The day Jessica Long made her Paralympic debut in September 2004, the American was just 12 years old. The scene was Athens, Greece, the birthplace of the Olympics. The teenager had only started swimming two years earlier, but she already had a mission in her heart. “A lot of people didn’t understand how incredible the Paralympics were., said the athlete during a press conference the day after the opening ceremony of his sixth Games, on August 29 in Paris. I remember thinking that I was going to change that and try in my own way to grow the Paralympic movement.”
Twenty years later, Jessica Long has become an emblematic figure. On Wednesday, September 4, in the Paris La Défense Arena, the 32-year-old athlete won her 30e medal, the 17the in gold, in the 400 m freestyle in the S8 category – intended for swimmers with a severe disability in the lower limbs or an upper limb. With a time of 4 min 48.74 sec, she beat the British Alice Tai (4 min 52.24 sec) and the Italian Xenia Francesca Palazzo (5 min 00.13 sec).
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“I’ve never been good at listening to people. I always feel like they’re telling me what I can’t do (…), she relates in her autobiography, Unsinkable (“Unsinkable”, Harper Collins editions, not translated), published in 2018. I want to hear what I “can” do.”
In February 2021, during the Super Bowl, the American football championship final, her fellow citizens (re)discovered her story in an advertisement broadcast by one of her – many – sponsors. Born in Eastern Siberia (Russia) with fibular hemimelia, a congenital malformation depriving her of fibulas, she was abandoned by her young parents. An American couple from Maryland adopted her at the age of 13 months, after a year spent in an orphanage. Tatiana Kirillova became Jessica Long. After twenty-five operations, the little girl finally had both legs amputated, at one and a half years old.
“The cherry on the cake”
In the water, it is impossible for the swimmer to push off the wall. So, to compensate, she puts “a ton of pressure and rotation on his arms.” The American has always displayed a face of determination. As proof, she cites a family anecdote dating back to the American selections for the Athens Games. “My father prepared me for the possibility that I would not qualify. He told me that I was young (…)that I would have plenty of time to train for the next Games, she reveals in her book. I was 12 years old, and I looked him straight in the eye and said, ‘I’m going to make the team. I know I’m going to make it.’ And sure enough, they called me.” She becomes the youngest U.S. Paralympic Team athlete of all time in any sport.
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