The Paralympics only last 10 days, so they come at you fast. It’s not easy to stay on top of everything that’s happening, and easy to miss some of the drama. That’s why we’re here: We tracked all the ups and downs, the thrills and the heartbreaks, that American amputees encountered during the Games. Here are the narratives we found most compelling.
The Armless Archer wins his first Paralympic gold
Despite being the world’s most recognizable para-archer, Matt Stutzman entered the 2024 Games with just one Paralympic medal (a silver from 2012) in three tries. To reach the gold-medal match this year, he had to win harrowing tiebreakers—one-arrow shootoffs to determine the winner in deadlocked matches—in both the semifinals and the round of 16. To top it all off, Stutzman set a new Paralympic record in the finals by racking up 149 points, a single point shy of a perfect score.
Kelly Elmlinger’s cruel fate
Elmlinger came to Paris as the prohibitive favorite in the women’s PTS4 paratriathlon classification. She hasn’t missed a podium since 2018, and she’s won every race she entered in the last two seasons. But Elmlinger had to withdraw on race day due to an unspecified illness. It was the second consecutive Paralympic disappointment for Elmlinger, who in 2020 was forced to race in the more difficult PTS5 classification (against two-legged racers) because there weren’t enough PTS4 qualifiers to stage a race. Despite dominating the PTS4 field for half a decade, she remains without a Paralympic medal.
Amputee rookies rock the medal stand
Eight amputees who were competing in their first Paralympics won medals for Team USA. That’s double the number who scored medals in Tokyo. Even more impressive, half of the 16 amputee first-timers on the 2024 US Paralympic roster medaled in their first appearance on the globe’s biggest stage. US rookie stars included Noelle Malkamaki, who shattered the world record in shotput (F46); Derek Loccident, who won silver medals in both the high jump and long jump; swimmer Ali Truwit, who scored a pair of silver medals in the S10 classification just 15 months after losing her left leg; and 16-year-old Arelle Middleton, the youngest American medalist at these Games (silver in shotput F64).
Men’s basketball, women’s volleyball complete gold-medal threepeats
The United States became the first nation ever to win three consecutive Paralympic gold medals in men’s wheelchair basketball. Amputee starters Brian Bell and Trevon Jenifer both played key roles in the tournament; Bell lit up the scoreboard for 31 points in the semis against Canada, then scored seven crucial fourth-quarter points to seal the championship game against Great Britain. The US women’s sitting volleyball team gained the upper-hand in their long-running rivalry with China. For the fifth straight Paralympics, these two nations have faced each other in the gold medal match; China won the first two (in 2008 and 2012), while Team USA has won the last three. Heather Erickson led Team USA with 96 points in the tournament, including a dominant 28-point performance in the championship match.
Mr. Davis-Woodhall follows his wife to the podium
Hunter Woodhall capped a long, eventful summer in Paris with his first career Paralympic gold medal. Rewind the tape to early August, and NBC’s cameras captured Woodhall in the stands during the Olympics celebrating his wife Tara’s gold medal win in the long jump. Then, during the interval between the Olympics and Paralympics, Woodhall came down with Covid, disrupting preparations for his own events. He finished a distant sixth in his first race, the 100m (T64)—but, to be fair, he was the only bilateral amputee in a field of unilateral-amputee runners. In his signature race, the 400m (T62), Woodhall outpaced world record-holder Johannes Floors, then found Tara in the stands to reprise their Olympic celebration.
Noelle Malkamaki crushes the competition
Although she’s lived her whole life with a congenital limb difference, Malkamaki didn’t know parasports were a thing until after the Tokyo Games. And even then, she considered herself “not disabled enough” and had to be cajoled into participating. The rest of the F46 shotput classification probably wishes Malkamaki had never gotten involved. She beat the field by nearly two meters in Paris; even the worst of her sixth throws flew a full meter further than the second-place distance. Malkamaki’s winning mark of 14.06 meters broke her own world record by nearly half a meter.
Mark Barr wins his first medal at age 38
At his first Paralympics 20 years ago, Barr (then an S9 swimmer) finished fourth in two races, missing the podium by a mere .6 seconds in one instance. Twelve years later, in Rio, Barr (by then a triathlete) again narrowly missed the podium, this time by an agonizing 16 seconds. His classification (PTS2) didn’t race at the Tokyo Games, so Barr had to wait eight long years for another crack at a medal. His bronze-medal performance in Paris ranks as one of our favorite outcomes of 2024.
Ezra Frech’s prime-time performance
Like everyone else (including Frech himself), we expected this guy to win gold in the high jump (T63). He’s the world record-holder in the event, and he took gold at last year’s Worlds. Plus he’s been in the spotlight since elementary school, so he wasn’t likely to flinch when the blurbs burned hot and bright in Paris. But also like everyone else—again, including Frech himself—we were shocked when he won a second gold in the 100m. He’d never reached the podium at all in that event in a worldwide meet, much less the top tier. Frech seemed much better-positioned to medal in the long jump, where he finished a strong fourth at the Worlds back in May. But he ran a career-best time (12.06) when it mattered most. He’ll head back home to start his freshman year at USC, where he’ll be the first above-knee amputee ever to compete on an NCAA Division 1 track scholarship. And he’s already locked into place as the face of the 2028 Paralympics, which will take place in his hometown of Los Angeles.
Ellie Marks: Half-full or half-empty?
You’d have to be a pretty big grouch to label a five-silver-medal performance “disappointing.” Then again, you couldn’t blame swimmer Ellie Marks for feeling a bit frustrated that she didn’t reach the top of the medal stand even once in Paris. Marks is used to winning, after all; she claimed two golds at the most recent World Championships and earned a gold medal at both the 2016 and 2020 Games. In two of her races (the 50m freestyle and 100m backstroke), it took a record-breaking performance to beat her—and in both cases the record breaker was China’s Yuyan Jiang, who won seven gold medals at these Games. Marks’s fellow US competitors found nothing wanting in her performance: They honored her by choosing Marks as one of the two flag-bearers for the Closing Ceremonies,