Life Force
Champions come in all shapes and sizes. The Paralympics are the best showcase in the world for that.
Five weeks ago, Sam Coffey and 21 soccer sisters on the U.S. Women’s National Team returned home from the Paris Olympics with gold medals in their possession. It was the USWNT’s first gold in a dozen years, and an achievement none of them will ever forget.
As she settled back into her day job in the Portland Thorns’ midfield, Sam decided to tune in to NBC’s coverage of the Paralympic Games. One of the first events she watched was the final of the men’s 50-meter freestyle, a competition in which an armless 23-year-old Chinese man, Guo Jincheng, blew away the field, breaking his own world record with a time of 29.33, an aerodynamic marvel whose legs powered him the length of the pool like a torpedo.
Two of Guo’s countrymen, also armless, finished second and third, all three of them touching the padded wall with their heads submerged.
“It was one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen,” Sam told me. “What these athletes are doing makes what we did look like nothing.”
Across 12 days in late August and early September, the Paris Paralympic Games played to rave reviews, encompassing 4,400 athletes from 170 National Paralympic Committees. It’s not a reach to say that virtually every one of those athletes deserves a medal for refusing to let their disability, whatever it might be, define them, rising above adversity and pain and discrimination to pursue athletic greatness.
Take Ali Truwit, for example. Sixteen months ago, after graduating from Yale, she was snorkeling off the coast of Turks and Caicos when a shark bit off her left foot and part of her leg. A former collegiate swimmer, Truwit made a frantic, 70-yard swim to a boat, where a friend applied a tourniquet, probably saving her from bleeding to death. Truwit’s left leg had to be amputated below the knee, but as with Truwit’s fellow Paralympians, the story doesn’t end there. Truwit didn’t just recover; she got back in the water, qualified for the U.S. Paralympic team and wound up winning two silver medals and setting American records in the process in the 400-meter freestyle S10 and 100-meter backstroke S10. (Paralympic swimmers are classified into different categories, scaled from 1 to 1-10, depending how much their impairment impacts their swimming, with the higher number reflecting the lowest level of impairment.)
What made Truwit’s performance even more remarkable was that she had to overcome re-traumatization, a result of flashbacks triggered by the big, dark underwater camera that NBC used to cover the races, an ordeal Truwit only shared after the fact in a powerful interview with my friend, Sean Gregory, of Time magazine. (https://time.com/7020319/ali-truwit-paralympics-trauma-shark-interview/). Might she have won gold had the trauma not resurfaced and sapped her of focus and energy?
“The fact that I'm at the Paralympics a year after shark attack and amputation, I'd already won gold in my mind, regardless of what place I came in in the race,” Truwit told Gregory.
Trying to select the most notable and inspiring stories from the Paralympic games is as impossible an undertaking as choose whether Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu Teresa or Abraham Lincoln was the best person. So please understand that what follows is not meant to be a ranking, but just a capsule of five Paralympians whose stories I was touched by.
Matt Scott, wheelchair basketball. A six-time Paralympian who was born with spina bifida, Scott, 39, of Detroit, grew up watching Michael Jordan, Clyde Drexler and other NBA stars. He discovered his own basketball calling when he became part of the U.S. men’s wheelchair basketball program in 2004, and not even a four-month hospital stay during which he went into septic shock and endured multiple organ failures could stop him. Along with his U.S. teammates, Scott, the first Paralympian to be featured in a Nike advertisement, captured his third consecutive Paralympic gold medal by defeating Great Britain in the final in Paris, continuing to center his life around inspiring others to rise above their disabilities.
Matt Stutzman, archery. When Matt Stutzman decided he wanted to give his sport a try, he took the logical first step and Googled the relevant topic: how do you teach an armless man how to shoot a bow? The search yielded nothing. Stutzman had no recourse but to create his own technique. His ingenuity didn’t just ultimately make him a champion; it made him an icon – the rare athlete who invents his own discipline.
Born without arms and put up for adoption by his birth parents, Stutzman was taken in by a family in rural Iowa, and his good fortune was that they “were the type of parents who wanted to adapt me to the world instead of adapting the world to me.” Stutzman learned to eat his food, brush his teeth, even drive a tractor – with his feet. When a friend suggested he sign up for an archery tournament, Stutzman signed the required waiver with a pen between his toes.
Three years later, he not only made the Paralympic team for the London Games in 2012, he took home a silver medal, earning it with his self-styled technique, loading the arrow and clutching the bow with some of the most powerful, highly coordinated toes you will ever see, straightening his right leg to get the full draw and then releasing the arrow it with a slight movement of his jaw.
