10 Inspiring US Paralympians: Three years ago, the United States participated with 235 athletes in the Tokyo Paralympics and won 104 medals.
Among them, some of the athletes were born physically disabled, while others got seriously injured in accidents or acts of violence. Some have been Paralympians since as soon as the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Here are ten US athletes to look for in Paris: There are Big Three here—the athletes who have won dozens of Paralympic medals between them, all of whom were born in the former Soviet Union, adopted by American parents, who managed to get them the medical help they needed in order to live and compete.
Jessica Long, swimming
One of the most decorated people on the United States Paralympic Squad has numbers that are astounding.
As for the 32-year-old swimmer who started the Paralympic career in 2004 at the age of 12, she has won 29 Paralympic medals, including 16 golds and 37 world championships. She played an important role in introducing paralympic sports as an equal part of sports culture. winning four ESPY awards and frequently appearing on US TV advertisements, crips one was a lo summarising her adoption story, which aired during a Superbowl in 2021. She was also the first Paralympian to take the much-coveted Sullivan Award as the USA’s premier amateur athlete.
Long was born with fibular hemimelia, a medical condition that resulted in her being born with out several bones in her lower legs. Both of her legs were surgically removed below the knees at the age of one and a half when she was adopted from the Russian orphanage.
Oksana Masters, cycling
Masters was born with multiple birth defects caused by the Chernobyl nuclear explosion and was adopted at age 7. By the time he was 14, she required the amputation of both legs.
After that, she was able to compete in six Paralympics in four sports, where she bagged 17 medals, of which 7 are gold.
She began the rowing at the Paralympic level in 2012 with the bronze medal and came into the cross-country skiing and biathlon Paralympic scene, focusing on two cross-country medals in 2014. She bought a new one in 2018 and was also able to clinch her first Paralympic golds.
Unfortunately, she developed back problems, switched to handcycling for the summer sport and has again clinched her two subsequent gold medals in Tokyo—the time trial as well as the road race. In 2022, she got back to the snow to win two biathlon gold medals and a cross-country relay gold before claiming her inaugural two cycling world championships this summer. She has won another cycling world championship and two other winter ones, making her total career world championships to 16.
Masters’s long-term boyfriend, Aaron Pike, is a cross-country skier and long-distance track runner going to his seventh Paralympics: three winter and now four summer.
Tatyana McFadden, track and field
Talk to any distance, McFadden, who hails from the United Kingdom, is a 35-year-old man with success to tell of.
Thus, five-time winner the female Leningrad-born chair racer has had a collection of 20 Paralympic medals, which includes eight golds, the Boston Marathon five times, the New York City Marathon five times, the London Marathon four times and astonishingly, the Chicago Marathon nine times.
But she has become far from being a mile or distance specialist. In the shortest possible events, she practices and has clinched gold medals in 400m sprints and also got gold in Tokyo’s mixed 4x100m relay. She also has individual medals in each distance, right down through 100 meters.
She also started doing cross-country skiing and in 2014 participated in the competitions in the country of her birth; she won the silver at the sprint race and met her birth mother.
Tyler Merren, goalball
If this pattern is to be continued in his fifth Paralympics, Merren and his goalball compatriots will capture gold this year. The USA won the bronze in the year 2004/ The USA came fourth in the year 2008. Merren, along with the US men who failed to qualify for 2012, competed and won the silver medal in the 2016 version; they finished fourth in the Tokyo Olympics.
Even in the 2022 world championships, when the men failed to make it to the knockout stage, Merren hasn’t taken a break and scored 21 goals for the team.
Ian Seidenfeld, table tennis
Before this summer in Tokyo, no American had ever won Paralympic table tennis gold since Tahl Leibovitz at the 1996 Atlanta Paralympics. That was solved by Seidenfeld, who has the dwarfism to overpower defending champion Peter Rosenmeier of Denmark.
Leibovitz is still among the team; he has been to the Games seven times at the age of 49.
Becca Murray, wheelchair basketball
The Whitefish, Wisconsin native made his Paralympic debut at the age of 18 and was feted with a gold in Beijing.
But by the time Rio Paralympics came around, Murray was unchallenged for the gold. She tops the charts for all scorers in the games, scoring an average of 24. On average, he scores 1 point per game, which is far more than any other player on this list. She scored 33 points during the final match against Germany, which the USA team triumphed with 62-45.
However, in case the Olympics 2020 were put off and Nakaia had an opportunity to participate in the Olympic Games in Tokyo only in 2021, a short stop became a retirement. She was not in the team that was in Tokyo the next year, where they won the bronze.
Retirement didn’t last long. She came back to represent the US in the 2023 World Championship, where she was on a bronze medal winning team.
Chuck Aoki, wheelchair rugby
He is still chasing the Paralympic gold medal despite these busy schedules, as he is doing a PhD in comparative politics and international relations.
Catching up, the US team won gold in Aoki’s first world championship year in 2010. Since then, the USA has medaled in every world championship and Paralympic, but the gold has remained elusive.
In Rio, the USA was very close to Australia taking the game to overtime but they lost 59-58. In Tokyo, Great Britain overtook the opponents in the last 4 minutes and won the match 54/49. Again in the 2022 World Championship, Australia did the same to the USA.
They won their first match against hosts Tokyo Sugury 74-68; Aoki, who proudly waved the US flag during the opening ceremony, topped the team’s scorer with 21 points. Eight attempts a game, the sixth highest attempt rate among the Paralympians.
Kendall Gretsch, triathlon
I believe that it will be very difficult for Gretsch to beat what she did in the PTWC (wheelchair athletes) race in Tokyo, where she sprinted through the finish line and overtook Australia’s Lauren Parker to secure the gold position. The event has a staggered start depending on the classification of the athlete and thus Gretsch was steadily trying to reduce the gap to Parker before she overtook him at the last lap of the wheelchair race.
The three-sport athlete also has three golds in the 2018 and 2022 Winter Paralympics in cross-country skiing and biathlon and seventeen world championships in her summer and winter sports.
Katie Holloway Bridge, sitting volleyball
This year, a whopping 11 of the 12 women sitting volleyball team members have clinched Paralympic gold—in Tokyo, Rio, or both.
Holloway Bridge was the tournament ‘most valuable player’ in Tokyo, where she scored 54 points: 36 from attacks, 17 blocks/when attacker and an ace/when setter.
She also continued to play college basketball for Cal State Northridge after she had lost her leg and had to play with a prosthetic one; by the time she was done with her sporting career, she stood as one of the all-time greats of the school and had ranked second in blocked shots and sixth in rebounds.
Noah Malone, track and field
Malone, like Holloway Bridge, had a college career in sports for the able-bodied prior to his becoming disabled. He broke two paraworld records in the T12 (visually impaired) class, as the rest of Indiana State’s track and field team won the 2022 Missouri Valley Conference meet for able-bodied athletes.
At Tokyo, he won the gold in the 4x100m mixed relay and silver in the 100m and 400m T12 (visually impaired). He also included a world championship in the men’s 100m event in 2023.
