Ezra Frech and his remarkable journey to winning Paralympic gold on Day 100 (and 99) (2024)

On May 11, 2005, Bahar Soomekh gave birth to her first child, a beautiful baby boy. But less than 24 hours later, she and her husband were told the baby’s left leg would have to be amputated and one of the toes from his left foot would be transplanted onto his left hand, which only had one finger.

After a traumatic time in hospital, they were finally back at home, her son sleeping peacefully. Soomekh sat down with a cup of tea and a copy of The Los Angeles Times newspaper. She took a breath.

Her eyes were drawn to a headline on the front page, which she recalls said: “Chinese trash scavenger adopts 42 children”.

The article recounted the story of a Chinese man who sifted through rubbish and found a baby girl wrapped in a white sheet, abandoned because of her physical disability. Soomkeh, whose mother moved her family to Los Angeles during Iran’s 1979 revolution, began to cry. She turned to her husband, Clayton Frech, and said: “These children do not have a voice.”

Soomekh, an actress most famous for her roles in the films Crash and Saw, was at the height of her career, but she left her profession to help her son with his physical and occupational therapy. She was, in her words, a “freaked-out new mum”, scared of what the future would hold and how she and Clayton would support their son, whom they called Ezra, which means ‘helper’ in Hebrew.

More than 19 years later, Soomekh sat in the Stade de France and watched her son clear a new Paralympic record height of 1.94m in the T63 high jump — for athletes with available movement moderately affected in one leg or the absence of limbs above the knee — to claim his second gold medal in 24 hours, having first won gold over 100m.

On September 3, Ezra Frech, sporting a blue and red USA vest and a gold chain around his neck, glared down at the runway leading to the high jump bar. In time to an ever-increasing slow clap, the crowd in Paris chanted “Frech, Frech, Frech”. He curved his run, leaned into the turn, pushed off his standing fleshed leg and silkily curved his back over the bar in a beautifully balletic arc.

For Soomekh, the memories came flooding back.

“When I remember that young mum and look at what he’s accomplished, I get really overwhelmed,” she told The Athleticas she waited for Ezra outside the stadium at 1am. “I’m just beaming with pride.”

“I would tell Ezra when he was younger: ‘You walk into every room, take pride in who you are, put your chest out, your head up, look every person in the eye and tell the world you’ve arrived’.

“He’s arrived. My son has arrived.”

Ezra’s first word was not mummy or daddy but “ball”. He played all sports with non-disabled kids but, obsessed with basketball, wanted to be the first amputee NBA player. Clayton, who took his child to his first adaptive sports event at five months old, vowed to do everything he could to prepare Ezra for what may lie ahead and, anticipating the day he would not be able to keep up with his peers, become an expert in Paralympic sports.

John Siciliano, whose prosthetic leg came loose in the 200m race at the 1996 Paralympics in Atlanta, forcing him to carry it and hop over the finish line, advised Clayton to take eight-year-old Ezra to the Endeavor Games at the University of Central Oklahoma in 2013. Clayton signed Ezra up for nine different track and field events — 60m, 100m, 200m, 400m, long jump, high jump, discus, javelin and shot put — plus archery and sitting volleyball.

He learned how to high jump in the middle of the meet and when he broke his age-group record on his third-ever attempt in the long jump, Ezra’s eyes lit up. A spark had been ignited.

He would go on to become one of the most accomplished youth athletes in the United States, holding records in all nine of his events.

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A post shared by Ezra Frech (@ezrafrech)

Clayton also realised Los Angeles needed more Paralympic programmes and so left his career in the Environmental Protection Agency to set up the competition Angel City Games hosted by his company Angel City Sports, one of the biggest nonprofit organisations helping the disabled community.

Ezra watched fellow American Sam Grewe become T63 world high jump champion in 2015 at the age of 17 and then take silver in the same event at the 2016 Rio Paralympics. Then 11, Ezra declared he would be at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympics. His mother remembers how, when she came downstairs to prepare breakfast, Ezra would already be training, jumping on boxes.