Nobody had ever seen this before, because it hadn’t been done before.
“Matt is not just a para archer,” said He Zihao, his longtime Chinese rival. “He’s also the legend and the G.O.A.T. in the whole para sport.”
In Paris, Stutzman won a shootoff to get through the quarterfinals, and prevailed over He, the reigning gold medalist, in another shootout after they tied with a score of 148 out of a possible 150. Stutzman had one more round to go, this one against another Chinese – Ai Xinliang. Firing his bow from 164 feet from the target, Stutzman scored 149 out of a possible 150 points to capture the gold medal. The first armless archer became the first armless archer to win a gold medal. His greatest legacy, though, is that there were three other competitors without arms in Paris, among them 17-year-old Sheetal Devi, who scored a bullseye in her elimination round and wound up winning a bronze in the mixed team compound event.
“I can retire now and be OK with everything,” Stutzman said. “I’ve done really well, but the fact that we have other armless archers is way more important. It builds archery,” he said
Elena Congost, marathoner. A visually impaired 36-year-old Spaniard with a degenerative eye disease. Congost has long been one of the elite Paralympic runners in the world. She won the silver medal in London in 2012 at 1500 meters, then took gold in the marathon in Rio four years later. In Paris, Congost crossed the marathon finish in third place, tethered to her guide, Mia Carol Bruguera, per usual. Her time was just over three hours, and it was one another epic achievement, but it did not earn her a bronze medal. About 10 yards from the finish of the 26.2-mile race, Congost briefly let go of the tether to come to the aid of Carol, who was cramping badly and about to fall. She grabbed the tether again and they crossed triumphantly, only to find out later Congost was disqualified because rules require that competitors hold on to the tether for the entire race.
The bronze medal was awarded to Japan’s Misato Michishita, who crossed some four minutes later.
“I would like everyone to know that I have not been disqualified for cheating, but rather I have been disqualified for being human and for an instinct that comes to you when someone is falling and to help or support them,” Congost told a Spanish sports newspaper. “I’m devastated, to be honest, because I had the medal. I’m super proud of everything I’ve done, and in the end they disqualify me because 10 meters from the finish line I let go of the rope for a second.”
Jessica Long, swimming. One of the nation’s most prolific Paralympians, Long, 32, of Baltimore, gets right to the essence of her journey on her Instagram page (@jessicatatianalong), where she writes to her 110,000 followers that she was “born without legs + living my best life.” Her two gold medals in the 400-meter freestyle and 100-meter butterfly in Paris – both achieved with late-race surges – hiked her career Paralympic medal haul to 31, including 18 golds. Adopted by her American parents after beginning life in a Siberian orphanage with a condition (fibular hemimelia) that required amputation below both knees, Long’s remarkable competitive resume began at age 12 in the Athens Games in 2004, and also includes four ESPY’s and the Sullivan Award as the U.S.’s outstanding amateur athlete.
“With the never ending support of my family I understood that the only thing that was going to impact my future was my attitude towards my life,” Long said.
Chuck Aoki, wheelchair rugby. At age 33, Aoki, from Minneapolis, is the co-captain of the U.S. wheelchair rugby and a four-time Paralympian, a towering figure in the sport no matter that he is 5-feet, 2-inches tall. A quadriplegic for most of his life, a result of a genetic condition called hereditary sensory and autonomic neuropathies type II, Aoki was avid wheelchair basketball player until he saw the 2005 film, “Murderball,” about wheelchair rugby. He loved the sport’s intensity and physicality, and just six years later, was voted the US Quad Rugby Association’s Athlete of the Year. Aoki and his U.S. teammates have won three silver medals and a bronze in the Paralympics, most recently taking silver as the runnerup to Japan in the Paris games. More important, Aoki has emerged as a passionate and eloquent spokesperson for the entire Paralympic moment.
“Every (Paralympic) athlete on the court or on the track or in the pool is an athlete,’ Aoki said. “It might look different than you are used to seeing, but every athlete is an elite athlete at what they do. It just looks different, because their function is different, their body is different, but that doesn’t make them any less elite. I hope people can understand that and appreciate every athlete for how they work and train to be the absolute best in the world.”
Such incredible stories! Thank you for sharing, Wayne.
These athletes are truly inspiring! Thank you for highlighting a few of the many who compete fearlessly.