“Away from being a gold medal-winning 100m sprinter I’m just a regular 24-year-old,” says Thomas Young. That’s not him being cheeky, by the way. He’s just giving a straightforward account of who he is.
Young is the T38 100m Paralympic champion. He’s also one of the faces of the Paralympics GB team that will begin competition in Paris this coming week. He has been mentored by Usain Bolt, is starring in campaigns for Adidas and Aldi and is the recipient of an MBE for services to athletics. But being ordinary is also his thing. “I love hanging out with my mates, going watching football and gaming on my Xbox,” he says. “So, yeah, away from the track I’m just a normal guy.”
Young likes to describe himself as a “real model”, a coinage that in part reflects his desire to remain down to earth. It also, however, speaks to his journey as someone who was diagnosed at the age of 12 with neurofibromatosis, a condition that affects coordination and balance but is not always visible.
“As someone who has a less visible impairment I find that sometimes people say to me: ‘Are you actually disabled?’” he says. “I don’t mind people asking that at all because when you say the word Paralympics you’re thinking of amputees, wheelchair users, blind people, for example, and I’m none of them. I think I can get more people aware and probably more people with less visible impairments into sport as well. That would be something I really want to do, away from winning gold.”
Born and raised in Croydon, Young began to run competitively shortly after receiving his diagnosis, inspired by watching the Games of London 2012. It was only in 2017 that he began to work with the coach Joe McDonnell at the Charnwood Athletic Club in Loughborough, but by the following summer he was a double European champion at 100m and 200m. In 2019, he added a 100m silver in the world championships, competing in the T38 classification for those with coordination impairments. Then, after the disruption of Covid, the triumph of a lifetime: gold in the T38 100m on his Paralympic debut, with a European record time of 10.94sec.
“Of course I look back and think that if I had been classified much earlier I could have had a home world championship in London [in 2017], I could have even looked on to the Rio Paralympics,” he says. “But I think everything happens for a reason and since I’ve been classified I’ve had so many really good points in my career. I’ve had some low points, linked to my injury from falling in a race a couple of years ago, but the amazing points in my career really outweigh the not-so-good bits and I can’t wait to make some memories this year again.”
The bar has been raised for Paris, with Young now aiming not just for gold. “I want to run beyond my expectations, record a personal best and break that world record,” he says. But he is also relishing tackling an event that will be harder and a field that will be more challenging than even three years ago. “I know come Paris I’m going to be unbelievable but the T38 category has gone much tougher now,” he says. “The Chinese athletes are getting quicker, the American athletes are getting quicker … you’ve got many countries now building world-class athletes. And I say world-class athletes instead of world-class para-athletes because at the end of the day that is what we are. It was never going to be easy in Paris but that’s what I wanted, for it to be as hard as it can be because that’s when I perform at my best.”
Almost as an aside, Young notes that it’s not only the athletes that are making improvements in parasport. An increase in professionalisation is helping to improve coaching too, with more contact time fast-tracking the learning required to help maximise the performance of athletes with disabilities. “I think as more coaches get to understand impairments and disabilities I think they are [better at understanding] how to improve their athletes,” he says. “We’re seeing so many coaches now coming from club level, grassroots level and they’re taking world-class athletes to world championships and Paralympics.”
Young seems at ease in the new, more competitive world of parasport. In fact, he embraces it. At the Diamond League meeting at the London Stadium earlier this summer he raced against fellow ParalympicsGB sprinters Zac Shaw and Zak Skinner in an open classification race (Shaw and Skinner are visually impaired athletes). “We know we’re going to really push each other on those races to be the best that we can be,” says Young.
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Neither do his ambitions stop there. At the end of our interview Young recalls he has another goal he wants to pursue: competing against non-disabled athletes. “One thing I really want to do is get the qualifying times so I can go and race my able-bodied counterparts at the British championships,” he says (Young’s 10.94 personal best, recorded at the Tokyo Games, is 0.34 outside the qualifying standard at this year’s UK Athletics Championships). “So I could go, do the para race and then compete against my able-bodied counterparts, too. I might well beat one of them of course, but just by racing against the best people in the country – Zharnel Hughes, Reece Prescod, Jeremiah Azu – that’s going to be a really good feeling. It would let me compete again on a whole new playing field.”
Young might see himself as an ordinary guy, but he doesn’t think ordinary. His ambitions, and those of like-minded athletes, will be what continues to drive forward the growth and success of parasport, hopefully starting with more medals in Paris. As Bolt said to Young when the pair exchanged messages after his Tokyo success: “Anything is possible, don’t think limit.”
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