In 2015, when Los Angeles bid to host the 2024 Olympics and Paralympics — they won the 2028 Games instead — Will Ferrell, Kobe Bryant and Jessica Alba appeared in a video, and Ezra was among the children who also featured. When asked, “What are you going to be in 2024?’ he said: “I’ll be faster than ever.” Ezra is also in the video that forms part of Los Angeles’ 2028 Paralympic handover celebration during the closing ceremony in Paris on Sunday.

Grewe took Ezra, who did not have a coach, under his wing, texting him suggested workouts, reviewing his videos and giving him pointers at meets. Ezra, in his early teens, was, however, competing against grown men, trying to accrue the necessary number of ranking points to obtain international para classification, a requirement for World Championships and Paralympics.

In 2019, his father drove his 14-year-old son to track and field competitions every weekend. “We weren’t getting them (the necessary ranking points),” Clayton told The Athletic. “Every meet he was crying on the way back in the car. It was miserable.”

Ezra hit the mark he needed at the Angel City Games at the University of California in front of a hometown crowd in May 2019 and made the U.S. Paralympic team for Tokyo, delayed by 12 months because of the global pandemic. The 16-year-old gave up his sophomore year to have a shot at the podium. He registered a personal best of 1.80m in the T63 high jump at his first Paralympics but failed to clear 1.83m three times and finished fifth.

“That was one of the worst nights of my life,” said Clayton, who was with his teenage son in Japan as a chaperone. “He came out of the stadium bawling, yelling at me, not wanting to listen. It was terrible.”

Distraught, Ezra stayed up until 2am in the athlete village cafeteria with his father, who tried to reason with him. The athlete found a photo of the three medallists and saved it as the background on his phone. The caption read ‘Never again’. Ezra was “so p***ed off”, says his dad, that he did a workout on the rooftop of a hotel at 3am.

Every day for the last three years, he has used that photo as fuel to drive his ambition of claiming gold in the high jump in Paris.

It’s Paralympian Ezra Frech’s birthday and we’re still thinking about the story behind his phone background. 😤 #ParisParalympics pic.twitter.com/7kYGhvksC2

— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) May 11, 2024

For the last 100 days, Ezra has posted a countdown until his T63 high jump final on social media which reads: “Day X of 100 until I win Paralympic gold”.

He put all of his efforts into Paris: cut sugar out of his diet for two years, has never drank a drop of alcohol, and meditated and journaled every day. He enjoys going down to the beach in Los Angeles with his parents and younger brothers Gabriel and Elijah, playing board games and hanging out with his friends, but his parents say he does not party.

A fifth-placed finish in the T63 long jump last week was disappointing and, on day 99, the plan veered slightly off track. Ezra’s first Paralympic gold medal came a day earlier than expected. Ezra ran a personal best of 12.06 seconds, winning the sprint T63 race in a photo finish on Monday evening.

That same night Ezra said on social media: “Don’t think there’s an ounce of complacency in my soul. Tomorrow night we complete the countdown and win gold again.”

He could not sleep that night, inundated with so many congratulatory messages he had to mute all notifications. His family and friends, known as Team Ezra, were also beavering away into the early hours of the morning making shirts with the words: “Faster. Higher. Ezra” written across the front.

On Tuesday morning, there was one key question, inspired by his coach and four-time Paralympic gold medallist Roderick Townsend, who won gold for the third consecutive Games in the men’s T47 high jump in Paris. Townsend, with his striking multi-coloured Picasso hairstyle, writes Ezra’s training sessions while fellow coach Ryan Sanders focuses on his high-jump and long-jump technique. Ezra also has a prosthetist who creates his two different competition blades worth $10,000-$15,000 (£7,600-£11,400) each: one for the long jump and one for sprinting and high jump, as well as his everyday walking prosthetic.

While he was doing his recovery sessions on Tuesday morning, Ezra asked himself: “What side of history do I want to be on? Do I want to remember this Paralympics as the games where I did a 100-day countdown, won the 100 metres on day 99 and then lost the high jump the next day? The event that I put the most energy and effort into?”

No way.

Before every jump, whether in training or competition, Ezra swings his arms and goes to twist his body. It is his visualisation jump routine — and Tuesday was no different.

