Albino Paralympian known as the ‘White Tiger’ reveals the hurtful nickname he was hit with in school

Australian Paralympic hopeful Chad Perris opens up about the cruel nickname he was given when he was at school.

Perris, 32, has developed into a sprinting phenomenon since graduating and is also known as the White Tiger.

But the Australian hero was plagued by bullying during his training and his contemporaries mocked him for his albinism.

He told Wide World of Sports that because of his condition he would be called ‘Casper’, as in Casper the ghost.

“I think there’s a difference between being called names when people are putting you down and being called names when it’s out of love and people are using that to accept you,” he said.

Not only does Perris have light skin and hair, but he can only see about five meters in front of him, and his vision is always blurry.

He was nicknamed White Tiger when he first tried Australian Rules in Perth at the age of 17.

‘At first I didn’t like the nickname that much and that was because I was coming out of school and I thought it was a term that people used to put me down, but I got to a point where I realised that I had been accepted by a group of people and I had been given a nickname, like 99 per cent of the people in the football club. So I embraced the nickname and it’s still with me,’ he said.

‘I had a change in mindset because I knew it didn’t come from a place of hate like it did in school. It came from a place of affection.

‘I look back at pictures of me from school and I definitely had really, really low self-esteem and my mental health probably wasn’t great, and that’s trying to stand out from the crowd and look different from everyone else. When you have albinism, you walk around and everyone knows who you are.

‘I definitely have more self-confidence now and I don’t care what other people think of me when I walk down the street.’