Sante Paris 2024! Paralympic Media Wrap

The Dolphins closed off their time at La Defense Arena with 6 gold, 8 silver and 13 bronze medals in tow – in fact every single male swimmer claimed a medal at the Paris 2024 Paralympics. Overall, the Dolphins contributed the most to Australia’s total Paralympic medal haul of 63.

The thirty-strong swim team provided 10 days of highlights including:

• Debutant Alexa Leary dancing atop the dais, celebrating her world record and first individual Paralympic gold. The 23-year-old set a new mark of 59.60s during the women’s 100m freestyle S9 heats before bettering that time less than twenty-four hours later in the final (59.53).
• Ben Hance smashing his own world record in the men’s 100m backstroke S14 heats, touching in at 56.52 and then honouring his late father with a gold medal, becoming the first ever to win back-to-back in the event.
• Our Paralympic swimmers breaking 12 records in Paris – two World Records, two Paralympic Records and eight Oceania Records.

And it all started with veteran Dolphin Brenden Hall leading the Australian Team and carrying the flag at the Opening Ceremony of the 2024 Paralympic Games.

Australians celebrated at home by tuning into Nine Network’s coverage: first day of the Games secured a National Total Television Reach of 3.082 million across Channel 9, 9Gem and 9Now.

And notably, Day 4 of competition (1 September) – which featured Ahmed Kelly’s shock DQ in the SM3 150 IM heats, only to be reinstated for the final on appeal in which he won silver –  secured a National Total TV Reach of 3.637 million across the Nine Network.

From the team’s touch down in Chartres, France (Aug 14) to September 14, the Australian Paralympic Dolphins were mentioned across all media at least 51.6K times for a potential reach of 23.7 billion, the estimated value of earned media coverage was $219 million.

On owned social media channels, 5.35 million users were organically reached across the Swimming Australia and Dolphins AUS Facebook, Instagram and X (Twitter) channels.

A standout social media post for the Paralympic campaign was ‘World Hold On’, posted on 5 September which celebrated Leary’s two world records and gold medals. On Instagram alone, the post reached at least 375k users with 23.5k likes, 340 comments and over 700 shares.

Leary’s impressive feat also helped drive broadcast and external social media as both channels recorded top numbers on 4 September – the competition day of Leary’s world record and golden swim. Broadcast got most daily mentions of 6.1k and social media recorded at least 420 mentions.

Swimming Australia’s High-Performance Unit, widely regarded as one of the best on the global stage, functions at the elite level with the support of the Australian Government, through the Australian Sports Commission and the Australian Institute of Sport, as well as the National Institute Network and other partners such as Arena, Griffith University, Nine Network, Pho3nix Foundation and Yumi’s.

Also contributing to swimming’s successes are the many states, territories and organisations who continue to feed the pipeline of talent that makes swimming the biggest participation sport, with our clubs the heartbeat of Swimming Australia.