Next month, 21-year-old Lauren Ball will sprint down the racetrack at Launceston’s Northern Athletics Centre in Tasmania, her arms and legs pumping as hard as they can, wind in her hair, and air coursing through her lungs.

As a competitor in the 18th Australian Transplant Games she won’t be alone, but will also carry with her the memory of the little boy who gave her these air-filled lungs.

“He would be my age if he were still alive today,” says Ball, who has thought of him as she’s reached milestones she never thought she’d reach – birthdays, graduating from high school, her first job.

“So I’m honouring him and his family while running.”

Ball was born with a rare genetic lung condition that left her reliant on oxygen 24 hours a day and in need of a wheelchair and BiPAP (bi-level positive airway pressure) support for the first six years of her life.

For parents Helen and Scott, then newlywed and welcoming their first child into the world, it was a terrifying period, fraught with helplessness.

“We literally got told that you will not leave hospital. It was really difficult,” recalls Helen.

But the young couple refused to give up – they did eventually bring Ball home to Jervis Bay, NSW – and realised her only chance at survival was a lung transplant.

“Prior to Lauren, the youngest child that had been transplanted [in Australia] was an 11-year-old. Lauren was only about three, and we kept asking and they kept saying no,” she says.

They knew surgeons overseas were performing lung transplants on patients her age but, after speaking to an American hospital and realising the procedure would cost upwards of $1 million (not to mention the toll of flying that far with a sick child), realised it was a pipe dream.

Finally, when Ball was six, they received the call they’d been hoping for – making her the youngest person in Australia at the time to undergo a lung transplant.

“She had had a few hiccups in there … but she managed to power through it, and it was like a butterfly coming out of a chrysalis,” Helen says of watching her daughter thrive post-transplant as she learnt to walk, talk and breathe on her own again.

For Ball, a self-professed bookworm and musical-theatre lover, merely competing in the games is achievement enough, regardless of how she places in September.

“I wanted to test myself and it’s something that pushes me out of my comfort zone,” she says.

“I just went on a 20-minute run and I probably went through every feeling in the world. I got angry, I got upset, but I was happy because I completely did it,” she says, crediting her parents and doctors with continually pushing and believing in her.

Ball, who just completed her certificate II in hospitality while working in her local bakery, aspires to be a librarian and eventually transition into museum studies one day.

About 500 athletes – spanning recipients, those waiting for a transplant, living donors, donor families and supporters – will compete in this year’s games, across 20 sports including golf, cycling and basketball.

Chris Thomas, chief executive of Transplant Australia, says the games are considered a rite of passage for many transplant recipients.

“We often hear they have their running shoes at the end of the bed, and set a life goal of saying, ‘Hey, baby, I’m back’, through the games.”

Beyond the physical achievement, the competition is a chance for the community to come together and find kinship and solace in their similarities and differences, says Thomas.

For him, the spirit of the games is a testament to the importance of organ donation, and the work still to be done.

In 2025, 1438 Australians received a life-saving transplant from 557 deceased donors – the highest number of donors on record.

Still, the consent rate remains low at 53 per cent, lagging behind its 2018 peak of 60 per cent – despite the fact surveys consistently show the majority of Australians support organ donation.

About 80 per cent of families agree to donation in the hospital if they know their loved one is registered, dropping to about 40 per cent when they don’t know if their family member wanted to be a donor.

Lucinda Barry, chief executive of DonateLife (run by the government’s Organ and Tissue Authority), encourages anyone who supports donation to register and have a conversation with their family about this decision.

“There’s apathy, and people just don’t think about their own mortality – they don’t think about getting a will [for example]. It falls into death literacy and preparation,” agrees Thomas.

Meanwhile, rates of living donations (kidney or liver transplants) continue to decline. In 2025 there were 230 living kidney donors, a 9 per cent decrease from 2024.

“The biggest [transplant] waitlist we have is for people whose kidneys have failed, and the overwhelming majority are on dialysis,” says Barry.

In 2024 the government approved a national strategy aimed at addressing these gaps in organ and tissue donation but Thomas says it is yet to be funded.

“There are economic savings to people coming off dialysis with a kidney transplant … We need a more centralised system for living donation, unity around the values of living donation and to help people understand that it’s an extremely safe procedure,” he says.

Barry says DonateLife is working with government to identify these barriers before funding is allocated.

Kidney transplant recipient Brian Donovan helped establish the inaugural Australian Transplant Games in Melbourne in 1988 (the first World Transplant Games were held in England a decade earlier).

The 78-year-old was born with a rare birth defect that, like Ball, meant doctors thought he would not survive childhood.

He spent eight years of his 20s on dialysis – a mentally and physically gruelling process that left him with severe bone disease – all while working full-time and raising a young family.

Donovan recalls his determination to maintain his independence while working in Kmart’s advertising department.

“After work I’d count the electricity poles. I had nine of them to go to the bus stop, and I’d lean up against the first one and my aim was to get to the next one. And that’s how I got on the bus,” he says.

Finally, in 1982, his younger brother Ray, who died last year, was approved to donate a kidney.

“As soon as I had my transplant I was jumping up and down in bed,” says Donovan.

“I couldn’t walk anywhere – I had to run. Even going back to work, I never used the lift. I used to run up the stairs; I had so much energy again.”

Pauline, Donovan’s wife of 55 years, says the transplant “was like having a new life”.

“Before, everything revolved around the kidney machine. And after, we weren’t stuck to it any more. We could take our daughters places and do all sorts of things,” she says.

In the almost five decades since his transplant, Donovan has competed around the world in tennis and table tennis, picking up bronze, silver and gold medals in the Australian and international games.

But the real glory, he says, should go to his wife.

“Pauline should win a medal for looking after me. Sometimes I find it very difficult to explain how much she did for me,” says Donovan, who cites walking his daughters down the aisle and watching them become parents themselves among his proudest moments.

In his later years, Donovan has traded tennis for bowls, and will compete alongside a 10-year-old kidney transplant recipient next month. Age has yet to subdue his ferocious spirit.

“Bowls is pretty bloody competitive, there’s a will to win even in social competitions,” he says.

While Ball and Donovan are in Launceston next month, student Orlando Sinn will be in Germany representing Australia in the Transplant Football World Cup.

The 17-year-old was born with a rare liver condition called biliary atresia, and at the age of just one received a life-saving transplant.

“It was a pretty devastating time. You want to fix your children or protect them and I felt I couldn’t do that,” says dad Shane, recalling the months his son spent in the ICU – at least five of which were in an induced coma.

Sinn has been playing football with Chelsea FC in Melbourne since he was five but it wasn’t until last year he joined the Australian transplant football team, meeting others like him for the first time in his life.

“I was treated pretty normally, growing up, but there’s a 20-year-old boy on the team who has the exact same story as me, which is pretty cool,” says Sinn, who is the youngest on the squad.

The tournament will be the teenager’s first time in Europe.

“I’m just looking forward to being with all the people in the Australian team, we’re pretty close in terms of our shared experiences,” he says.

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