The beginning of the road to the 2024 Paris Paralympics

I worked for a company that was doing remote work long before the pandemic. My team was about two dozen individuals distributed across Austin, Boston, Silicon Valley, Portland, Oregon, Bulgaria, Armenia, India, and China. We had quarterly gatherings in Palo Alto to help improve collaboration. The previous quarterly corporate event, a gathering at a winery, had been an unmitigated access disaster. 

The room the meeting was held in was next to impossible to get to by wheelchair unless you knew the super-secret unlabeled path. The room itself was totally crammed with oversized furniture. Nobody involved with the event planning had bothered to check on wheelchair access. Because the event was in the mountains, there was no way to reach anyone by cell phone for me to get help once I had arrived. 

By the time I found a winery employee to help me get to the event, people were already distributed across inaccessible furniture playing board games. As people looked uncomfortably at each other, asking silently with their eyes, "who is going to inconvenience themselves so Sheri can participate?" I answered the question for them by glaring angrily at my boss, downing my glass of fairly decent red wine, and leaving less than five minutes after I arrived.

My upper body strength was crap. The spinal curvatures seriously inhibited my range of motion, and I had avoided exercising for as long as I could remember. I had dislocated my shoulder about 18 months earlier and never completed physical therapy. Even with the assist the compound bow draw weight provided, I could barely draw the string back to the anchor point. Being almost six feet tall meant the childrens' bows, which required less upper body strength, were not a viable option. My arms were just way too long.

We started shooting at 10 feet, then went to five yards and then ten. Peter brought out balloons when our arrows started to hit the target more reliably. The look on everyone's faces when they realized that I was the one breaking the most balloons was priceless. I was one of the last to leave, staying behind to talk to Peter about what type of equipment I should buy and where I should go to get it.

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The weekend after the work team archery event, I went to a local archery shop in Pacifica and ordered my own compound bow. It was a Matthews Mission, which was literally the only viable option because it was the solitary bow that could handle my super long arms while simultaneously being shootable while exerting only 20 pounds of peak draw weight. My bow was set to 20.4 pounds, to be exact. I was very proud of that extra .4 pounds because it meant I wasn't at the bare minimum. 

The overwhelming desire to not finish last or be the worst at something was a common theme throughout my life. My draw length was 29 ½ inches because that was as long as you could go on a Matthews Mission. "When you upgrade, you'll probably want a longer draw length," said Randy, the guy at the archery store who sold me the bow. 

Randy had back problems from a military parachuting injury and definitely understood the needs of adaptive archers. Then he asked me what I thought was a very strange question: "what color do you want?"  

It turns out archers like to color coordinate all their equipment and arrow fletchings. I thought about it for a moment and said, "Why not blue, the color of the universal disability icon."  "Makes sense," he replied, and from that point going forward, I chose blue equipment whenever I could.

When I competed in my first official archery tournament, I begged the organizers not to set up a paralympic division just for me. I didn't want to be singled out, and I really didn't expect to do very well. I was very proud of my fourth out of sixth place score that I would have gotten if they had grouped me with the non-wheelchair using competitors. The "first out of one" participation medal in the para division, not so much.

My second archery competition was the California State Seniors Archery Tournament three months later. As was my usual approach to anything where parking was an issue, I got there bright and early to get the best parking space, which isn't always one of the accessible blue parking spaces, without inconveniencing anyone. I stayed in my car for a while "talking" with my Chief Technology Officer at work by Slack about a project while I was waiting for others to show up. 

It was the end of September, one of those days with a 50+ degree swing between the low and the high temperatures. I started the day in three layers of clothing and ended it in one, topped off by a generous dose of sunscreen and an SPF 50 hat. I wished I had prescription sunglasses and made a mental note to add that to my list of pending archery-related expenditures.

Therefore, the first thing I did after setting up my chair was to find Donna, who was running the tournament. She told me to set up on target eight, so I grabbed my gear and wheeled off to my assigned spot. 

Because Paralympic certification takes forever, I had been trying to register in the classes for athletes without disabilities for all my tournaments. The first tournament didn't let me do that, but this one didn't care. At the end of the day, good archers aren't really competing against others. Archery is about competing against yourself. Set a goal, see if you can beat the goal, and then set a newer, more difficult goal.

A gentleman setting up on target seven next to me informed me authoritatively, "you aren't supposed to be here."  To which I replied, "Huh?" He confused me because I went where Donna had instructed me to go. "All the disabled people are on target one. So you stay out of our way." he insisted. "You are a distraction," he finished. "I'm not shooting in a para division, but I'll double-check," I replied.

I went back to Donna, who told me that I was exactly where I was supposed to be, but she told me to tell "Mr. Grumpy," as she referred to him, that if he wanted to be moved, he could request to be assigned to a different target. 

She also offered me some duct tape to keep my wheelchair bumper from rattling as I went back and forth to the target on the gravel parking lot and a piece of cardboard that the 1.2-meter targets had been shipped on to make it easier to turn circles behind the shooting line. Indeed, Mr. Grumpy must have asked to be assigned to a new target because he moved several spots away from me, sharing a target with someone I knew named John. I felt bad for John.

Because this tournament was on a parking lot surface and not grass, my wheelchair battery life held out much better than the previous competition, even though the number of shots and distances were identical. I shot 27 points better than I had shot at the previous competition and won the competition for my age group, shooting from a wheelchair against all non-disabled competitors. 

I found out my friend John's score was seventeen points lower than mine. I asked John to let me secretly take a peek at the score sheet and saw that he had shot two points better than Mr. Grumpy. By doing the math, I figured that I had beat Mr. Grumpy by nineteen points, which made me even happier than winning the competition. That score got me a ticket to nationals next May in Fort Lauderdale. Distract that, Mr. Grumpy, I thought as they handed me a first-place medal that actually meant something to me.

I excitedly texted pictures of my medal to co-workers and family. And then it began to dawn on me. Maybe getting to the 2024 Paris Summer Paralympics wasn't a pipe dream. I googled the scores from the US and Canadian teams who went going to Tokyo in 2021.  57 more points, and I would be right up there with them.

Read more about Sheri Byrne-Haber's journey in tech and to the 2024 Paris Paralympics in her memoir "Moving Target"  Follow her accessibility blog on Medium or LinkedIn.