Isaac Jean-Paul cannot clearly see the bar he is about to jump over.
The two-time Paralympic medalist, who trains at West Los Angeles College in Culver City, has lived with severe visual impairment since childhood. Diagnosed at age 2, Jean-Paul has roughly 20 percent of his eyesight. Faces blur. Small print disappears. His field of vision can feel like looking through a straw.
But some of the most important advice Jean-Paul ever received came from a doc- tor who told his parents not to let what he couldn’t see determine what he could do.
“Allow Isaac to experience life through his own lens,” Jean-Paul remembers the doctor telling them. “Don’t hold him back. Don’t limit him.”
Sports became the place where those words made sense.
“I immediately gravitated toward sports,” he says. “Athletics was my gateway. When I played sports, you didn’t see my disability.”
Basketball was his first love, thanks to his mother. Track came later, during his junior year at Warren Township High School in Illinois. Always competitive, Jean-Paul picked up track and field wanting to see how his athleticism measured up. He quickly discovered an extraordinary ability to jump.
At Illinois’ Lewis University, he became a five-time All-American and NCAA Division II national champion in the high jump. Yet despite competing at an elite level, Jean-Paul knew virtually nothing about adaptive sports. “I didn’t even see myself as someone with a disability,” he says. “I was so good at whatever field or court I was on.”
That changed when he entered para athletics in 2017. At his first World Para Athletics Championships in London, Jean-Paul won gold and set a world record in the T13 high jump. He went on to win bronze in the long jump at the Tokyo Paralympics in 2020, and silver in Paris in 2024.
The success came with an unexpected reckoning.
“I was no longer the great athlete, but rather, the blind athlete,” he says. “That identity shift was tough because I never identified as someone with a disability.”
Eventually, the thing Jean-Paul had spent years outrunning became something he learned to embrace.
“My disability has given me a different look onto the world,” he says. “It makes you trust yourself more.”
Now, as he trains toward Los Angeles 2028, that trust is part of every jump. He approaches a bar he cannot fully see and believes his body will carry him over it.
“You’re not going to see every obstacle,” Jean-Paul says. “You have to trust and believe in yourself even when you can’t see it.”
Sometimes seeing yourself clearly has very little to do with eyesight.
The post A Leap of Faith: Two-Time Paralympic Medalist Isaac Jean-Paul Prepares for LA28 appeared first on LAmag.
