At an age more given to cardigans and cups of tea, 69-year-old grandmother Emilie Gradisek still dons a tracksuit as the "spiritual leader" of Slovenia's sitting volleyball team at the Beijing Paralympics.

Gradisek's forays into the cut and thrust of competition have earned her three world championship medals with the high-achieving Slovenians.

On Sunday, Gradisek narrowly missed out on Paralympic honors after her team lost its bronze-medal match to the Netherlands.

Having surrendered the floor to younger bodies, Gradisek spends more time on the bench than on court these days, acting as a motivator and pillar of wisdom beside the coach.

"It makes me feel very proud to be the oldest Paralympic athlete," Gradisek, who resides in Ravne na Koroskem, a sleepy resort town in northern Slovenia, said.

"I'm the spiritual leader. I make the players feel good about themselves and make them laugh. I cook good energy for the whole team. And excellent coffee!"

Gradisek, who is quick to laugh and sports a shock of ginger hair, joined the team over 10 years ago on the invitation of coach Adie Urnaut, as a way of getting her over the doldrums of hip surgery.

"I felt handicapped at the time. But now I know that even with a handicap you can still be happy and especially on the field when you win ... I stayed with the team because sport makes me feel young," she said.

If not for love and Cold War politics, however, Gradisek may well have been playing for the Czech Republic.

Born in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939, she was a member of a touring folk art troupe in the late 60s during the country's attempts to cast off its Soviet shackles.

After Russian tanks rolled in to crush the Prague Spring movement in 1968, Gradisek was forced to pause in Yugoslavia on the way home from a trip to the seaside in Bulgaria to wait for the country's borders to reopen.

The month-long sabbatical saw her fall in love with a local man in Ravne na Koroskem and eventually move there permanently in 1970.

Four decades on, the coach pays tribute to Gradisek for raising the spirits of the team: "They sing whether they win or lose, they laugh a lot. Emilie is one of the key factors of this family spirit, before and after matches," Urnaut said.

She is also a mere 56 years older than the youngest Paralympian: fellow Czech native Katerina Komarkova, a gum-chewing 13-year-old swimmer born with an arm that ends above the elbow.

"I really felt how young I was out there. Really like a child among the grown-ups," Komarkova, whose medal ambitions in the women's 100m breaststroke last week were thwarted by an attack of big-occasion nerves, said.

"But it's been an excellent experience ... and it's great knowing that giants like Michael Phelps swam here."

Agencies