Five days a week, From 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., Brady Perry practices his scales “in the best training group in the world”. At the Pure Athletics National Track Club in Clermont (Florida), the 24-year-old American sprinter rubs shoulders with Noah Lyles, crowned with the title of fastest man in the world since his victory in the 100 metres Olympics in Paris 2024, on Sunday 4 August. . But also Nick Mayhugh, the “Paralympic Usain Bolt”eagerly awaited in the French capital for the Paralympic Games (28 August – 8 September), after his three titles (100m, 200m and 4 × 100m universal relay), accompanied by two world records at Tokyo 2021, in the T37 category (cerebral palsy).
Unlike his two friends, Brady Perry, a 400m specialist, cannot boast of these prestigious world events. In addition to a better time this year, still too modest (51.73s), the profound congenital bilateral deafness he suffers from is a major obstacle.“The highest level of competition for us is the Deaflympics. [Jeux olympiques des sourds]»He explained to Worldin mid-March, via the notepad on his smartphone.
Thanks to or thanks to the Frenchman Eugène Rubens-Alquet, nicknamed the “deaf Baron de Coubertin” –Founder of the first international silent Games a month after the 1924 Paris Olympics, deaf athletes have been developing for a century in intermediate athletics. Attached to their independence and eager not to be invisible, their community has never wanted to be associated with the Paralympic Games (whose origins date back to the Stoke-Mandeville Games, which were launched in the United Kingdom in 1948).
Coming from a line of deaf-mutes – “Four generations on the side of [sa] mother and three beside [son] father ” –Brady Perry has long viewed athletics as nothing more than a way to gain the speed and endurance essential for the career as an American soccer player he dreamed of. But at age 17, a national team coach checked his times during a national school competition. Three months later, at age 23,my At the 2017 Summer Deaflympics in Samsun, Turkey, she excelled in the 50 seconds in the 400m semi-finals. “Two hundredths away from qualifying for the final”writes, with pride. Then he swears “winning a medal at the real Olympic Games, because deafness is not a physical disability”.
“Everything became possible”
Becoming a member of the track team at Gallaudet University in Washington, the only campus in the world reserved for deaf and hard of hearing people, where he studied physical education, “too much partying” and suffers from recurring injuries. When the Covid-19 pandemic broke out in 2020, his Olympic design was revived. He resumes training, alone.
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