These days Bowen owns and operates Queanbeyan's 'Vibe Rehabilitation' with his wife, which they established in 2008, but after finishing fifth at both the Beijing 2008 and London 2012 Paralympic Games in javelin, and finishing fourth in shot put at the Delhi 2010 Commonwealth Games by the smallest of margins from third, Bowen retired in January last year.

He would train 30 hours a week at the same time as working at Vibe, and now has a young nine-month old daughter. He said he did not want to continue juggling each of these commitments knowing there were no guarantees he would ever medal.

"In Beijing and London I ended up finishing fifth, and that was great. I was happy with that. But I didn't want to go through another four years and end up with the same results," he said.

"The two options that I had were to stop work a bit more and train more, or stop training and work more.

"So I decided to go with the second choice, and I haven't looked back since."

He said although he never medalled, he would not take his career back at all.

"Competition is kind of like gambling. You go up against it, and you give it all you've got, but if it doesn't fall your way, you can't have a cry about it, it's just the way it goes," said Bowen.

Bowen was born and raised in Perth with the disability of cerebral palsy, but this never stopped him excelling in sport.

While he said he had it tough at times being an athlete throughout his schooling years, he took up disability swimming and wheelchair basketball, and competed at national level in those sports until the end of his studies in Human Movement and Exercise Science at the University of Western Australia.

His swimming coach at the time identified Bowen as a great talent, and suggested he take up track and field sports if he wanted to go further with his sporting career.

"Through school I had to make adjustments in whatever the sport was to enable me to compete," he said.

"But that knowledge in knowing what my capabilities were was a bit of a stepping stone to find those limitations as far as knowing what I could do and how best to compete," he said.

Bowen has lived in Queanbeyan since 2007.