Ezra Frech’s Paralympic experience didn’t go quite the way he wanted it to in Tokyo. Then 16, Frech missed the podium in the T63 high jump by a matter of inches.
He sat alone on the track. His fellow competitors had already retreated. Frech watched the three medalists celebrate across the track. They held up their flags for the photographers gathered around in one of the lasting Paralympic images. Frech just watched. He took mental snapshots of the moment that hadn't gone to plan. How the mostly-empty stadium looked. How it felt on that rainy night in Tokyo.
That night, in the Paralympic village, Frech set his phone’s background with an image of the three men who defeated him holding their flags with two words above it. Never Again. That moment of disappointment has become his motivation in the three years since.
“It felt like the origin story for the hero or the villain, depending on which way they go,” Frech says. “Never again will I let that happen.’”
After winning a world title last summer at the Para Athletics world championships, reporters asked Frech if the win meant that he would change his screensaver. He didn’t waver.
“I said, Absolutely not. I will keep that until the day I retire,” Frech says. “I can’t get complacent. Complacency is the killer of greatness. And that’s what I’m going after. So I will never change that.”
Frech was born with congenital limb differences, missing his left knee and fibula and several fingers on his left hand. By age three, he underwent surgery to remove the non-functioning part of his left leg and to transplant a toe from his amputated foot to his left hand. He got his first prosthetic at 11 months. He received his first running blade at age four. It changed everything.
“I remember the feeling to this day,,” Frech says. “And it was epic, it was so impactful. I remember thinking, Man, I need to experience this all the time.”
He took his running blade to school to show his friends. He played sports against his able-bodied peers. Then, in 2013, he traveled with his dad, Clayton, to his first adaptive sports event in Edmond, Okla. At age eight, he competed in track and field at the Endeavor Games and for the first time, his opponents also had physical disabilities. Ezra says his dad put him in each of the track and field events to figure out what he liked best. It meant doing all of the running, throwing and yes, the jumping events.
“I remember when I high jumped for the first time,” Frech says. “It’s the same feeling I still chase to this day, that feeling of freedom, that feeling of soaring through the air. I just genuinely don't think there’s a better feeling in the world than clearing a high jump bar. That’s the feeling I chase on a day-to-day basis.”
Eventually, Frech settled on three events as his favorites. The 100 meters, the high jump and the long jump. They happened to be the three events his T63 classification competes in internationally. Three years after participating in his first meet, he watched the 2016 Paralympic Games in Rio de Janeiro and told his friends and family that he was going to make the U.S. Paralympic team for Tokyo.
“Everyone said I was crazy,” he says. “It was statistically unlikely. I mean, an 11-year-old saying he’s gonna make the Games in four years is utterly ridiculous.”
But it wasn’t. The COVID-19 pandemic postponed those Games an extra year and Frech made his first Paralympic team in 2021, at age 16. He came within an inch of earning a medal in the high jump, finishing fifth.
“That is undoubtedly one of the most devastating moments of my entire life,” he says now. “It’s easy to fail in private. It’s hard to fail on the world stage where everyone sees it.”
That moment, memorialized on his phone’s wallpaper, continues to drive him.
“Competing at a high level there’s ups, there’s downs, there’s highs, there’s lows,” says Frech, now 19. “There’s days I don’t want to train. And I open up my phone, I see the guys that beat me in Tokyo and it reminds me that I can’t get complacent and I gotta keep working.”
Earlier this year, Frech announced his decision to attend USC and compete on the track and field team. There wasn’t a path for him to participate in adaptive track and field as a college athlete. So Frech took a year off after graduating from high school and worked to hit the jump marks that he would need to make an able-bodied program. He is the first above the knee amputee to commit to a Division I track and field program. He hopes that while he may be the first to do it, that others will see him and follow suit.
Ezra and Clayton founded Angel City Sports in 2013 on the track at the Endeavor Games and launched two years later. At the Team USA Media Summit in April, Ezra recalled standing near the long jump pit during the event when Clayton turned to an official and said, “Why are we coming to Tornado Alley in tornado season to run, jump and throw stuff?”
The father and son wondered why there were few, if any, adaptive sports available where they lived in Southern California. They decided they would bring adaptive sports to Los Angeles.
