Who is Susannah Scaroni?

American Paralympic athlete Susannah Scaroni won the 2022 Grandma’s Marathon elite wheelchair race in the women’s division on Saturday in Canal Park, Minnesota. She reached the finish line with a new personal record of 1:26:31, which is four seconds less than her previous record. 

Early life

Susannah Scaroni was born on born May 16, 1991. At the age of 5, she sustained a spinal cord injury in the T12 vertebra in a car accident. Since then, she began using a wheelchair.  

According to the official website of the International Paralympic Committee, Scaroni gained interest in sports after attending a sports day event for people with a physical disability.

“I was fortunate enough to be close to Spokane, Washington, just about an hour away. There’s an adaptive sports programme for youth there. So I learned about it through Shriners Hospital and immediately fell in love with it. I started out on the ParaSport Spokane team,” she said.

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Career 

Scaroni began working as a dietician for the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee while she was studying at the University of Illinois for a postgraduate degree.

“I want to just try it out and see what it’s like being a sports dietitian. I haven’t completely thrown out the possibility of continuing research. There’s a lot of things that need to be studied in Para athletes still. I’ve really enjoyed sports physiology as well as nutrition science in my grad school programme so far. So I think I could see that being a possible future thing to do as well,” she said when she was a student at the university. 

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In 2012, she competed in the Summer Paralympics and secured the 8th rank in the women’s marathon T54 event. Four years down the line, she competed in the same event and came 7th. 

In 2016, she failed to qualify in the women’s 800 meters T54 event of the Summer Paralympics.

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Finally, in 2018,  Scaroni won the Peachtree Road Race in Atlanta with a record of 22:49.05.

The following year, she won bronze medals in the women’s 5000 m T54 and women’s 800 m T54 events of the World Para Athletics Championships. 

In 2020, she represented her country at the Summer Paralympics in Tokyo, Japan.