For this Paralympic champion, some things are brighter than gold
Deja Young-Craddock’s first memory remains sharp: She stands in front of a jury of strangers and unties the strap of her black-and-white sundress to reveal her right shoulder. She is 4 years old.
At her family’s home in Mesquite, Texas, in June, the 25-year-old two-time Paralympic gold medalist reflected on her path to Paralympic success. It’s a testament to her resilience that even as she talks about the litany of challenges she’s faced since birth—circumstances that could bring anyone to choose bitterness over joy, hate over love—the ever-present smile her mother described is indeed still there.
She eventually found solace and community in sports, filling her after-school schedule with basketball, volleyball, and softball. She tried out track for the first time in seventh grade. “She was excited to be there, a great teammate, a joy to be around, determined, stubborn, almost every quality a successful athlete has to have,” says Becca Fitzgerald, who was an assistant trainer with the program while Deja was there. When working on Deja’s training plan, Fitzgerald says, “It wasn’t that she had something wrong, it was, ‘What can we do to make you successful?’” Success came quickly. Her 2015 4x100-meter team still holds the school record with a time of 44.30.
That fall, she made her way to Worlds in Doha where she clinched gold and silver in the 100 and 200 meters in her class, then earned a spot on Team USA for the 2016 Paralympic Games in Rio the following summer. But three months after Rio and five months after her suicide attempt, Deja found herself in a hospital bed again. She’d been driving to Wichita on a rainy morning to get to practice on time when her car hydroplaned then flipped four times. Her injuries, which included severe bone bruising and nerve damage, required extensive rehab. By the time she was cleared to resume training in January for her outdoor season, she had lost her base fitness.
The next two and a half years were marked by milestones for Deja on and off the track: After switching majors from pre-med to social work, she graduated from Wichita State in 2018. She won gold in the 200 meters and silver in the 100 meters at the World Para Athletics Championships in Dubai in 2019, and she also met and fell in love with Tim Craddock, a supply technician with the National Guard who Deja describes as a “trilingual master gardener” and her perfect counterpart.
In a world where professional athletes are seen as little else, Deja is emphatic that she is an athlete second, a Black woman and a human first. “Obviously when you see someone in a Team USA uniform, they’re a Team USA athlete. But no. You see me, and I’m aTeam USA athlete. Which is hard for me to think about. But it’s something we have to talk about.”
Despite everything, Deja says that “2020 was almost the happiest I’ve ever been. Because I was able to become not just ‘Deja track and field,’ but Deja who had other hobbies and could do other things. I could find myself off the track.”
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