identity and being able to give back to two communities I’ve been a part of for a very long time,” McDonald says. “I’m starting to find my niche.”