When Femita Ayanbeku lined up for the 100 meters on the 2024 US Paralympic Staff Trials for Observe & Area in July, she had a quantity in thoughts: 13.01 seconds. That mark, she knew, would guarantee her a spot on the Paralympic group headed to Paris.
She’d run sooner prior to now. In reality, three years in the past, she set the American document of 12.84 seconds within the T64 classification, for athletes with a below-the-knee amputation who compete with a prosthesis. However at this yr’s Trials, she was lining up simply six months after giving delivery to her daughter, Nailah.
The gun went off, and Ayanbeku pushed exhausting, crossing the end line in first place. She waited, briefly, for the announcer to say her time. When she heard it—13.01 seconds on the dot—she doubled over, crying with pleasure and reduction.
“So many individuals thought I wasn’t going to have the ability to do it,” Ayanbeku, 32, tells SELF. The tears stored flowing throughout her post-race TV interview, particularly as her fiancé Dexter Bradley introduced Nailah over for her to carry. “However I used to be in a position to do it—and have her there to see it.”
Now Ayanbeku will head to her third Video games to pursue her first Paralympic medal. Right here’s what it’s best to know concerning the famous person mother earlier than she takes to the observe for the 100 meters in Paris. Watch her in motion on September 5 for the primary spherical, with the ultimate on September 6.
1. She didn’t begin operating till she was 23.
Ayanbeku grew up exterior Boston in Randolph, Massachusetts, and didn’t contemplate herself notably athletic as a toddler. When she was 11, she misplaced her proper leg in a automotive accident; she was thrown from a fast-moving automobile, and docs needed to amputate it to avoid wasting her life. Throughout her freshman yr of highschool, she tried to observe in her older sister’s footsteps and play basketball, however her prosthetic leg gave her blisters and she or he give up after a couple of months. “I performed for like three months, then by no means once more,” she says.
It wasn’t till 2015 that her prosthetist urged she go to a operating clinic via the Challenged Athletes Basis, a nonprofit devoted to adaptive sports activities. There she obtained an Össur model operating blade and met Jerome Singleton, a sprinter and three-time Paralympian. He noticed one thing in her and launched her to his coach, Sherman Hart, and the 2 agreed to start out working collectively.
After a couple of meets the place she held her personal towards nondisabled athletes, Ayanbeku competed on the US Paralympic Staff Trials for Observe & Area in 2016. She clocked a time of 13.44 seconds to win the 100 meters and positioned second within the 200 meters in 28.41 seconds. That earned her a spot on the Paralympic Video games in Rio, the place she positioned twelfth within the 100 meters and sixth within the 200 meters.
Afterward, she returned to her alma mater—American Worldwide Faculty in Springfield, Massachusetts—for homecoming. “The observe coach was like, ‘Why didn’t you run for us once you have been right here?’” Ayanbeku says. “I used to be like, ‘I didn’t even know I may run!’ It was undoubtedly a shock to everybody, even myself.”
2. She gained a nationwide championship whereas pregnant.
Since then, Ayanbeku has gained seven extra nationwide titles. Although she didn’t understand it on the time, Nailah was together with her for the latest. When she counted again in a while, Ayanbeku realized she was about three weeks alongside when she gained the T64 100 meters on the 2023 US Paralympics Observe & Area Nationwide Championships in Could 2023.
