Blade runner targets an ‘exclusive club’

Paralympian Papaconstantinou ‘chill and calm’ as she aims to break 13-second barrier in 100 metres

Paralympic sprinter Marissa Papaconstantinou is on the verge of breaking the 13-second barrier in the 100 metres and that would put her in a place that few women in the world in her category have ever been.

She’s at 13.07 now and the difference between that and her goal is less than the blink of eye. It takes a sprinter to truly appreciate how hard gaining such tiny fractions of speed can be.

“It feels like a long time coming and I definitely feel like it’s right there,” Papaconstantinou says. “It’s one of those things where you just gotta put it together in the race when the time is right.”

The 22-year-old from Toronto hopes that time comes Saturday at the Canadian track and field championships.

It’s pretty much her last chance this season. While many of the elite able-bodied athletes competing this week will go on to July’s world championships in Eugene, Ore., para athletes don’t have that same opportunity because World Para Athletics cancelled this year’s championships.

It’s “an exclusive club” that Papaconstantinou is looking to join, says her coach Bob Westman, who is the lead para coach at Athletics Canada’s high-performance hub in Toronto.

“She’s only seven hundredths of a second away from it, but sometimes it feels like a bit of a barrier. I think once she goes under once, she’ll go under many times,” Westman says. “But for me as a coach, knowing that there’s no worlds this year I don’t mind if we don’t do this year and we kind of save that occasion for next season. But I’m sure her delayed gratification might not be quite as strong as mine.”

That’s probably understandable given how much she has had to go through to get to this point.

After watching blade runners at London 2012 Olympics, Papaconstantinou, who was born without her right foot, switched her focus from soccer to para athletics. She was only 16 years old when she competed at the 2016 Rio Paralympics and that brought a lot of attention her way. “In some ways it felt like I was starting to be a poster child for para track and field,” she says. “It had been a long time since we’d had a blade runner for Canada.”

Then, after suffering major hamstring and knee injuries in 2017, 2018 and 2019, she won a Paralympic bronze medal in the 100 metres in Tokyo last summer and became the poster child for something else: perseverance.

In the lead-up to last summer’s Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics, Papaconstantinou and Westman were featured in television ads about how the words of coaches help fuel athletes. There was a dramatic shot of her crying in pain in the rain as she hobbled down the track after her first hamstring tear and Westman’s words of wisdom: “It gets easier later.”

Papaconstantinou says she’s comfortable with her new poster-child role.

“Perseverance and never giving up is one of the things I want to share with people,” she says. “I do get a lot of positive feedback from others about how they were able to get out of bed that day and go for a run or not make excuses for themselves and that’s something that also helps fuel me, the fact that I’m inspiring other people to chase after their goals.”

In pursuit of her own goal this week, that sub-13-second time, Papaconstantinou says she needs to approach the race, “really chill and calm, that’s when I run my best.”

And, of course, explode out of the blocks.

“The biggest thing for me is my start, that first 10 metres,” she says. “Pushing off a block with a prosthetic leg is obviously a little more delayed than (for) someone who has two feet.”

As she accelerates, she needs to keep low, which is an added challenge with a blade that wants to “pop up and start running upwards.”

“Technology is fantastic and it does some really amazing things but it still can’t fully replicate what the human body is capable of.”

And what happens if she gets her sub-13 time? “Then we set the next one at 12.80,” Westman says. “We just keep setting barriers.”

It feels like a long time coming and I definitely feel like it’s right there.

MARISSA PAPACONSTANTINOU