After Switching Events, Jarryd Wallace Heads to Paris Paralympics Reinvigorated

After winning bronze in Tokyo in the 200 and feeling sapped from years of sprinting, the 34-year-old will now contend for a medal in the long jump. He hopes the decision will be yet another in his life that sets him on a better path.

After winning bronze in the 200 in Tokyo, Wallace made a big decision to switch events ahead of Paris 2024. / Mika Volkmann/Getty Images

If you are sprinting at 40 kilometers an hour, world-class speed, your surroundings will begin to warp. The space in front of you shrinks. The margins disappear. If you were counting on anything to serve as a constant, you will find its measurements become suddenly, troublingly elastic. Consider sprinting toward a board that measures 20 centimeters across. At this speed, you will find it feels like half of that, a quarter, an eighth. A plane becomes a line and then becomes a point. Any room for error gets folded away, out of reach, tucked inside that dimensional collapse. 

This is the problem at the heart of the long jump. How can you arrange for a perfect hit on that 20-centimeter take-off board? That question lies underneath a tangle of others. How do you adjust your mechanics for that last step? For the step before that? How do you transfer horizontal speed into vertical? How do you decide all the right measurements here, the right launch angle at the right foot speed, to create the right parabola? The event is among our most straightforward athletic tasks: How far can you jump? But for the right jumper, it’s also a puzzle, a physics problem, a process question.

All of which made the event appealing to Jarryd Wallace. The 34-year-old Paralympian spent years building a decorated career as a sprinter. Previously a teenage state champion runner, Wallace’s right leg was amputated from the knee down when he was 20, lost to complications from compartment syndrome. He quickly adapted to running with a prosthetic, and within two years, he’d set his first world record and qualified for his first Paralympics. Wallace enjoyed consistent success in sprinting and became one of the fixtures of U.S. Paralympic Track and Field. Yet the last few years saw him beginning to drift. Wallace had been running the 100 and 200 meters for the entirety of his adult life. The events no longer engaged him in the same way they used to. And when he considered what he wanted for the end of his athletic career, how to feel more fully engaged in his work, he realized he wanted a new challenge.

He found it in the long jump. 

Two years ago, Wallace had never so much as played around with the event. (The closest he’d ever come was jumping in the sand with his father on beach vacations as a child.) But he quickly realized that he found it stimulating analytically as much as athletically. If the long jump felt like a demanding, multilayered equation, Wallace believed it was one he could solve. He’s gotten strikingly close in a short period of time: He won bronze at the World Para Athletics Championships in 2023, less than a year after picking up the event, and he set an American record at the U.S. Paralympic Trials in July. It means that as Wallace heads to Paris for his fourth Paralympics—his first with the long jump—he finds himself enjoying his career in a new way.

“I think one thing I’ve learned during my entire career is just the power of change,” Wallace says. “It’s given me life back a little… It’s really kind of given me a fresh perspective on track and field. I’ve re-fallen in love with the sport.”

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At 17, Wallace thought he knew exactly what the next few years of his life would hold. Born and raised in Athens, Ga., he had a track scholarship to the University of Georgia, the institution that anchored his hometown. His parents had met on campus as athletes—tennis for him and track for her—and they’d never left. His father, Jeff, had gone on to become the women’s tennis coach, and Wallace grew up with the campus as his playground. He dreamed of eventually competing beyond college, perhaps even working toward the Olympics, but he knew that he wanted it all to start with running at UGA. 

He never got the chance. 

A nagging pain in his right leg was originally labeled a stress reaction. When it refused to go away, Wallace saw additional doctors and received a diagnosis of compartment syndrome. The condition involves a painful buildup of pressure around the muscles and is not exceptionally unusual among runners: Wallace’s mother, Sabina, had experienced it herself in her running days. The surgery to treat compartment syndrome is typically straightforward. Wallace was told he could plan to begin training again soon after the procedure and expect to defend his state titles a few months later. 

But there were complications with the procedure, leading to another surgery days later, leading to another which led to another which led to another. Afterwards, roughly 60% of his calf muscle was dead. The next two years were a mess of blood transfusions and skin grafts and pain. Wallace had 10 reconstructive surgeries in all. UGA honored his scholarship. But it was clear that he would not be able to run—certainly not competitively, and maybe not at all, in any capacity, ever again. The vision Wallace had previously had for his immediate future disappeared. He had no idea what might take its place. 

“It was going from, I know what the next five, six years of my life are going to be, and they’re going to be the best,” he says, “to literally needing care 24/7 and being in excruciating pain and addicted to pain medication and just trying to figure out what the rest of my life was going to be like.”

Wallace hadn’t known what to think when a doctor first mentioned the possibility of amputation. He’d spent years undergoing painful reconstructive surgeries aimed specifically at saving his leg. This would represent a total reversal of course. But he came to a point where amputation seemed like gaining something rather than losing it. “I saw it as an opportunity for a second chance,” Wallace says. “Instead of loss—the loss of self—it was an opportunity for hope and a way to get a second chance at life.” He made the call. A few weeks after his 20th birthday, Wallace’s right leg was amputated from the knee down.  

It was his eleventh surgery in less than three years. Wallace and his parents had by then developed a routine: They would join him in the pre-op room with a Bible and pray together before he was wheeled away. Yet it felt different this time. Wallace recognized that his parents were scared. But this surgery was one he was coming to by choice, his choice, and he suddenly realized that he felt completely secure.

Two years ago in Tokyo at his third Paralympic Games, Wallace finally claimed his first medal. / Alex Davidson/Getty Images for International Paralympic Committee

“There was a fear that I saw in my parents’ eyes, and I think it was the same fear they saw in my eyes for the first 10 surgeries,” Wallace says. “But for the first time, I had peace.”

