The 2024 Paralympics held its closing ceremony on Sunday, with Team USA taking home a total of 105 medals — the third largest for any competing country.
Seven of these medals were won by the five Georgia athletes who represented The Peach State: track and field runners Ryan Medrano and Jarryd Wallace, swimmers McKenzie Coan and Gia Pergolini, and wheelchair basketball player Bailey Moody.
In her second Olympics competition, Pergolini took home a gold medal in 100-meter backstroke and a silver in 50-meter freestyle in the classification of S13, reserved for para-athletes with vision problems.
Her victory in the former marks her second consecutive gold medal for the event, making her the first U.S. woman in Paralympics history to achieve this feat.
“My competitors are very strong girls,” said the 20-year-old Georgia native, who is affected by Stargardt disease — a rare eye disorder that causes slow vision loss.
“I always have to keep a mindset that swimming is so unexpected. So, I just need to keep focusing on myself. Yes, I won gold in Tokyo. But that didn’t mean that I was going to win here. So, I just try to keep making myself get better and better each day.”
Four-time Paralympian Coan also took home a silver medal in swimming after competing in the 400-meter freestyle in the para classification of S7, reserved for swimmers with have control of their arms and trunks, but limited control in leg use.
Last month, the athlete spoke with WABE about the rigorous training process that came with preparing for the Paris games.
“It’s definitely pretty intense, and I always tell people, if you pursue this at this level, you got to make sure that you love because it’s going to demand a lot of you … it’s not always pretty,” Coan said.
“For me personally, I’ve always loved the grind of it. I’ve always loved going in every single day and trying to be better than I was the day before.”
In his first Paralympic games, runner Medrano took home two silver medals, one in the men’s 100 meters T38 and the other in 400 meters T38.
The T38 category is a disability sport classification for athletes with cerebral palsy who are affected by coordination impairments such as hypertonia and athetosis.
In his fourth consecutive Paralympics, Athens-based sprint runner Jarryd Wallace took home bronze for the long jump T64, a classification for high jumpers with movement affected in one leg or absence of a leg.
With a performance score of 7.49 meter/24-7, the athlete broke the record for an American jumper in the event.
“It’s crazy. It’s my fourth Games, and I was able to get onto the podium,” the 34-year-old told the Toyota Newsroom. “It was a hard day on the track today. I had trouble managing my energy but there was a big one out there on the fourth jump. I just wish I had a centimeter back on the board.”
In her second Paralympics, wheelchair basketball player and University of Alabama senior Bailey Moody helped to lead the women’s U.S. team to a silver medal. Moody previously won bronze as part of the team in the 2020 Tokyo Games.
In an interview with WABE days before leaving for Paris, Moody stated that she was proud to be part of a new wave of Paralympic athletes being embraced on social media and by the Olympic viewing audiences.
“There’s still a lot of work to be done as far as educating and kind of understanding the level of athletics that it is,” she said.
“It’s not just like a participation thing and it’s not just like a bunch of athletes out there to get good experience. It’s a bunch of athletes who have trained their whole lives for this.”
