Two-time Paralympic medal winner Wu Baili will be watching the wheelchair fencing team compete in Rio de Janeiro from her home in China this week. As of Monday, the nation currently leads the medal table with 92 medals, including 39 gold.

After a glorious performance at the London Paralympics four years ago, the 29-year-old Wu failed to make the cut this year, in part due to a surgery in 2014 that set back her training.

But Wu isn’t complaining. After 12 years of training, she earned the highest possible honor in disability sports — a Paralympic gold medal — and also the highest salary of her life, which came in the form of a 500,000-yuan ($74,862) bonus.

The win gave Wu a surge of confidence, because she knows that her future would be uncertain if she were to leave the team. Here at the training center in Shanghai, Wu is a world-class athlete. “But if we were to go out into society, we might be nothing at all,” she tells Sixth Tone.

Despite affirmative action policies that give companies tax breaks for employing people with disabilities, Wu can only think of a few who have been able to secure decent, steady jobs: Jin Jing, her former teammate, became famous in China for her patriotism as a torchbearer in 2008, when she protected the Olympic torch from being snuffed out by political protestors in Paris. After she left the sport, Jin found a job in local government.

Wheelchair fencing is just one of the 22 events at the 2016 Paralympic Games in Rio. From Sept. 12 to 16, competitors in protective masks, gloves, and outerwear will have their chairs fixed to the ground before fending off each other’s attacks in displays of swift and furious skill. Twelve Chinese fencers will be among them, and five of these are from Shanghai.

The latest government estimates that there are more than 85 million people with disabilities in China, with 27 million officially registered. In 2015, a total of 9,055 sports events were held countrywide for disabled people. Most were casual community activities, such as wheelchair dancing or blind board games, organized by the national and local disability unions. But the government is pushing to develop the disability sports sector, with more funding, dedicated facilities, and professional training.

For now, the best disability sports centers are located in big east-coast cities like Shanghai. Wu began wheelchair fencing where she grew up, in southwest China’s Yunnan province, after attending a workshop when she was 17 years old. But the facilities in Yunnan were under-resourced and inconsistent, so in 2007 she moved to join the more mature, more professional Shanghai Wheelchair Fencing Team.

Wu was born with a dislocated hip joint, which means she walks with a heavy limp. That puts her in “Class A” for wheelchair fencing, an event that’s divided by weapon, gender, and severity of disability. Class A fencers are those who can bend and control their upper bodies, while fencers whose disability impacts their torso or fencing arm in addition to their legs are in Class B. “Class A wheelchair fencing is more competitive than Class B,” Wu tells Sixth Tone.

To represent China internationally, a fencer needs to finish in the top two in two national competitions. Though Wu is still training, she wasn’t selected for the Paralympics team this year because she missed two ranking competitions after a hip replacement surgery in December 2014, following a fall that damaged her good leg.

While non-disabled fencers have to be quick on their feet to control tempo and dominate space, wheelchair fencers rely on strength and movements from the waist up. The distance between the duelers is shorter, demanding quick reactions. Combat is focused and intense.

“We train for power, speed, sense of distance, and technical skills,” says Wu, dressed in a red-and-white team uniform emblazoned with the Chinese flag. As she speaks to Sixth Tone, her teammates practice stabbing at tennis balls suspended in midair by wires. Some play wheelchair badminton; others face off in one-on-one combat.

The training is tough. Even with protective gear, Wu’s arms are covered in red welts from her opponents’ attacks. For the last six months, Wu has been staying in the sports center’s on-site dorm so she can train more intensively. She only sees her husband once a week, and her parents in Yunnan even less frequently. “Before major competitions, we’re in semi-isolation," she says, explaining that before the 2012 Paralympics in London, she didn’t go home for half a year. Even without a major event, she trains so much that she says she can’t take care of her family.

