Tatyana McFadden

Chelsea

Tatyana McFadden spent the first six years of her life in an orphanage in St. Petersburg, Russia. Born with spina bifida, she was paralyzed from the waist down, and her birth parents couldn’t afford to take care of her. Tatyana recalls that the staff at the orphanage did their best to encourage her independence (“I must have been a handful!” she said later, laughing), and though there was no wheelchair for her, she learned to walk on her hands in order to keep up with the other children.

When Deborah McFadden was in graduate school, an autoimmune disease called Guillain-Barré syndrome left her temporarily paralyzed from the neck down. She used an electric wheelchair for four years, then crutches for eight more while she continued to recover. The discrimination she faced at school and work because of her disability made her into an advocate for others with disabilities. In 1989, the year Tatyana was born, Deborah had helped write the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Five years later, on a visit to distribute U.S. aid, Deborah met Tatyana at the orphanage where she lived. Deborah came back to see Tatyana several times over the next year, and when she learned that Tatyana was going to be transferred to a different orphanage, she couldn’t bring herself to say goodbye. “It had never been on my mind to adopt, but the moment they said they were going to transfer her to this place that, frankly, in your worst nightmare you can’t imagine, I said, ‘You can’t do this,’ ” Deborah said. Twelve months later, Tatyana came to live with Deborah and her partner, Bridgette, in Clarksville, Maryland.

When doctors told Deborah and Bridgette that Tatyana was unlikely to have a long life because she hadn’t had the medical care she’d needed while in Russia, they refused to accept the grim prognosis. Instead, they decided to sign their daughter up for sports to help her build strength. When they tried to sign Tatyana up for swimming lessons, every instructor except one turned them away. The first time Tatyana submerged herself in the water and popped back up to the surface, she shouted, “Ya sama!” (“I can do this!”) That was only the beginning of what would become a lifelong love of sports. “I tried a lot of sports, and I really fell in love with wheelchair racing,” Tatyana remembered later. “It made me feel so fast and free.” After years of building the muscles in her arms, shoulders, and back, she excelled at the sport. She would eventually earn the nickname “The Beast” from her coach because of the way she charged up even the steepest hills.

“I knew I could do anything if I just set my mind to it. I always figure out ways to do things, even if they’re a bit different.”

—TATYANA MCFADDEN

As a teenager, Tatyana set her sights on the Paralympics. She qualified for the U.S. Track and Field Team at fifteen years old, becoming the youngest athlete on the 2004 team. In that year’s Paralympic Games in Athens, Greece, she won a silver medal in the 100-meter and a bronze medal in the 200-meter. The next year, she tried to join her high school track team and got an unpleasant surprise. The school refused to let her race alongside other students, claiming that her wheelchair was a safety hazard for other athletes. Deborah went back and forth with the school before finally making a demand: “You give her a uniform and you let her run around the track.” As Deborah remembers, the school responded, “Sue us,” so that’s what they did.

Tatyana and her mother filed a lawsuit against her school with the help of attorneys from the Maryland Disabilities Law Center. Tatyana’s standing up for her fundamental right to compete alongside everyone else didn’t always make her popular with the other athletes. “[T]hey were always booing,” Tatyana said. “But on the inside, I just knew this was the right thing to do.” The day she testified, the courtroom was full of her friends. Before she took the stand, Tatyana turned to her ten-year-old sister, who has a prosthetic leg, and promised, “Hannah, you’ll never have to fight to run.” They won their case, and Tatyana was granted the right to continue competing. As the presiding U.S. District Court judge told the courtroom before deciding in Tatyana’s favor, “She’s not suing for blue ribbons, gold ribbons or money—she just wants to be out there when everyone else is out there.”

“I wanted to get the same thrill and the same experience as all the other high school students. There’s no competition by myself. It was lonely and embarrassing, and I just didn’t like it. Other competitors would come up to me and they would say, ‘Good race,’ but it wasn’t really a good race because I was running by myself.”

—TATYANA MCFADDEN

Still, the Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association continued to throw up roadblocks. They determined that they would allow Tatyana and other wheelchair athletes to compete but refused to allow their victories to earn points for their schools’ teams. With her mother by her side, Tatyana advocated for the Fitness and Athletics Equity for Students with Disabilities Act, which passed the Maryland legislature in 2008. The new law required schools in Maryland to give students with disabilities a chance to participate in school sports, without being treated differently.

After high school, Tatyana attended the University of Illinois, in part because of its exceptional wheelchair athletic program. In 2008 she competed in the Beijing Paralympic Games, where she won four medals: silver in the 200-meter, 400-meter, and 800-meter, and bronze in the 4x100-meter. Four years later, she won three gold medals in London. That year, she and her sister Hannah became the first siblings to compete against each other at the Paralympic Games. In 2014, Tatyana returned to the country of her birth for the Sochi Paralympic Games, her first time competing in a Winter Olympics; she won a silver medal in cross-country skiing. She said, “I was really nervous because I’ve only been skiing less than a year. I just had to ski with my heart, and having my family here has been absolutely wonderful. I went up against people who have been doing cross-country for years, so I’m absolutely proud of myself.” She made the top of the podium again in 2016 in Rio—four times—and is currently training for her sixth Paralympics in 2020. Tatyana has also broken records as a marathoner, becoming the first person to win four major marathons in a year—Boston, London, Chicago, and New York—and then doing it three more times. Every time I see Tatyana race, whether in person from the sidelines of the New York City Marathon or through the screen during the Olympics, I am in awe of her focus, grit, and athleticism.

In addition to excelling across multiple wheelchair racing distances from the 100-meter to the marathon, Tatyana is also a passionate advocate for athletes with disabilities. She has lobbied Congress for equal access, treatment, and pay—some marathons award seven times as much prize money to medalists outside the wheelchair division, and it wasn’t until 2018 that the U.S. Olympic Committee voted to start giving Paralympians the same medal bonuses as Olympians. She started a foundation “to create a world where people with disabilities can achieve their dreams, live healthy lives, and be equal participants in a global society.” She isn’t shy about the hard work and courage it has taken to achieve her own success and clear a path for others. “It’s taken me a long time to get where I am,” she has said. “I didn’t just wake up, and this all happened.”