Paralympics star Anna Grimaldi isn't taking any chances with the precious gold won at Paris this year.

After her triumph over 200 metres at the Parc de France track in September, the Kiwi sprint/long jumper stayed in Europe on vacation and took to travelling around with her medal tucked into a variety of clothing items.

"The medal box is massive, it's huge," she told Breakfast, extracting her prize from a ball of socks. "The box is so hard to travel with.

"This doesn't go so well with airport scanners. They go, 'What is this bunch of socks with a big metal disk in it?', but yes, I have been protecting it in a pair of socks and carrying it around like that as well.

"It saves a bit of baggage space."

Grimaldi captured the nation's hearts with her surprise sprint victory, following closely on the heels of heartbreak in her preferred event — the long jump — where she was unable defend her titles from Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020.

She was an agonising one centimetre short of the bronze medal.

After also finishing third over 100 metres, Grimaldi hints her sprint success may change her priorities heading forward. Until Paris, she was reluctant to devote too much time to speedwork, with its increased risk of injury.

In her only previous 200m appearance at the 2017 world para athletics championships, she suffered a stress fracture in her foot that sidelined her for an entire year.

Now, Grimaldi welcomes "a new era" in her career.

"I've started back into training very lightly," she said. "The percentage back is not very high, but that was always planned anyway.

"It takes so much out of you planning for a four-year cycle and then to come back and start all over again. It's important to take the time to relax and get back into it slowly.

"It's so interesting having 10 years behind me in one aspect and this time, we've got options and can take our time to decide what we're doing. Having the time to focus on sprinting, which is something we've never had, I'm really excited about where we could go with it."

During a subsequent 'victory lap' of New Zealand, visiting schools with her medals, Grimaldi has relived the moment over and over again.

"It feels like it's in slow motion at the time, but also over in the blink of an eye and you miss everything," she said. "If felt great at the time, and seeing it again in slow motion and being able to reflect on it has been a real pinch-me moment."

After Tokyo campaign that yielded 12 medals, including six gold, Grimaldi was the only Kiwi to stand atop the podium at Paris three years later and has understandably become a role model for young athletes — both disabled and non-disabled — in New Zealand. That's something she takes seriously.

For so long lost in the shadow of the Olympic movement, increasing awareness of their feats has thrust Paralympians into the sporting consciousness, alongside our non-disabled heroes.

"TVNZ had such great coverage, I've had so much good feedback on what it was like to watch," said Grimaldi, who was born with a withered right forearm and no hand. "People really cared, and were interested in our team and what we were doing.

"Growing up, I never saw people that looked like me or had bodies that represented mine in the media or in sport. That was a real struggle, thinking I'd love to be a professional athlete, but it felt unsafe to have that dream, because I didn't know it was a possibility.

"Now I just hope kids back home — kids with different bodies and different ways of thinking — get to see people that represent them, but also kids with able bodies get to have role models whose bodies function differently. That's part of society and how lots of people live there lives differently.

"It's important that's portrayed in a positive light. I'm really proud of being disabled, but it took a quite a bit of time to fully embrace that part of me."