All aboard the youth express with Puseletso Mabote at the Paralympics

You get to understand it’s a young person’s world when one of Team SA’s biggest hopes for 2024 Paris Paralympics success is a teenager, and his hero is a 22-year-old countryman who has been to two such Games and won three medals.

Puseletso Mabote is only 19, a product of the Jumping Kids system, a nonprofit company that supplies and maintains quality prosthetic equipment for children living with lower-limb amputation or limb-related disability across South Africa and into the continent.

In 2010, five-year-old Mabote underwent an emergency amputation after a truck crashed into the family vehicle on the way to school. The accident claimed his right leg from above the knee. He became a beneficiary of the Jumping Kids Prosthetic Fund in 2013 and was introduced to para-athletics to aid his rehabilitation.

Like so many of his Team SA peers at the 2024 Paralympics, which kicked off on Wednesday night, Mabote is a shining inspiration.

Mabote, who is in matric year at King Edward VII School in Johannesburg, will compete in his second Paralympics, taking part in the men’s T63 100m and the long jump.

By all calculations he has a fine chance of winning a medal in the sprint at what will be a 80,000-capacity Stade de France. He claimed the silver in the event at the 2024 Para-Athletics World Championships in Kobe, Japan, and set a new African record in the long jump.

“The times I’m running in training are amazing,” Mabote said. “I’ve never run this fast in my life. This is a new feeling for me.”

Not that Mabote hasn’t got used to running fast times. Five years ago, when he was 14, he broke the senior men’s T63 world record in the 200m at the World Junior Championships in Nottwil, Switzerland. It remains his most memorable moment of a career still in its infancy, given his age.

“I remember I was in the change room when the announcement confirmed a world record, and I jumped out of my seat. It was amazing. I loved every second of that,” he recalled.

In Paris it will be duty in the shorter T63m sprint (100m) and the long jump, and he’s mentally adjusted to what to expect at the Stade de France, given there were no spectators inside the Tokyo Olympic stadium owing to Covid-19 restrictions.

“I would have loved to have spectators there, but it was a Paralympic Games. It was that type of environment with the pro athletes and some some faces I’ve only seen on TV and YouTube,” he told SuperSport TV.

"Getting there and seeing them face to face, and being told I’m going to be lining up against these people, was kind of a shock. I went in there with the mentality of let me compete and see how far I can go. But at the back of my head, I wanted to win. I managed to reach the final. In the final it’s anybody’s game."

In the final he ran 12.66sec to finish seventh in the 100m and leapt 5.18m to place ninth in the long jump.

In Paris he has gone from a wide-eyed 16-year-old to a more mature 19-year-old in his second Games.

“Paris is going to be big. Paris is going to be the largest thing I’ve ever been to.

“It’s going to be a full, packed stadium with everything the Olympics and Paralympic Games are supposed to be, and I feed off the crowd, so that’s going to be perfect for me. It’s going to be amazing. I’m aiming for full gold all the way.”

Not only will he have his matric schoolmates cheering him on but an entire country will also help him speed down that track, fulfilling their hopes and his dreams.

Team SA media/Sascoc