What do you do when you've climbed the mountain? 

It's a question Madison de Rozario faced when she finally broke through for a Paralympic Gold in the 800m T54 wheelchair race in Tokyo before doubling down with victory in the marathon just days later.

After making her Paralympic debut 13 years earlier in Beijing when she was just 14, de Rozario had broken world records, won three World Championship golds and Paralympics silver medals, but never the "elusive" gold. But now she was a two-time winner and undisputedly the world-beating athlete she always dreamed of becoming.

So, what now?

After all, she is the most recognised Paralympic athlete in Australia, having started wheelchair racing when she was just 12, appearing at the Paralympics just two years later. She's an outspoken advocate on disability. She's on the cover of magazines, she's even had a Barbie doll made in her likeness.

"I always kind of wondered what would happen after, finally, that elusive gold sort of happened," she told ABC Sport.

"I think I thought we'd kind of lose some amount of motivation or like the urgency of it would sort of begin to fade a little.

"But it's almost done the opposite.

"Once you kind of do it, you want to know how much further you can go than that."

Which is why at just 30-years-old and going into her fifth Games, de Rozario is as driven as ever.

"It's like how you can do it again and how you can do it with integrity, and how you can do it as a force as the field continues to get so much stronger and leading into these games," she said.

Because this is a sport that is "evolving so quickly, that three years is so much time for everything to change", de Rozario said.

There are more people coming into the sport; the wheelchairs are getting lighter and more high-tech; and now there's a growing group of wheelchair racers worldwide that, like de Rozario, are full-time elite athletes with government funding and private sponsorship

"It is unbelievable," she said.

"I haven't seen a jump like this in my career.

"In wheelchair racing, it's becoming far more realistic to be able to be a full-time athlete … and the result of that is faster athletes, it's stronger athletes.

"And so, it's exciting going into Paris, but it's also a little bit nerve wracking — it kind of keeps the motivation alive when there's no certainty of what's going to happen."

There's no question the motivation is still there.

On the track, she's dropped the 800m from her schedule, and wants to go all out for the missing pieces in her CV: gold in the 1500m (bronze in Tokyo) and 5000m (fifth in Tokyo).

"We weren't willing to line up for an event that we didn't think we could contend a gold medal in," she said.

"The 1500, the five — that's the reason we did put them on the program. There's as much focus on those as there is on the marathon in my three events and that's kind of exciting going in."

Those two track events will occupy de Rozario early in the games program, before a five-day break to re-set herself and then get on the road to defend her gold medal in the marathon.

There's just one issue: the cobbles.

France's legendary pavé will be under-wheel, rattling de Rozario's bones throughout the course and particularly as the field climbs the legendary Champs Élysées and then hurtles back down the avenue at the pointy end of what will be a gruelling race.

The only problem is there's not a lot of cobblestones to be found for practising on at Olympic Park in Sydney where she trains daily.

"We've been doing what we can with what we have in the area that we train, she said.

"So, there's one stretch of road we have that is pavers here in Olympic Park and we've been going over that almost every single session purely just for the exposure to that."

Then there's negotiating tight corners, which de Rozario admits isn't a strength of hers, as well as the heat and humidity.

"It's going to be uncomfortable, but I think it'll be new territory for all of us to be honest," she said.

By then de Rozario will have negotiated some more new territory – as the joint flag bearer for the Australian team with swimmer Brendon Hall at the Paralympic Games opening ceremony.

Marching at the head of her team will give her an added bonus: A look at the Champs Élysées, which is hosting the opening ceremony, as the Seine did during the Olympics.

De Rozario said she was overwhelmed when Paralympic Chef de Mission Kate McLoughlin busted in to one of her training sessions to deliver the news.

"You kind of never think something like that will happen," de Rozario said.

"You go from representing Australia for the first time and you walk out behind someone else carrying the flag and you wear it, you know, on your shirt when you race.

"And you know, if you really nail it, maybe you get to kind of be in that top three that holds it up in the stadium amongst your counterparts.

"And then if you really, really nail it, you get to see it raised in that stadium while your anthem plays.

"And the idea of that progression of things being I now get to carry that same flag that has been such a visual staple throughout my entire career, it's so powerful.

"It's surreal, but it's very exciting."

And fitting for Australia's highest-profile Paralympic athlete.

Her face, with its steely focus that can transform into a 1000-watt smile, will be everywhere during these Paralympic Games.

She has achieved that heady mix of combining excellence and dedication in sport with intelligence and exceptional communication abilities.

It's a skillset she uses to act as an advocate for people living with disabilities. But it wasn't always a platform that she was keen to climb.

"If you told 17-year-old me this is what we'd be doing, I would have been devastated for that to be the case when I started racing," she said.

"I saw the contrast between our Olympians and our Paralympians and that our Olympians got to just be athletes and kind of got to pick what they cared about and chose to use their platform for no matter what that was going to be.

"Our Paralympians were all advocates as well, and were all having conversations about disability.

But over time her position changed.

"I think it really clicked what a waste that was that I was choosing not to do that and not just a loss to myself but to an entire community that I was a part of," she said.

