World record holder and two-time gold medal Paralympian, Alexa Leary, is an inspiring woman in many ways, not solely for her sports acumen. Nearly five years on from a life-changing accident, Alexa rebuilt her life through grit, determination, and the support of her family.
Once a promising triathlete, Alexa suffered a life-altering cycling accident in 2021. Afterwards, she spent six months in the hospital and spent months rehabilitating at home. Swimming was one of her therapies.
“Being in the pool is like therapy,” Alexa shared in our candid interview. “It’s refreshing and relaxing to just focus on the sets and switch off for a bit.” It gave her a new purpose and goal. She went on to win three medals (two gold medals and a silver medal) at the 2024 Paralympics.
Sadly, Alexa will not be representing Australia in the 2026 Commonwealth Games. She was expecting to make her debut in Glasgow this year, but her disability has been reclassified. Prior to this, she competed in the S9 category, and she has now been reclassified to S10 for athletes with less severe impairments.
Additionally, the Glasgow Commonwealth Games are hosting a pared-down version after stepping in to take on hosting duties after Victoria cancelled the Games due to budgeting issues.
In the lead-up to the fifth anniversary of Alexa Leary’s life-shattering accident, the champion swimmer and her parents reflect on her fight for survival in the May 2026 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
“My parents are the reason I’m here,” the Sink Or Swim author says in that heartfelt interview. “They’re the reason I’m alive, and the reason I’m able to live my best second life.”
Read on for that feature and subscribe to the magazine so you never miss an issue.
“Our miracle girl”: Alexa Leary and her family on the road back to recovery
In a quiet corner of Russell and Belinda Leary’s light-filled Broadbeach apartment on the Gold Coast, there is a shelf lined with family photos. There are candid moments from when their combined seven children were little, and more recent portraits of the kids together as adults. Between these photos is an invisible line. It marks a point in time: the accident. All the photos fall on either side of July 17, 2021. There’s before the accident and after the accident.
On that winter day nearly five years ago, the Learys’ lives were upended. The family was living in Noosa at the time, and Russell and their youngest daughter, Alexa – then a 19-year-old triathlete – woke early. It was a Saturday and Lex was embarking on a 90-kilometre bike ride in the Noosa hinterland alongside a pack of professional cyclists, with Russell as her one-man support crew.
“We began riding at 6 am on the dot,” remembers Lex. “I was itching to get going. I’d ridden the route before, but I was yet to keep up with the elite riders when climbing the mountain.”
That morning, for the first time, Lex made it up the tough gradient of Black Mountain with the elite group. At a pit stop in the town of Pomona, she messaged her dad, who was following the group some kilometres behind, to tell him she had managed to stay with the pack. Russell wrote back: “Great effort. The universe is changing, keep trusting it.”
Moments later, the universe changed irrevocably. Lex crashed her bike going 75 kilometres per hour downhill. She landed on the right side of her head, then her helmet fell off, and she hit the left side. The damage was brutal.
When Russell got to the scene of the crash about 20 minutes later, he barely recognised the girl crumpled on a steep bank beside the road.
“Everything started moving in slow motion. The scene in front of me played out like a horror film,” says Russell, who cannot speak about the crash without crying. “Lex’s body looked like a rag doll. It was contorted in this unnatural position.”
Lex was rushed to the Sunshine Coast University Hospital in an ambulance and then airlifted in a LifeFlight helicopter to the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital. She wasn’t expected to survive the journey. Lex had sustained a severe Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), and her parents were told to prepare for the worst.
“If she makes it to Brisbane, it’s possible she’ll never walk or talk again. You’ll probably never get the same girl back,” a nurse warned.
Against all the odds, Lex did make it to Brisbane and was taken into surgery to have part of her skull removed, relieving the pressure on her swollen brain.
“It was surreal. My daughter was in the ICU,” recalls Russell. “Part of her skull was in a freezer, and her life was in the balance. In less than 24 hours, our entire world was flipped on its head. That’s not a pun; it’s the most fitting phrase.”
Lex went on to spend 14 days fighting for survival in the ICU, and then another three months in the neurology ward and rehab learning how to walk and talk again.
During that time, Lex’s sister Maddy started the @moveforlex Instagram account, encouraging people to get out and move for those who can’t. The page took off. Lex’s nan pulled out the Pilates stick she’d received as a gift; her younger brothers did an F45 class; and Jimmy Barnes went for a walk in her honour. The country rallied behind Lex, and she rallied for us.
The Leary family took shifts at the hospital and leaned on each other when it felt like their knees would buckle under the pressure.
Russell and Belinda also turned to a woman named Michela D’Addario for a special kind of support. Michela calls herself a “quantum healer”, which she describes as a practitioner who blends alternative medicine with quantum physics to work on the body’s energy field. Lex had been booked in for an appointment with her on the Monday after her accident. When Belinda rang Michela to explain what had happened and cancel, Michela offered to treat Lex from afar.
“We know that might sound a bit out there to some people, but we were desperate for any help we could get,” Belinda tells The Weekly. “Michela explained how she would ‘meet’ Lex on the ‘quantum field’, which often looked like a garden, and tap into her thoughts. She started passing on messages from Lex to us.”
Initially, the messages were simple enough: Lex wanted her dad to hold her hand instead of rubbing her feet at the end of the hospital bed, where Russell had positioned himself so he didn’t have to confront the sight of his daughter’s injuries.
Lex also asked if someone could rub Voltaren pain-relief gel into her neck, which is something her parents used to do when she was sore after training.
“The messages hit home for us. There was no way Michela could have known the context behind any of the statements she shared, but they gave us hope,” says Belinda, who clung on to that hope for dear life.