He didn’t choose amputation for a chance to run again. If his initial reconstructive surgeries had been geared toward returning to the track, this one was in service of a larger, simpler goal. “I just wanted to be pain-free,” Wallace says. “I just wanted to live a normal life.” But he’d known that running prosthetics were an option and that, potentially, the surgery would mean he could finally get back to athletics. 

Three months to the day after the amputation, Wallace tried a running prosthetic for the first time. What do I do? he asked his physical therapists, unsure of how different this would be from the running that he remembered, how many accommodations he would have to make. Their answer surprised him: Just run. The motions would be a little different, yes, but he could figure it out. This would still be running, the same as he’d loved all his life, what he’d been missing and chasing and mourning for the last few years. All Wallace had to do was start. He took off down the track.  

A year later, Wallace set a world record in the 100 meters at the 2011 Parapan American Games, and months after that, he was at the Paralympics in London.

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The next decade brought success, personal and professional alike. London was followed by the Rio and Tokyo Games. Wallace won a combined three gold medals at the World Para Athletics Championships (twice in the 200 meters and once in the 100 meter relay) plus a bronze at the Paralympics in Tokyo. Outside running, he started a foundation to help fellow amputees, and he met the woman who would become his wife, Lea. They made a home together just outside Athens and had two sons.

But as Wallace looked toward what seemed like his final Paralympic Games—Paris at the age of 34—he wasn’t sure exactly what he wanted from them.

He’d been sprinting for years. Training was beginning to feel rote. The events no longer sparked much in him. Wallace knew, in theory, he wanted to keep going: In 2021, the stands had been empty due to the pandemic. He wanted a chance to experience that same medal moment in front of a crowd, to hold his sons in his arms right afterwards. But that would mean committing to years of additional training at a point when he was beginning to feel sapped, and matters were complicated by a series of minor, nagging injuries.   

Wallace began working with a new coach. Dan Pfaff was a legend in the sport who’d coached dozens of Olympians and Paralympians. Now in semi-retirement, he specialized in helping athletes return from injury, but as they tried to figure out an issue with Wallace’s Achilles, the veteran coach spotted a different problem. 

“Watching some practices and some videos, going back and forth, you could just tell he wasn’t really motivated,” Pfaff says. “He’d been on a long grind. You could just tell the energy wasn’t there.”

Pfaff thought on it and came back with a suggestion for Wallace: How do you feel about a new event at the age of 32? 

Ahead of Paris, Wallace decided that switching to the long jump was the change that he needed in his career. / Andy Lyons/Getty Images

There’s plenty of overlap between the skills needed for sprinting and long jump. But most athletes who do both start doing so in high school—they don’t convert without any prior experience in the twilight of their careers. Still, Pfaff suspected that long jump would be an especially good fit for Wallace. There was his raw speed, yes, but also his elasticity with his left leg and his control of the running blade with his right. Just as important as those physical qualities were his mental ones.

“He’s an attention-to-detail guy,” Pfaff says. “And he’s a process guy, whether he’s here or in business with his foundation or in his church… He’s very intelligent, both academically but also athletically, and so if he understands the puzzle, it’s pretty easy for him to make progression.”

Pfaff began laying out the basics of the event, what needed to happen in each phase of the run, the takeoff, the jump. This was an equation they could solve together. Wallace decided that experience might be exactly what he needed.

“I think he’d been sprinting for so long, he kind of just lost his love for it,” says Wallace’s wife, Lea. “It’s really cool to watch him love what he’s doing again.” 

The new event came with all sorts of challenges. (One that is minor but nonetheless annoying: Wallace has learned the long jump involves so much sand, everywhere, all the time.) But trying something new was invigorating, and beyond that, it helped reshape his mindset about what could be the final stretch of his athletic career. Failure seemed less damning. Trying to exercise control over every little thing felt less important. He’d found a new challenge in the long jump, but he’d found an unexpected freedom, too. 

“Transitioning to a new event… It was like, hey, yeah, I’m going to mess up a lot. There’s a lot I’ve got to learn,” Wallace says. “But every time I fail, it’s going to teach me something that’s going to help me get closer to where I want to be.” 

That process has involved trying out new running blades and tinkering with mechanics and, of course, trying to nail the landing on that narrow board for take-off. (“When you’re hitting a board that’s 20 centimeters wide, it has to be perfect,” Wallace says.) The resulting puzzle feels equal parts intriguing and fun—to his 70-year-old coach, too.

“It’s re-energized me,” Pfaff says. “We’re both kind of on a second life here.”

Wallace kept sprinting even as he began to practice jumping. But he found a turning point when he competed in both disciplines at the 2023 U.S. Paralympics Championships. Wallace took gold in the 100 meters and bronze in the long jump. Yet when he sat down for his debrief with Pfaff, he was clearly more excited to discuss the latter, starting with just how much fun he felt in the long jump. Pfaff figured that said enough. This gold seemed like a perfect close to his career in the 100, going out on top as the national champion, and this bronze felt like a perfect opening to dedicating himself entirely to long jump. 

“I can see a new brightness in him towards his craft that’s really refreshing,” Lea says. “Especially now going into the Games, where he’s having a really great time and he’s not afraid to work hard for it.”

Wallace placed first at the Paralympic trials in July and set an American record at 7.91 meters. He’ll be chasing an even further mark in Paris: He believes he can potentially hit eight. (In Tokyo, German jumper Markus Rehm won his third consecutive gold medal with a jump of 8.18 meters; no one else hit over 7.40.) 

But whatever the results, Wallace enters these Paralympics with more clarity than he felt heading into his previous three Games. That feels like a sense of peace, he says. It also feels like joy.