Even as a full-time professional athlete, Wu’s regular income from fencing is less than the minimum wage in Shanghai. While her non-disabled counterparts can supplement their incomes with endorsements and media appearances, the market doesn’t embrace disabled athletes in the same way. The fencers receive an allowance of 30 to 70 yuan for each training day, which means that in an average month Wu — one of the team’s highest earners — receives about 1,820 yuan for training.

The training center provides all the athletes with free meals and accommodation, and most of the athletes also receive government pensions, which vary by province and level of disability, or have other sources of income. Competition bonuses contribute to a large portion of each athlete’s income, but with no matches at the club level, opportunities to win these bonuses are infrequent.

Yet professional sport remains one of the most glamorous and respected careers available to people with disabilities in China. The team’s newest member, 22-year-old Li Hao, dreamed of being a soldier when he was young. He lost his right leg after a traffic accident when he was 2 years old. As Li grew older, he learned that the army wouldn’t accept someone with his disability, but his childhood ambition for combat drew him to fencing. “A fencing competition is also a battle,” he says.

These days, Li dreams of competing in the 2020 Tokyo Paralympics. Training dominates his waking hours, and even invades his sleep. “Sometimes when I’ve been thinking about how an opponent deflected one of my attacks so cleanly, I’ll mimic the move in my sleep,” he says.

Li’s fighting spirit was seeded early in his life. His classmates bullied him, calling him a cripple and forcing him to do their homework. The torment continued even after he transferred to another school. By the time he reached junior high, Li had begun to fight back, joining a gang and beating up the kids who had bullied him before. “I just wanted to pay back what I had suffered,” he remembers. “Once people were afraid, they never called me names.”

Later, Li learned to channel his aggression into sports. One day, as he was pedaling his bicycle home with one leg, he saw a car following him. He sped up, but the car followed him home. The driver turned out to be a coach from the Sichuan province disabled sports team who had taken note of Li’s athleticism.

At first Li trained as a swimmer, but his coach pushed him into an endless stream of competitive events without any systematic or targeted training. “Butterfly, breaststroke, freestyle, 100 meters, 200 meters — he wanted me to do everything,” Li says. Eventually he turned to fencing, joining the Shanghai team in May 2015.

The Shanghai Wheelchair Fencing Team was founded in 2000. The city has for years been a powerhouse of disability sports, contributing 14 gold medals to China’s Paralympics tally in 2008 and 12 in 2012. The team now has 21 members, and is on the lookout for more reserves and young talent.

In the past, many wheelchair fencers started their sports careers later in life. But as the competition gets fiercer in China and around the world, the Shanghai team wants to transform its recruitment process to focus on candidates from 10 to 20 years old, so they can get a head start on intensive and systematic training with professional coaches.

But recruitment has been a struggle. Earlier this year, community engagement officer Xu Yiren called more than 300 households with disabled family members in the local area to invite them to an open house at the Shanghai disabled sports training facility, but only 37 accepted the invitation, and when the day arrived, only 10 families showed up. Finally, following a summer training camp, three were selected to train at the center — among them, one fencer.

As an amputee himself, Xu understands the issues affecting disabled people in China, and why they may be unwilling to join the world of professional sports. With so much discrimination at school and in the workplace, many disabled people are reluctant to step into new territory. Parents can also be overprotective of their disabled children, fearing anything that could potentially bring them harm.

Disability sports also haven’t achieved a particularly high profile yet, even among disabled people themselves. “It’s natural that they might not know what wheelchair fencing is,” Xu Yiren says. Compared to the Olympic fever that seduces the nation, the Paralympics attract much less media coverage and social media discussion.

It’s a long road ahead, but Xu looks forward to being part of the progress. Beyond developing the professionalism and public recognition of disability sports, the center already has an inestimable impact on the lives of its athletes and employees by creating a community of equals. “In the subway, people always give me sidelong glances, or whisper behind my back,” he says. “But here, we’re all in it together.”

(Header image: The Shanghai Wheelchair Fencing Team poses for a photo at the Shanghai Disabled Sports Training Center, Sept. 6, 2016. The team was established in 2000. Wu Yue/Sixth Tone)