He Was Eleven, Watching the Paralympics From His Couch.
He Asked His Mother If He Could Be There in Four Years. She Said Yes.

The Ezra Frech Story

The Person Who Believed In Me  ·  Hosted by David Begnaud

"What I saw was someone who was going to be a remarkable human because of the system of support that he had around him."

- Roderick Townsend, on first meeting Ezra

He Watched Roderick Win on TV at Eleven. Years Later Roderick Coached Him.

Ezra was eleven, on the couch, watching the Rio Paralympics, when he saw a high jumper named Roderick Townsend compete. He describes what happened next as an out-of-body epiphany - the universe telling him what he was meant to do. "Oh my God, this is my calling. I should be a Paralympian." Then he went and found his mother. Could he make the Tokyo team? He was eleven and unranked. She said yes.

What followed was four years that became five because of the pandemic: up at six, jumping in the backyard, learning technique off YouTube, the track after school. "I knew nothing." He made Tokyo and missed the podium by an inch, his blade clipping the bar.

Townsend is the greatest Paralympic high jumper there has been - Ezra means it literally: "He went a decade without ever losing." They compete in different classifications, so they have never faced each other, and Townsend took an eleven-year-old under his wing while collecting gold medals of his own. David read him back what Townsend says he saw in that kid, and Ezra had never heard it from the other side. "Wow. That's really sweet."

The coaching is not gentle. They run a drill called "continuous makes": miss one bar and practice is finished. Ezra was driving ninety minutes each way to Orange County, warming up for an hour, getting his head right - and on the days he missed the first bar, he got back in the car and drove home. In competition the instruction was stranger and sharper. Don't look at your parents. Don't get wrapped up in seeing your family. Stay present. You can hug them later.

Then the low point. Three months before Paris, Ezra lost the world title he had won the year before - with Townsend there, and with the two of them having been training over FaceTime from Arizona to Los Angeles, unable to see the angles that mattered. He calls it one of the most devastating moments of his life and says he cried his eyes out that night. Townsend's response was to get on a plane to Los Angeles every week until the Games. In Paris Ezra won two golds in the same week, days after Townsend won his own.

▶ Watch on YouTube: The living room epiphany, I can do that - ~2:43

His Parents Wrote a Script for Strangers Who Stared.

He was born missing his left knee, his left fibula, and all but one finger on his left hand. The leg, curved up toward his waist and never going to be functional, was amputated at the knee when he was two and a half. At three he had a toe-to-hand transplant - his big toe moved onto his left hand in a fifteen-hour operation under a microscope. He has had that finger for eighteen years.

His mother remembers him standing in his crib, looking at her legs, then down at his own, then back up at hers. He doesn't remember it. What he does remember is a preschool playground and a four-year-old who would not stop apologizing to him. "I'm so sorry. You're missing your leg." Ezra kept telling him he was fine. The lesson wasn't about the kid. It was that everybody else had decided disability was a tragedy. People still say it to him. "You don't have to feel sorry for me. I am totally happy and proud to have a disability."

His parents were advocates before he was born, and they handled the staring by walking toward it. They had an actual script. His father would approach people and ask, "Are you curious about Ezra's leg?" Then: he was born missing a leg, he uses a helper leg, he can play sports, he can run, he can do anything anybody else can do. And then the turn - do you have two eyes like Ezra? Two ears? Look how much you have in common.

He started giving speeches at four. At nine he spoke to a conference in a basketball stadium, seventeen thousand people, and that same year he walked out on Ellen's stage with the composure of a grown man. Asked where that came from, he puts it down to repetition rather than nerve: "I just got so comfortable talking about my disability that it didn't necessarily matter the setting."

He is not pretending it was painless. He describes middle school, the pointing and the whispering, and feeling like an outsider for a long stretch of childhood - "I was like a zoo animal." What changed was not other people. It was sport. On a court or a track he stopped being the kid with a disability playing the sport and became, simply, the player.

▶ Watch on YouTube: The script, are you curious about Ezra's leg? - ~20:55

He Could Dance in His Walking Leg. He Chose the Blade.

Dancing is harder than sprinting, and he says so without hesitation. He has run track since he was eight. He had never ballroom danced in his life. "If my blade is centimeters off or my weight is in the wrong position, the knee will buckle and I'll fall." The safer choice was his walking leg. He went with the running blade instead, which leaves him balancing on a couple of centimeters of edge on every step.

His partner Daniella has never danced with an amputee, let alone an above-the-knee amputee, and he insists the credit is hers. Every week they rewrite the rule book. Take the salsa: every step lands on a bent knee, and his prosthetic knee is a simple hinge that cannot land bent without collapsing. So he goes bent, straight, bent - and her job is to make that look like salsa. They fall in rehearsal. She is black and blue from his prosthetic.

He does not wear pants over it. He grew up in shorts and he is not starting now. For the salsa they bedazzled the prosthetic - a sleeve of it, the whole leg - which he points out would have been impossible hidden under fabric. The team name is Footloose. The leg is not a problem being managed; it is part of the choreography.

David read him a note from a viewer named Aniki, who was born with spina bifida fifty-two years ago and uses a wheelchair full time. She wanted to thank him for showing the world that having a disability is not an inability. He got chills. "That's honestly what I'm doing this for." He reaches for the numbers when he explains why it matters - fifteen percent of the population, fifty million Americans, a billion people worldwide - and then the line that reframes it: "It is a minority group that anybody can join at any time. Disability doesn't discriminate."

That is also why the nonprofit exists. He and his father were flying to Oklahoma and Wisconsin so Ezra could compete, until his father asked the obvious question: why cross the country to run and jump when we live in a sports-obsessed city with the people, the facilities and the weather? Angel City Sports now provides year-round equipment, training and competition for people with physical disabilities across Southern California. The barrier he wants understood is practical - you cannot roll up to the local gym and join a wheelchair basketball game, because the chair alone costs thousands.

▶ Watch on YouTube: Footloose, and dancing on a blade - ~37:34

He Missed Every Shot in Kindergarten. His Coach Made Him Take One More.

He was five, in PE, and he missed a basketball shot. Then he missed all of them, and ran off the court in tears. His coach, a man he still calls Coach Chow and still sees, came after him and would not let him leave until he made one more, however long it took.

Sixteen years later it is still the operating principle. He does not walk off a basketball court without ending on a make. At the track, he and Townsend do not finish on a bad rep. "It doesn't matter how you start. It really matters how you finish." He points at his hundred meters in Paris as the proof: he was not leading at ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, even sixty meters. He finished that race well.

Asked for the best advice he's been given, he says dream big, and explains it with more clarity than most people twice his age manage. "I think most people in life fail because they set goals that are too easy for them to accomplish. They accomplish these goals but then forfeit all this potential because they didn't think they were capable of more." He would rather aim at something frightening and miss - and he has missed plenty, listing them without flinching: Tokyo by an inch, the world title twice, a back injury that wrecked a month of training, relationships. "I have cried my heart out outside of stadiums for the last six years." The one thing he admits to performing is wellness, a habit built over years of people worrying about him. "I feel pressure to act like I'm fully put together all the time, and I'm not."

Which is the whole thing, folded shut. A kid saw somebody who looked like him on television and decided what his life was for. Now he is the one on the screen, bedazzled leg and all, with the Games coming to his hometown in 2028. Asked the best part of being twenty-one, he didn't name an achievement. He said time.

▶ Watch on YouTube: Coach Chow, and one more shot - ~48:04

"I'm Ezra Frech, and the person who believed in me is Roderick Townsend."