Paralympian and mother Mallory Weggemann secured her fourth career gold at the 2024 Paralympic Games in Paris, France, emerging victorious in the women’s 200-meter Individual Medley S7, according to People.
Weggemann’s love affair with competitive swimming began at an early age but took an unexpected turn when she was just 18 years old. During a routine epidural injection to treat back pain associated with a shingles infection, she lost all feeling and mobility below the waist. The incident, which left her in a wheelchair, forced her to reinvent how she did many things in life – including the competitive swimming career that she prized above all else.
To achieve her dreams, Weggemann had to break out of the limitations that society puts on people with disabilities. “We look at disability in society as something that needs to be pitied: a worst case scenario outcome. We don’t see the potential that lies within,” she told CNN.
In the years since her disability, she has broken down walls and shattered records, winning her first gold medal in 2012 at the Paralympic Games in London. Even as she was breaking barriers, returning to a sense of peace and constancy that the pool gave her, in 2014 another curveball came her way. A shower bench collapsed under her resulting in permanent nerve damage in her left arm. She had surgery to correct some of the damage, but it left her in constant pain and contemplating an early retirement, instead of building towards the 2016 Rio Paralympic Games.
But her husband Jay knew she was strong enough to do what she loved. He put in a call to the high school coach who got her through her first injury, and with their support Weggemann went on to compete in the 2016 Rio Paralympic Games, win two gold medals at a 2019 World Championship, and two gold medals at the 2020 Tokyo Paralympic Games.
“Society wanted to box me into what life with a disability should look like,” Weggemann told CNN in 2021.
As Live Action News has reported, society places a low value on women with disabilities, who often face discrimination and harsh judgment when trying to achieve normal goals and live their lives. For example, Sydney Ann Barnett was wheelchair-bound after suffering from Functional Neurological Disorder (FND); after sharing photos of her new baby on her Instagram, she faced online harassment and discrimination for becoming a mother. Nicole Lee, who suffered a spinal cord injury as a child, faced nonstop pressure to abort her second baby after becoming pregnant, and almost nobody offered her support. Disability activist Samantha Connor staged a joke protest while in her wheelchair, requesting donations to euthanize herself, and was shocked to receive 15 straight donations from passersby.
But Weggemann, with her husband by her side, defied the odds and accomplished “all the things society said weren’t for people like me.” Today, as mother to an almost 18-month-old daughter, Charlotte, Weggemann sees her most recent win at the Paris Paralympic Games as an even more meaningful chapter in her journey.
“Everything about the 31st was what we had dreamed of,” she told People. “I wanted to defend my Paralympic gold, but I also wanted to do it with my family. And I wanted to be able to look into the stands and see my husband Jay and our daughter Charlotte, and know that we did this as a unit.”
Weggemann has also said she’s looking forward to Los Angeles in 2028, so we will surely see more of her and her family in the future. Meanwhile, in the words of her recent documentary Watershed, Weggemann continues “actively living a life that says, yes, adversity will strike, but it will not define us and regardless of which way the tides turn, we always have the power to write our own ending.”
