Brown, who has been blind since the age of 13, remembers taking on the “spots and colors” of the Beijing Paralympic Games while his friends dictated what was happening on the track.
It was 2008, but he advanced 13 years and Brown is preparing to defend his crown in the 100-meter T11 event at the Tokyo Paralympics.
In addition to winning a Paralympic gold medal in 2016, Brown, 28, also claims to be the first all-blind athlete to run less than 11 seconds in the 100m with his 10.92-second classification record.
He ran in the 600- and 60-meter trials with the track team at the Missouri School for the Blind in Saint Louis, grabbing a clothesline similar to a clothesline that ran along the track for help. guide.
“I denied my sight a lot, which is one thing, so there were times when I ran and didn’t run with a guide because I thought I could see,” Brown says. He was diagnosed with Kawasaki disease at 15 months, which caused glaucoma and he lost his sight years later.
Brown continues, “I was able to see well enough not to necessarily be on my tracks when I was running, but I was able to see well enough to stay on track. That’s how I went through a lot of things for a while. I started running officially with a guide until I was 17 “.
“Like a three-legged race”
Running with a guide is a difficult art to master. Brown’s T11 category athletes, who are those with “very low visual acuity and / or no light perception,” run on a cordon; The role of the guide is to make sure the competitors stay in the lane and know how the race is progressing.
“We’re running like a three-legged race,” Brown explains.
“They will have to adapt to me and my career style and the speed and slowness I go through, my body language.
“They have to be one, in very good condition; two, very fast; three, to be able to synchronize their steps with the speed or slowness with which I move my arms and legs. Making these adaptations is very vital.”
Avery, a top-class sprinter, finished out of Olympic qualifying places in the U.S. track events in 2000 and 2004. He has been a guide runner for the U.S. Paralympics since 2004.
An injury to Avery during the run-up to this year’s Games means he and Brown will not be running together in Tokyo, a big challenge for Brown as he seeks to defend Rio’s gold, as he and Avery have competed together for seven years.
“It’s going to be different, it’s going to be a big change and a change,” Brown said of the prospect of competing with a new guide. “But I look forward to seeing what happens, honestly.”
“Everything has a time”
“Untethered” refers to Brown’s love of music. He says he has an eclectic taste (including classics, country, gospel, jazz and reggae) and plays drums and piano at his local church. In the film he meets Tariq Trotter, the rap artist best known as Black Thought.
To some extent, it’s an interest that benefits Brown’s athletic career and the practice of running with a guide.
“Everything has a tempo, you know, and there’s a certain pace that, I guess, we’re going to go in the direction of running,” he says.
“Of course you see it in the track room. They say, ‘Oh, he’s done 234 steps a minute’ or something like that. You could think of it as beats per minute … it can help to keep the same page until the synchronization. “
Brown adds, however, that using a mooring is the best way to synchronize a runner and a guide.
“Say I’m out of step and they are … you won’t feel it or even notice that if you don’t have the connection,” he says. “The more you have the fixation, the more you do with the fixation, whether it’s a slow tempo or a fast tempo, the better.”
Downloading records
The track at the Tokyo Olympic Stadium is favorable for sprinters, giving fast times during the Olympics. Brown’s world record could be threatened in the coming weeks as the Paralympics get underway, though he remains baffled by the idea that one of his rivals will win his time.
“If someone breaks my world record … that means our ranking is getting faster and that’s the advancement of the sport,” he says. “And that’s what it’s all about at the end of the day. I was just the catalyst for all of that.”
Having changed direction in preparation for the Paralympic Games, Brown has moderated expectations of entering the Games.
But that doesn’t mean fast times (or more world records) aren’t in your mind below.
“We’re training for the future,” Brown says. “I look at Paris.
“Our training hasn’t been where I think it could be technically said it would be the Games training, so I don’t necessarily know about Tokyo, but next year or the year after, that’s where I say,‘ Hey, be careful because it will be very lethal for this reason. We have a lot of fantastic guides that we are training.
“If everything goes in the direction it’s going, the possibilities are endless about how fast we can go and how low we can get that thing down.”