“Think about NBA, NFL, even NHL, NCAA, it comes out of Southern California because we can play year round, right?” Clayton says. “We’re a sporty culture. Then here we are not sending athletes into the Paralympic system, because there’s no programs and there’s no strong organizations, and so that was part of the motivation to start introducing sports.”
The organization launched its first Angel City Games in June 2015, holding competitions in track and field and wheelchair basketball for 125 adaptive athletes. Angel City Sports now offers year-round sports clinics in a variety of sports while the Angel City Games have expanded from a two-day event to four days and includes competitions in archery, swimming and wheelchair tennis. The nonprofit also provides sports equipment and competition to people with disabilities year-round.
Frech sees track and field and the Paralympics as a platform for him to normalize and destigmatize disability. He didn’t have someone in the mainstream media with a physical disability competing on the world stage. For the next generation of para athletes, he wants to be that person.
“I would trade in every medal, every world record, every national championship title, if it meant I could normalize disability in the process,” Frech says. “That's what I'm about, I just know that those accolades are a step to reach that larger goal.”
He hopes to see Paralympians breaking into mainstream media like podcasts or sports talk shows. But most of all, he wants the world to see the athletes for what they are: people with physical disabilities competing at the highest level.
“This is not a pity party for people with disabilities who got active and participated in sports,” Frech says. “These are the best athletes in the world. They’re just missing a leg. They’re paralyzed. They’re blind. Whatever it might be, [they’re the] best in the world at what they do.”
The 19-year-old believes that he was put on the planet to be an example of what is possible for other amputees. He was often told growing up that it must be a burden to have those expectations. Frech refused to let himself think of it as a negative, instead framing it as a “beautiful burden.”
“The truth is that it is a burden right to have big dreams, to want to fundamentally change the way the world sees 15% of the population,” he says. “That’s that's daunting, that’s scary, that's big. So because this is a quote, unquote burden for me. I have to rephrase it, because the truth is, it’s not a negative burden. It’s a positive burden.”
To come so close to earning a medal at the biggest competition could have been crushing for someone so young. Frech has found a way time and time again to turn despair into motivation for this year’s Paralympic Games in Paris. He is doing it with the utmost confidence in his abilities. Starting on May 26, Frech has posted on social media “Day X of 100” until I win Paralympic gold. Some of the videos show the California native training or competing. Others showcase what he’s doing that day.
Sometimes, they take other forms.
Take the Paralympic Trials held last month. Frech donned customized shirts throughout the event with one featuring the face of Michael Scott from The Office and another with the phrase: Keep Calm and Watch the Paralympics. On the day of the high jump finals, Frech’s shirt was simple: Day 56/100 Until I Win Paralympic Gold.
For the third time in 375 days, Frech broke the world record.
This time the mark went to 1.97 meters, 17 centimeters higher than what he jumped in Tokyo. Frech launched himself up and over the bar and celebrated in jubilation with coach Roderick Townsend.
“I would be lying if I said I didn’t expect this to happen,” Frech said after the competition. “This is all a part of the plan. I’ve got big, ambitious dreams. I wanted to come out here and send a signal to the world that I wasn’t going to come to Paris to play. I was going to go out there and win the gold and that’s what I hope today did.”
Frech’s first major international meet following his disappointment in Tokyo took place at the 2023 Para Athletics world championship in—of all places—Paris. He clinched the T63 high world title with a jump of 1.86 meters, topping his best mark from the Paralympics by six centimeters.
Then, on his final attempt at the height, Frech cleared 1.91 meters to break U.S. teammate Sam Grewe’s world record set four years earlier. Frech set another record minutes later when he eclipsed 1.95 meters. He narrowly missed adding a second straight world title in May when he earned a silver medal in Kobe, Japan.
Frech will be one of the favorites in Paris for gold in the high jump. He’ll also compete in the long jump, an event where he finished eighth in Tokyo, and the 100 meters. The Los Angeles native entered Trials last month confident and ready to take on the world.
“I’m preparing like I’ve never won anything before, but my confidence is through the roof, right?” he says. “That’s what it is. Prepare like you’ve never won, perform like you’ve never lost. That’s my mentality. I’m going in with the utmost expectations of myself. I know what I’m capable of. I know what is possible.”
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Paralympian Ezra Frech Has Big Ambitions for Paris—And Beyond .