A couple of months after Lex’s crash, Michela reached out to the Learys with a message she was reluctant to share. She didn’t want to give Russell and Belinda false hope, but she felt compelled to tell them.
“Michela said that Alexa had told her she was going to walk out of the hospital on her own two feet. Not only that, but Lex also said she was going to the Paralympics, and that she had shown Michela three medals,” recalls Russell. “At that stage, we didn’t know if Lex would ever walk again. The thought of her returning to competitive sport was so far from our minds. It seemed absolutely impossible. Only a miracle could make that happen.”
The first miracle occurred on November 4, 2021, when Lex walked out of the Brain Injury Rehabilitation Unit and returned home to Noosa after 111 days in care. It was a milestone, but far from the end of the road.
“Things were really hard when I got home from the hospital,” reflects Lex, who was still doing intensive physical rehab. “My memory was very bad. I watched the same episode of Glee over and over again. I had to learn everything again, from how to brush my teeth to how to cook. The right side of my body wasn’t capable of much.”
The mental challenges were just as difficult.
“When reality kicked in, and I started to understand what had been taken away from me – my triathlete career, my driver’s licence, my hair and some of my friends – I was broken. I was sad, then I got angry,” she says.
In the pages of Lex’s new memoir, Sink Or Swim, she reveals the extent of her rage. Alexa took out her frustrations on those closest to her. She punched, slapped and pushed her parents. She kicked doors and put holes in walls.
“Both Russ and I were covered in bruises from the beatings,” Belinda reveals in the book. “It got to the point where we were calling the police and ambulance to our house once a week because we needed their help. We didn’t know what else to do. The other kids were genuinely worried Alexa was going to kill us. Some of them told us we needed to find a care home for her.”
“We weren’t going to do that. We weren’t going to give up on Lex. Not then, not ever.”
There isn’t a guidebook to caring for someone with a TBI. Belinda and Russell didn’t have a map – they had to feel their way through the challenges in the dark. Fortunately, they were in a position where they could invest time, resources and money into Lex’s recovery.
They took Lex to a neurocounsellor and a psychiatrist. Then, they hired a neuro-occupational therapist, a behavioural coach and support workers. They learned how to manage her triggers and how to distract her to avoid a meltdown. The thing that helped most, though, was getting her back in the pool.
Lex started swimming as a part of her physical rehab, in the hope of strengthening her damaged right side, but she soon found it helped with her mental health as well. “Being in the pool is like therapy. It’s refreshing and relaxing to just focus on the sets and switch off for a bit,” says Lex, noting that swimming gave her a new purpose in life.
After attending a development camp with Para Swimming in early 2022, Lex began training with coach Jon Bell and set her sights on the 2024 Paralympics in Paris.
As you may have gleaned already, Lex is stubborn. Once she locks in on something, there’s no stopping her. Lex moved to the Gold Coast for her training, travelled to Mexico to get internationally classified as a Paralympic swimmer, and earned her place on the Australian Dolphins squad. Which brings us to miracle number two.
September 2024, Paris La Défense Arena, France: With her family watching in the stands at the stadium and Australia tuning in at home, Lex won two gold medals and a silver medal at the Paralympics.
“Winning at the Paralympics made me proud of how far I had come. I set a goal for myself, and I did it for myself,” says Lex, who was crowned the golden girl of the Games, not only because of her medal haul, but also because of her dance moves on the podium and her entertaining post-race interviews.
“Seeing my girl with those three medals around her neck – the medals Michela had predicted when Lex was still in hospital – was a feeling like no other,” says Russell, once again with tears in his eyes. “I cry every time I talk about it. Lex has inspired so many people, including me. She’s our miracle girl.”
Of course, the miracle couldn’t have happened without an enormous amount of hard work. Lex, now 24, credits all her success and progress to her mum and dad: “My parents are the reason I’m here. They’re the reason I’m alive, and the reason I’m able to live my best second life.”
Today, Lex’s life is a full one. She has recently moved into a new apartment on the Gold Coast with her best friend, Emma, and she is training in the pool at the local Miami Aquatic Centre. On top of that, Lex is forging a career in music as a DJ, releasing a new track with her record label, etc., and becoming a published author with the launch of Sink Or Swim.
“The whole reason I wanted to write a book was to get my story out there, to tell the world who I really am, and to share the reality of living with a TBI,” she says. “I want people to learn about TBIs, to understand them better and to accept those of us who have them. It’s been nearly five years since my accident, and life is still hard every day. I have tough times, and I need support, but I know I’m improving and getting better.”
Reflecting on how far Lex has come since she first got home from the hospital, Belinda and Russell say they’ve seen extraordinary growth. “The improvement is amazing. Lex still has big emotions, but they’re less heightened and extreme. She knows how to control them, and we know how to reason with her,” says Belinda.
“We want people who have a loved one with a TBI to know that there is a way to get through the difficult times,” adds Russell. “It can be tempting to give up, but if you can hold on through the ups and downs, and learn about TBIs, you can understand better. And that’s when things get better. I’m proud of the person Lex has become and all the things she’s giving back to the world.”
For Lex, her greatest achievement is simply being here. “I’m proud that I fought hard to live,” she says. And live she does.
Soon, another photo will be added to the shelf of memories in Russell and Belinda’s apartment. An image from The Weekly’s photo shoot – of the proud parents smiling with their miracle girl – will stand as a testament to the power of hope.
Sink or Swim by Alexa Leary with Alley Pascoe, Penguin Random House, is out now.
This feature originally appeared in the May 2026 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. Subscribe so you never miss an issue.
