Michael Milton picks up Laureus Award
The Age, Wednesday 21 May 2003
Michael Milton skis down mountains at almost 200kph and seems to go through life at a similar pace, picking up acclaim along the way.
The Australian Paralympian capped a stellar 12 months when he was named the 2003 award for the world's best athlete with a disability at the prestigious Laureus awards ceremony on Tuesday night.
'Who would have thought a snow skier from Australia (would win this),' an emotional Milton said.
Known as the Oscars of sport, the Laureus statuette is voted on by an academy of 41 sporting legends who recognised Milton's four gold medals at the 2002 Winter Paralympic Games in Salt Lake City.
Milton, who lost his left leg to bone cancer when he was nine-years-old,
won the downhill, the super-G, the giant slalom and the slalom at last
year's Games, becoming the first competitor in his amputee class to make a
clean-sweep of all eligible events. The Canberra-born 30-year-old had
already won gold medals at the 1992 Albertville and 1994 Lillehammer Winter
Paralympics and thought Salt Lake City would be the pinnacle of his career.
But since then he's set a world speed record of 193.16kph for a single leg skier, picked up the NSW disabled athlete of the year award, been named one of three athletes on the International Paralympic Committee Commission and become the first winter sport athlete to win a Laureus trophy in the event's four-year history. The Laureus victory puts him on the same pedestal as Cathy Freeman, the 2001 sportswoman of the year for her Sydney Olympic gold medal, and Steve Waugh's Test cricketers who won team of the year in 2002.
' I thought that the Salt Lake City Games was my Everest, but in a career that has had some highs and lows, this is really the Everest,' he said. '(This) means that a group of absolute sporting legends have thought that I'm the best athlete with a disability of the year. That's a wonderful feeling.'
Milton received a standing ovation from the sporting legends and crop of current champions attending the ceremony in Monaco's Grimaldi Forum when he accepted the award from former legendary American football quarterback Dan Marino.
For a bloke with one leg, Milton has a very balanced view of life.
'It's just a leg. It doesn't change how happy you can be,' he told journalists when asked about the challenges in life as an amputee athlete. 'It doesn't change the joy you can get from life. It might change how you do things; you might walk with crutches instead of a pair of shoes, but other than that it really is just a leg.'
Milton maintained a winning tradition for Australians in the Laureus disabled athlete category, after wheelchair racer Louise Savage took the first statuette in 2000 and wheelchair sailor Vinny Lauwers won in 2001.