In short:

Australia's Steelers have begun their Wheelchair Rugby World Championship defence in Brazil, with Ella Sabljak returning to international competition less than a year after giving birth.

Australia is bringing four female athletes to the mixed-gender tournament.

What's next?

The Steelers will play five pool matches across the next four days, with the knockouts beginning on Saturday morning, Australian time.

For Ella Sabljak, the 2026 Wheelchair Rugby World Championships will be a little different to her tournament debut in Denmark four years earlier.

Sabljak, one of four women on the Australian Steelers' mixed-gender roster for the event, is making her return to international competition less than a year after giving birth to her first child.

Along for the ride is baby Billie, slotting into a non-playing but important morale-based role with the team, which has just begun its title defence in the Brazilian city of São Paulo.

And motherhood has given Sabljak a blunt new perspective.

"Back then [at the 2022 World Championships] you got to mess around a bit and have fun, where now I want to get in, I want to work hard, and I want to get out," Sabljak told ABC Sport after arriving in camp.

"I'm not into all the mess around like I used to be. If something's going to take up my time away from Billie, it's going to be worth it. She is my number one priority.

"Let's get in, let's f s up, and let's get out of here."

The road back to international competition

It has not been a straightforward journey back to the international arena for Sabljak, who says she would never have anticipated such a quick return to representative duties.

Only a visit from some of her Steelers teammates in the weeks after giving birth convinced her to return to the sport.

"I was at the stage of postpartum where I didn't know if I wanted to [come back] and they just planted the seed around returning to sport," Sabljak said.

But working off a tailored, week-by-week plan, Sabljak plotted her return to elite international competition, all while breastfeeding and working her day job.

Her involvement at the 2026 tournament comes 11 months after Billie's birth, and it is a feat Sabljak never would have thought possible in the immediate aftermath of becoming a mother.

"Not a chance [did I expect to be at the tournament]," she said.

"I thought about it and then we just kind of joked about it, and I was like, 'That's not going to happen! We've got a baby. We've got a small human we need to care for!'"

But Sabljak has felt right at home bringing Billie into the Steelers' camp, with several of her teammates already parents themselves.

Captain Chris Bond, a 15-year veteran of the team with kids aged four and six, told ABC Sport Billie's presence in the camp has been "refreshing" for the whole team.

"We're not their parent, but we get to hang out with them and fulfil that part of us when we're away from our own kids," Bond said.

"It brings out the human side of our team. We are athletes, and we're going to do a job.

"But at the end of the day we're people, and we're humans, and we've got lives outside of sport, and the closer we can connect as people and friends and humans, the better connection we have on court as athletes."

Transitioning to a full-throttle, mixed-gender sport

Previously known by the rather foreboding moniker "murderball", wheelchair rugby is a full-contact sport, renowned for its big hits and end-to-end action.

It does not resemble either rugby code much, with a circular ball permitted to be thrown in any direction.

And unusually for elite-level international sport, it is contested by mixed-gender teams.

Women have traditionally had little representation at the highest level, but a recent rejigging of classification rules as well as a top-down, institutional emphasis on expanding female pathways within the sport have aimed at changing that.

However, questions remain over the long-term viability of the mixed-gender model, with one study in 2025 finding only 2.2 per cent of wheelchair rugby players internationally to be female.

The Steelers are the exception, having focused on increasing female representation over the past few years.

There are four women in the squad for the 2026 World Championships, accounting for a third of the team.

Bond says the increase in female representation has coincided with a positive cultural shift for the Steelers, who have been the standard-bearers for international competition in the modern era, winning two World Championship titles and two Paralympic golds since 2012.

He says the "rough and tumble, blokey culture" has transformed and the players now "accept anyone for who they are".

For Sabljak, who was a Paralympian in wheelchair basketball before switching codes in 2022, the transition to a mixed-gender sport had its challenges.

"The locker rooms are vastly different; an all-girls locker room versus a boys-dominant locker room is quite, quite different," Sabljak said.

"Just like the conversations that happen, the music that's being played."

Shae Graham became the first woman to represent the Steelers at a Paralympic Games at Tokyo 2020, and Sabljak said she would not have conceived of joining the team if it were not for Graham's breakthrough.

Along with Sabljak and Graham, Emilie Miller is now a mainstay of the Steelers set-up, while Lilliana Prucha is making her World Championships debut in Brazil.

"[Having women in the team] is just the norm now, nobody questions it," Sabljak said.

While the Steelers are defending world champions, they enter this year's tournament with a point to prove, having claimed bronze at the 2024 Paralympics, the last major international meet.

That was the team's second-lowest finish across seven international tournaments since 2012, after placing fourth at Tokyo 2020.

Bond says the international standard has never been higher, with "six or seven" nations now serious contenders to finish atop the podium, but believes this Steelers side is "the strongest he's ever been a part of".

"I'm really excited about this team," Bond said.

"We've got so much more depth than we've ever had, we feel really good, really prepared, and the rest is up to the sporting gods."