USA’s wheelchair basketball team, including Latter-day Saint Paul Schulte, won gold in the 2024 Paris Olympics on Saturday, Sept. 7. A returned missionary from New Zealand won bronze in a tight para canoe race on Sunday, Sept. 8. Also, two more athletes with ties to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints competed in swimming and on the track.
Here are updates on these competitions in the final days of the Paralympic Games.
Wheelchair basketball
USA won 73-69 against Great Britain in the gold-medal match on Saturday, giving Team USA its third consecutive gold in Paralympic wheelchair basketball. Germany beat Canada to win bronze.
Schulte was also selected by his fellow Paralympians as one of the Team USA flagbearers for the closing ceremonies.
“It is a profound honor to carry this flag, representing not only my country but also the spirit of every athlete who has competed here,” said Schulte, reported the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee websites. “These Paralympic Games have been a celebration of determination and courage, and a representation that limits are meant to be overcome. Thank you to the city of Paris, and the entire country of France, for hosting an indescribable Paralympic Games.”
Paris is Schulte’s fourth Paralympics — and the first after once retiring in 2015. He competed in the 2000 Paralympics in Sydney, Australia; the 2008 Games in Beijing, China; and in 2012, when the Games were in London, England, winning bronze.
During the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, he took up handcycling, building muscle and losing weight. This year, he decided to try competitive wheelchair basketball again and was invited to try out for the national team.
Schulte had a spinal cord injury in a car accident at age 10 and gave wheelchair basketball a try when he was 14. He currently serves in the bishopric in his Florida ward, and he and his wife have one son.
Canoe
At his first Paralympic Games, New Zealand’s Peter Cowan is bringing home a bronze medal after a very close final for men’s va’a single 200-meter VL3 at Vaires-sur-Marne Stadium. His time was 48.28 seconds, less than a second behind the gold-medal winner, who set a Paralympic Games best. Earlier Sunday in the semifinals, he initially led and then ended up second. The top three from the two semifinals moved to the race for the medal podium.
The para va’a is a rudderless outrigger canoe that has a pontoon as a support float, and the competitor uses a single-blade paddle. The VL3 category is for those with lower-body impairments.
Cowan, 29, won silver at the International Canoe Federation Para Canoe World Championships in Szeged, Hungary, finishing 0.071 seconds behind first place, reported Paralympics New Zealand.
When he was 15, the rugby player was training for the Iron Maori triathlon when his bike was clipped by an oncoming car. Later, his right leg had to be amputated above his knee. When he was 17, he was invited to a waka ama, or Maori outrigger canoe, training session.
He served a mission in Japan and Australia, and he and his wife are the parents of two boys.
Swimming
Over at the pools in the Paris La Defense Arena, Alejandra Aybar, 35, a native of Azua, Dominican Republic, raced in the 50-meter butterfly S7 (for physical impairments). She was 15th overall with a time of 41.47 seconds. The top eight across the two heats moved on to the final.
Paris is her second Paralympics Games. In Tokyo, Japan, in 2021, she became the first swimmer representing her native Dominican Republic to compete in the Paralympics.
Aybar, who is 4 foot 3 inches tall, has brittle bone disease, osteogenesis imperfecta, also known as crystal bone disease.
Also in the Paris Paralympics, she competed in the 200-meter individual medley SM7 (for physical impairments), coming in 11th, and was eighth in the women’s 100-meter breaststroke SB6 (for physical impairments).
Athletics
On the purple track at the Stad de France stadium, Lindi Marcusen was sixth in the women’s 100-meter T63 final with a time of 15.11 seconds, less than a second behind the gold-medalist’s time of 14.16 seconds.
In Paris, athletes with T42 and T63 classifications competed together, and they included those with movement affected in one leg or the absence of legs above the knee.
This is the first Paralympics for 28-year-old Marcusen of Spokane, Washington. Marcusen was in a car accident in 2017 that resulted in amputation of her right leg. She competed in gymnastics from elementary to high school, according to her Team USA profile. Marcusen is also a BYU–Idaho alumna.
She also competed in the women’s long jump T63, coming in eighth overall.
