When Femita Ayanbeku lined up for the 100 meters at the 2024 US Paralympic Team Trials for Track & Field in July, she had a number in mind: 13.01 seconds. That mark, she knew, would assure her a spot on the Paralympic team headed to Paris.
She’d run faster in the past. In fact, three years ago, she set the American record of 12.84 seconds in the T64 classification, for athletes with a below-the-knee amputation who compete with a prosthesis. But at this year’s Trials, she was lining up just six months after giving birth to her daughter, Nailah.
The gun went off, and Ayanbeku pushed hard, crossing the finish line in first place. She waited, briefly, for the announcer to say her time. When she heard it—13.01 seconds on the dot—she doubled over, crying with joy and relief.
“So many people thought I wasn’t going to be able to do it,” Ayanbeku, 32, tells SELF. The tears kept flowing during her post-race TV interview, especially as her fiancé Dexter Bradley brought Nailah over for her to hold. “But I was able to do it—and have her there to see it.”
Now Ayanbeku will head to her third Games to pursue her first Paralympic medal. Here’s what you should know about the superstar mom before she takes to the track for the 100 meters in Paris. Watch her in action on September 5 for the first round, with the final on September 6.
1. She didn’t start running until she was 23.
Ayanbeku grew up outside Boston in Randolph, Massachusetts, and didn’t consider herself particularly athletic as a child. When she was 11, she lost her right leg in a car accident; she was thrown from a fast-moving vehicle, and doctors had to amputate it to save her life. During her freshman year of high school, she tried to follow in her older sister’s footsteps and play basketball, but her prosthetic leg gave her blisters and she quit after a few months. “I played for like three months, then never again,” she says.
It wasn’t until 2015 that her prosthetist suggested she go to a running clinic through the Challenged Athletes Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to adaptive sports. There she received an Össur brand running blade and met Jerome Singleton, a sprinter and three-time Paralympian. He saw something in her and introduced her to his coach, Sherman Hart, and the two agreed to start working together.
After a few meets where she held her own against nondisabled athletes, Ayanbeku competed at the US Paralympic Team Trials for Track & Field in 2016. She clocked a time of 13.44 seconds to win the 100 meters and placed second in the 200 meters in 28.41 seconds. That earned her a spot at the Paralympic Games in Rio, where she placed 12th in the 100 meters and sixth in the 200 meters.
Afterward, she returned to her alma mater—American International College in Springfield, Massachusetts—for homecoming. “The track coach was like, ‘Why didn’t you run for us when you were here?’” Ayanbeku says. “I was like, ‘I didn’t even know I could run!’ It was definitely a surprise to everyone, even myself.”
2. She won a national championship while pregnant.
Since then, Ayanbeku has won seven more national titles. Though she didn’t know it at the time, Nailah was with her for the most recent. When she counted back later on, Ayanbeku realized she was about three weeks along when she won the T64 100 meters at the 2023 US Paralympics Track & Field National Championships in May 2023.