Let it roll baby, roll: Australia champions of the world

• The Australian Rollers beat Italy 81-57 in the World Championship Gold Medal game
• Australia won all seven games in Ottawa for a third world title
• The semi-final against Germany was won by a single point, 84-83

Victorian wheelchair basketball star Jaylen Brown shot 13 from 18 and scored 28 points, and the Australian Rollers are world champions again.

Australia beat Italy 81-57 in the Gold Medal game of the 2026 IWBF Wheelchair Basketball World Championships at TD Place Arena in Ottawa, a match that tipped at 4:45pm Saturday local time and 6:45am Sunday in Australia. It is Australia's third world title, after 2010 and 2014, and the first in twelve years.

Brown was the best player on the floor in the final and he had been the best player in the tournament before it. He added six rebounds and six assists to the 28 points, in under 29 minutes, at 72 per cent from the field against a side that had not lost a game either.

What he did two days earlier was the reason there was a final to win at all.

In the semi-final against Germany, Brown scored 37 points, took 16 rebounds and handed out eight assists, and he did not leave the floor once. He played all 45 minutes of a game that went to overtime and finished 84-83. A tournament that reads as a procession in the results column came down to a single point, and the man who carried it played every second available.

He was not alone in the final. Tom O'Neill-Thorne finished with 20 points, seven rebounds and 16 assists in just over 37 minutes, setting up a substantial share of an 81-point night. Bill Latham added 12 points and seven rebounds, and Tristan Knowles scored eight in under 13 minutes off the bench.

Australia won every game they played. The Rollers opened with 100-46 against Argentina, then beat Türkiye 90-67 and Great Britain 77-59 to take the group stage unbeaten. Brazil went down 69-44 in the round of 16 and Spain pushed harder in the quarter-final before losing 70-66. Then came Germany by one, and Italy by 24.

Both finalists arrived without a loss, and the two countries had split their most recent meetings, Australia winning 61-51 in June 2023 before Italy answered 68-58 a month later. The third meeting was not close.

The squad was named for Ottawa in a pool the federation itself called brutal, and the warning was there in preparation, when Australia beat world number one USA in the Toronto Invitational final.

The Gliders

The Australian women's wheelchair team were at the same tournament and had a very different one.

The Gliders finished tenth. They lost all five group matches, to China 48-37, Canada 79-30, Brazil 44-41, Great Britain 75-39 and Spain 55-50, then beat France 54-38 in the knockout stage before losing the ninth-tenth playoff to Brazil 59-52.

One win from seven, and the closest of the group losses was three points against Brazil, the same side that beat them again in the playoff. The squad had been named at full strength for the qualifying campaign and went to Ottawa off a build that took in China.