Paralympian Sam Grewe originally had no intention of competing in Paris.
After taking the silver medal in the high jump at the Paralympic Games in Rio in 2016 and the gold medal at the Paralympic Games in Tokyo in 2021, he was more than ready to hang up his spikes.
Plus, there was, well, medical school.
“Tokyo occurred during my first year of medical school, and with the demands of the preclinical years, as well as going into the clinical years, I just did not have the bandwidth to continue training,” he says. “And I thought, ‘What a way to go out. Go out on top.’”
But sometime last year, as buzz starting picking up ahead of the Paris Games, Grewe decided to give it one more shot. He began jumping once more with the University of Michigan Adaptive Sports and Fitness team and competed in the 2024 U.S. Paralympic Team Trials —Track and Field at the end of July in Miramar, Florida.
It was a tough meet — conditions were extraordinarily hot, with a strong headwind, and Grewe’s prosthetic running blade broke a week before, so he was running on a backup blade. Despite it all, though, Grewe made the team.
And now he’s in Paris — the Paralympic Games open today — where he will defend his gold medal in the high jump on September 3.
“I feel like I’m jumping really well at this point,” he says.
Grewe didn’t grow up competing in track and field. As a youngster in Middlebury, Indiana, he was a year-round athlete, playing basketball, football, baseball, and soccer. But on Christmas Eve 2011, when he was 13, Grewe was diagnosed with osteosarcoma in his right knee. The next two years involved 21 rounds of chemotherapy, as well as the amputation of his right leg above the knee.
After treatment, he wanted to get back into sports as quickly as he could, so he joined his high school basketball, football, and lacrosse teams. But when he was a junior in high school, a family friend encouraged him to attend an adaptive track-and-field meet outside Chicago, where he met the head coach of the U.S. Paralympic Track and Field team. “She happened to see me high jump, and she said, ‘Hey, you know, that looked pretty good. You should give it a shot.’
“In high jump,” Grewe continues, “one of the technical details is that you jump off one leg. As a guy with only one leg, there was certainly an appeal to that. There’s a lot of physics involved too — there are different planes of rotation and axes to be aware of, and I really like that element of it.”
Grewe went on to jump on the varsity team at the University of Notre Dame during his undergraduate years, and then later at the University of Michigan, leading into the Tokyo Games and again leading into the Paris competition.
“On a day-to-day basis, the balance is really challenging,” he admits. “It takes a lot of advance preparation, always keeping snacks and training clothes in my vehicle so I can go straight from the clinic to the track.
“It’s also just a lot of sacrificing other parts of my life that are important to me, but I’m just not able to focus on them right now, including social things — hanging out with friends. My fiancée is a fourth-year medical student as well, and she’s had to fill a new role, just telling our friends, ‘Sorry, Sam can’t come. He’s at practice. That’s why he’s not responding.’”
But in the end, the sacrifices have been well worth it, Grewe says. So have the sacrifices associated with medical school — he was inspired to go into medicine by his oncologist and his orthopedic surgeon, who were sources of strength during his cancer treatment.
At Michigan, he’s also had a wonderful mentor in Oluwaferanmi Okanlami, MD, a family medicine physician and the director of Student Accessibility and Accommodation Services. “Dr. O” introduced Grewe to the field of physical medicine and rehabilitation (PM&R) — which he hopes to specialize in so he can work with patients needing prosthetic limbs, pain management, and rehabilitation. “It’s been really eye-opening to see how broad a field it is and how many different subspecialties exist within it,” he says.
Grewe and his fiancée, Mady Martinez, plan to enter the couples Match® — he in PM&R and she in anesthesiology — and get married next summer before starting residency.
For now, Grewe is excited for this next meet of his athletic career — both his and Martinez’s families are accompanying him to Paris.
And after that? With the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Los Angeles, he knows enough to never say never.
“If I could retire on a home meet, that’d be an extremely special way to do it,” he says.
