CEDARVILLE, Ohio – This past Saturday, family and friends gathered together at Cedarville University to cheer on Grace Norman as they watched her compete in the triathlon.
Now, after a day-long flight, she came back home with a hero’s welcome. Making it to Tokyo, she said, was a dream come true.
“Finally getting there, seeing the course, there was so much excitement and so much love from back home that I was just beyond excited,” she said.
It was her four years of running track at Cedarville University that she said prepared her to compete on an international level.
“It was super exciting to just develop my running here throughout college,” she said. “I came out as a successful high school athlete, but it really just brought my running to the next level.”
But this wasn’t her first time competing in the Paralympics. At just 18 years old, she won the gold medal in Rio in 2016, making her the youngest athlete to win the women’s gold medal for the paratriathlon. And this time around, she hoped to do it again.
“I was very focused on the goal which was trying to defend my gold medal or medaling in Tokyo,” she said.
In order to win this race, she knew she had to be at her best, and she said it was the swimming portion that put her ahead of the game.
“For me, it was going off in the swim extremely hard and trying to make as much of a gap as possible,” she said. “I didn’t know that was possible until I was about halfway through the swim that I noticed, ‘Oh OK, I’m a little bit ahead.’”
But she could only stay ahead but for so long. Her competitor finally caught up in the running portion.
“It was a little disappointing, but I knew I had enough time on bronze that I could really put a hard effort in to see if I could make any ground and I wasn’t,” he said.
Although she came in second place, just 41 seconds short of winning another gold, she said she’s overall happy with her performance and was determined to not let her mental health suffer.
“I took it as this is an opportunity to see how fast I can go and kind of lay the pressures of repeat gold medal aside,” she said. “And I believe by doing that it made me just even more ecstatic to come across the line in second.”
In a couple of weeks, Norman will be competing in the collegiate club nationals and after that, it’s back to training for another chance for gold.
“A lot of it is just listening to my body, getting back on the time schedule, not stressing over every little detail as I was pre-Paralympic Games, but Paris 2024 is definitely on the horizon,” she said.