"There was definitely a shift I think after those London Games, when I reassessed how I view the sport, but also how I viewed myself and my place in it.

"I realised that I just internalise this resentment of being a part of how we do view disability as a society.

"I was shunning an enormous part of me that I'm incredibly proud of because of how I had inadvertently been taught to do it by society and how there was a chance that I could actually use that platform for something really, really good."

De Rozario began a period of reflection and a change in how she viewed herself – not just as a person with a disability, but as an athlete, as a person of colour, and as a woman.

With a few notable exceptions, such as swimmer, Ellie Cole, it's largely been the male athletes who led the conversation about disability in Australia, like Kurt Fearnley and Dylan Alcott.

"And I didn't want to be a representative of disability, I think that's just a stepping-stone to authentic diversity," de Rozario said.

"Diversity, I suppose, is having people that represent a minority that is under represented.

"But when you do that, you run the risk of myself as that person, my entire identity becoming 'disability'.

"I wanted to shift from that idea to more one of visibility where someone like me was visible, but in all of their identity and all of their power and all of the multifaceted ways we exist.

But there's a dilemma. When the Paralympics come around, we are exposed to almost saturation coverage of people with a disability in all their various forms.

And yet, these athletes that we see on our screens aren't normal – they're exceptional in every sense of the word – at the far end of a bell-curve of athletic ability and dedication to their cause.

We see the likes of de Rozario, a full-time elite athlete at the peak of her physical power, not your average Joe in the street.

It would be like assuming that your average Australian can swim 100m under 50 seconds like Kyle Chalmers or pole vault six metres like Nina Kennedy.

It's a tricky aspect of the Paralympics, de Rozario said.

"If the only way we decide disability is acceptable is if it's this high-performing, unattainable goal, then we're not doing justice to the entire community," she said.

"That's something that I struggle with as a Paralympian is I have this platform and this spotlight that other people in my community don't have."

She draws a distinction between the Paralympic Games and the Paralympic movement, which she said was about disability across the board.

"It's 15 per cent of the global population, 20 per cent of Australia's population," she said.

"And that doesn't look like how we look on your TV screen, it looks like the person that you see at work; it's who you run into at the grocery store.

"I don't want people that look like me to watch the Paralympic Games and want to be a Paralympian.

"I want young kids with a disability and their families and their friends to watch the Paralympics and just see endless potential in themselves and in kids with a disability.

"And you want to see every person from every kind of walk of life doing anything and everything they want to do."

Without pity, or without being seen as inspirational.

Because, as de Rozario said, people with a disability can often be seen in those binary terms.

There are tropes that go hand-in-hand with Paralympics reporting: the storytelling often involves someone overcoming adversity to rise up and become an inspiration.

But de Rozario wants to challenge the media and by extension, the public, to change that sort of thinking.

"I think when we picture someone's life, we kind of imagine the rollercoaster that would be — it's the highs and the lows," she said.

"I think when you see a Paralympian you think Paralympians are high, whether it be a gold medal or whether it be whatever it is, and the low must be the acquisition of disability at some point.

"I was three when I acquired my disability, I don't remember it at all.

"The assumption is still that at three years old I stopped walking, and this is what we have decided to be the low, even though I have no memory of it.

"We're so comfortable with that narrative for Paralympians.

"There is this idea that disability and trauma go hand in hand.

"And I will get asked that exact question quite often … it is: 'How has that helped you overcome your disability?'

"And I'm also standing in front of them with a visible disability while we're having this conversation."

She said what people actually mean to ask is how has sport helped someone overcome the trauma of acquiring a disability.

"That's a valid question and it's real," she said.

She said sport had helped her accept her disability and overcome the trauma associated with her disability and the "internalised ableism" she developed, even though she can't remember when she lost the ability to walk.

"Sport absolutely helped me evolve and overcome that as far as my disability it's helped me lean into it," she said.

"It's helped me love it so much more. It's helped me become so much more comfortable with disability, and they're very different things to overcoming it."

Which brings us back to sport and more particularly a packed Paralympic program for de Rozario starting and ending on the Champs Élysées.

She's done the relentless kilometres of training indoors and outdoors. She's spent time training in a heat chamber. She's spent endless hours in the gym. She's pushed her chair over every lump of paving at Sydney Olympic Park to get whatever edge she can. Now is the time for Madison de Rozario to shine.

Last time around at the Paralympics in Tokyo she broke the gold medal drought but did so in front of empty stands and less-than-packed roads on the marathon.

In the city of light, she'll have an audience witness her try to finally get gold in the 1,500m and 5,000m and then race through some of the most famous streets in the world during the marathon.

De Rozario's star may never shine so brightly as a sportswoman, nor as the face of Paralympic sport in Australia.

But whatever happens in Paris, de Rozario has been on a journey that's given her a deep understanding of her role in the world and how she views herself in it.

She has raised the profile of Paralympic sport as much as anyone before and has been a powerful advocate for all people with a disability.

It says so much about the changing face of Australia, diversity and acceptance that a disabled woman is one of the most recognised and admired sportspeople in the country.

Whether she wins or loses at the games, the nation is better for it.