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

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Aussie Paralympic hopeful Chad Perris has opened up on the cruel nickname he was called during his schooldays.

Perris, 32, has established himself as a sprinting phenom since leaving school, and has been dubbed the White Tiger.

But the Aussie hero was troubled by hurtful bullying during his education, with his contemporaries mocking him for his albinism.

He told Wide World of Sports how he would be called 'Casper', as in Casper the ghost, due to his condition. 

'I think there's a difference between being called names where people are bringing you down and being called names where it comes from a place of love and people use it to accept you,' he said. 

Along with his light skin and hair, Perris can also only see roughly five metres ahead of him, and his vision is always blurry. 

He earnt his White Tiger nickname after trying Aussie rules for the first time as a 17-year-old in Perth. 

Chad Perris has revealed the hurtful nickname he was given while at school

The Australian Paralympic star, 32, is better known as the White Tiger

'At the start I didn't really like the nickname and that was because I had come from school and I thought it was a term people were using to bring me down, but I got to a point where I realised that I was accepted into a group of people and I had been given a nickname, as 99 per cent of people in the footy club had. So I embraced the nickname and still have it stuck with me today,' he said. 

'I had a shift in mentality because I knew it wasn't coming from a place of hate like it was at school. It was coming from a place of endearment.

'I look back on photos of me from school and I definitely had very, very low self-confidence and my mental health probably wasn't great, and that's for standing out in the crowd and looking different to everybody else. Having albinism, you walk through and everybody knows who you are.

'I am now definitely a lot more confident and couldn't give a toss what anybody thinks of me when I walk down the street.'