Ezra had left nothing down to chance. Townsend kept his instructions simple and said if he nailed two things — secrets Ezra said he could not reveal — he would be Paralympic champion.

However, seeing his mentor Grewe in tears having crashed out early on at 1.77m was extremely difficult. “I love Sam like an older brother,” said Ezra. “I just felt so bad for him. I gave him a hug. I’m here because of him. I told him I was going to finish the job.”

Frech found it tricky to refocus given he was jumping seconds later but he did not let that derail him. Barring one missed attempt at 1.85m, the 19-year-old made his gold-medal-winning performance look effortless — even if his muscles were aching and fatigued after four days of competition.

Out on the track between jumps, Ezra repeated the phrase he had written in his journal hundreds and hundreds of times, the phrase he had repeated to himself out loud in front of the mirror every day for months: “I’m the Paralympic champion.”

“This wasn’t an exceptional day for me,” he said afterwards. “I’ve sacrificed and dedicated everything in my entire life for this. When I went out there after one miss at 1.85m, I was sitting there reminding myself who I was, all the preparation I’d done. That gave me a lot of confidence throughout the rest of the competition, and, thankfully, it paid off.”

Watched by Team Ezra, wearing their white shirts, USA-colour-themed caps and mini Frech-faced stamps on their cheeks and forehead, the only thing to mar the evening were three failed attempts at breaking his own world record (1.97m). But Ezra had delivered what he had manifested all along, Paralympic gold on day 100.

“I was put here on this earth to normalise disability, change perceptions about what is possible as an amputee, win back-to-back golds, lead the Paralympic movement into Los Angeles 2028,” he said. “It was written. The universe gave me the script.”

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A post shared by Gabriel Frech (@gabrielfrechca)

Silver medallist Sharad Kumar thought Frech’s 100-day countdown was “overconfident” but told reporters he “proved everybody else wrong” and likened him to men’s pole vault Olympic champion and world record-holder Armand Duplantis.

Like Duplantis — in Ezra’s words “the greatest pole vaulter of all time” — it is scary to think how good Ezra can yet become. Coach Sanders believes he’s close to breaking the 100m T63 world record and will easily surpass two metres and beyond in the high jump, his “bread and butter” event.

Frech, who modelled for Hugo Boss in 2023, also wants to be the face of the 2028 Paralympic Games in his hometown, describing it as “one of the most significant moments in history for people with a disability”.

He also wants to win the “triple crown” — gold in all three events, a statement he made in 2017 to International Paralympic Committee President Andrew Parsons when LA was awarded the Games.

Off the track, Ezra will continue to push for change. “The Paralympics was trending on threads, I’ve never seen that before,” he said. “The energy, momentum and understanding around the Paralympics in the U.S. has skyrocketed because of these Games. I have no doubt that when the Paralympic Games come to LA in 2028, the (Memorial) Coliseum (stadium) is going to be sold out.

“There are parents around the world that feel ashamed because their child was born with a disability or people hide their disability. That’s what we’re fighting against here.”

But, just for a moment, Ezra can breathe and take time to bask in the afterglow, soak up the shoutouts from former United States First Lady Michelle Obama, American rapper Flavour Flav, former NBA stars Tracy Murray and Pau Gasol, and actress Kim Raver from Grey’s Anatomy.

Only after he eventually passed through doping control in the early hours of Wednesday morning — delayed because he was dehydrated — did he start to process what he had achieved. He celebrated at the brasserie Poppy in Paris with his supporters who had come from all over the U.S, Asia and the Middle East — including his Iranian grandmother.

French onion soup, steak with mashed potato and salad and, finally, a long-awaited dessert (cheesecake with homemade strawberry coulis) was on the menu.

His coach has banned Ezra from the track for 30 days to ensure he takes some time off. He also has some schoolwork to catch up on as he missed the first weeks of his first year at the University of Southern California, where he is majoring in the business of filmmaking. He starts back at school on Monday.

Asked what makes Ezra special, 32-year-old, five-time world high jump champion Townsend smiled. “He’s Ezra Frech, simple as that.”

(Top photo: Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)