PARIS – After an early workout session at Team USA’s high-performance center at the Paralympics, Noelle Lambert spots Jarryd Wallace by the side of the track. Loaded down with bags and a full-leg prosthetic, she stops to tell him that she’s switching blades. The new, softer one she trained with earlier in the day doesn’t give her the same return she is used to.
“Are you going to train in the morning again?” asks Wallace, a 34-year-old veteran in his fourth Paralympic Games.
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“Yeah,” says Lambert, a 27-year-old competing in her second Paralympics.
“Just send me some videos.”
“Okay, I will, I will.”
The two compete in para athletics, Wallace in the T64 category for athletes with below-the-knee amputations and Lambert in T63, for athletes with above-the-knee amputations.
While they may sound like mentor and student, Wallace and Lambert are teammates for Team USA at the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games. Despite being in different stages of their careers, they have both found a new passion in their shared transition from sprinting to the long jump at this year’s Paralympic Games.
For Wallace, switching events has saved him from burnout after competing in three Paralympic cycles of sprint events.
“I wasn’t having fun, and I think that’s always been kind of my marker,” Wallace said. “But I just didn’t feel like I was supposed to be done with track.”
For Lambert, adding a new event in her second Paralympic Games feeds an incessant desire to put herself in new and uncomfortable positions. It can be hard to trust something that is not part of you.
“The prosthetic is attached to my body, yes, but it’s not 100% mine,” Lambert said. “So it can be kind of scary, putting all your weight into something and having it launch you in the air.”
Wallace turned to Paralympic competition after his leg was amputated his senior year of high school. Since then, he has won championships and set world records in the 100-meter and 200-meter dashes as well as the 4x100-meter relay.
He won his first Paralympic medal in Tokyo in 2021. Afterwards, he decided to stop competing in sprint events and make the switch to long jump.
“It is a lot less stress-driven,” Wallace said of the long jump. He added that, unlike the unforgiving 10 seconds of a 100-meter race, if you do not start strong in long jump, you can walk back and try again.
Noelle Lambert was a lacrosse player at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell when her leg was amputated after a moped accident. She stepped back onto the lacrosse field two years later but after graduating, she was ready for something new.
“I just kind of signed myself up for the first track meet that I saw,” Lambert said.
She beat the reigning national champion at 100 meters at her first competition. “That next week I showed up to practice willing to learn,” Lambert said. “To hopefully make it to the next stage with Tokyo coming up.”
After also competing in snowboarding and being a contestant in the 43rd season of “Survivor,” Lambert made it to the 2020 Tokyo Paralympic Games and met Wallace there. After he transitioned to long jump in 2022, Lambert was inspired to pursue something her coach had suggested for years, but that intimidated her.
“I kind of saw Jarryd do it and that was what made me think, ‘All right, well, why can’t I do it?’” Lambert said. She first began to train for long jump in January.
Wallace said that watching a younger athlete approach the same transition assisted him in finding new joy and energy in his veteran sport.
“She’s a bull in a china shop a little bit, which is awesome,” Wallace said. “When I look at me when I was 26, it was the same deal.”
Wallace offers Lambert training advice and technical knowledge.
“He’s been an incredible help to me, especially with the long jump because he knows a lot about prosthetics,” Lambert said. “He’s been an amputee a lot longer than I have, and he just knows the mechanics of sprinting.”
Now at Paris 2024, the athletes will take their first jumps on the Paralympic stage, Wallace on Wednesday and Lambert on Thursday.
After competing in front of empty stadiums in Tokyo, Wallace and Lambert are both excited for fans to be back in the stands. She is currently ranked second in her classification in the world, and he's ranked third.
“It was weird winning a medal in an empty stadium,” Wallace said. “All the things that you go to the games for—celebrate with your family and the team that helped you get there, I didn’t get to do. So I’m really excited to have that layer.”
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Gabriella Etienne is a student in the undergraduate certificate program at the Carmical Sports Media Institute at the University of Georgia.
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AP Paralympics: https://apnews.com/hub/paralympic-games