Top Row: Israeli para athlete snags nation's 3rd gold medal
Moran Samuel secured Israel's third gold medal and its fifth overall at the Paris Paralympics. Samuel took first place in the Women's PR1 2,000-meter rowing final. This victory marks her third medal, adding to the silver she won in the Tokyo Games and the bronze in Rio.
Samuel, 42, was an international basketball player before becoming paralyzed from the chest down at age 24 due to a congenital vascular malformation in her spine.
"I went to sleep like any other day after practice," she said, "and woke up with extreme back pain. It was a spinal stroke, something very rare."
“You cannot be prepared for things like that,” she said. “It doesn’t matter how it happens. It’s really devastating. In two hours I was actually completely paralyzed in 70% of my body.”
After surgery, came the rehabilitation, giving her the desire to train in the field of physiotherapy, which she went on to study. Her road to recovery was challenging and came in small steps over many years.
“I actually tried to avoid basketball as much as I could, because it was just heart-breaking,” Samuel explained.
Three years after her surgery, Samuel was told that the national wheelchair basketball team was being reformed and she was invited to join.
They secured a victory at the European Championships, yet Samuel aspired to compete in the Paralympics. Realizing the basketball team was far from ready to compete at that level, she discussed her options with Limor Goldberg, the Paralympic sports director.
“After considering my abilities and my disability and the sports that are available, she thought that rowing is the sport for me.”
Samuel decided to train in the new field of rowing.
“For me it was the first time I was able to do sport outside of my wheelchair. And that was amazing – the freedom of that,” she said. “I had never rowed before I was in a wheelchair, but for me, it was really exciting and I learned a lot about the sport and about myself.”
Samuel placed fifth at the London Paralympic Games and later won a gold medal in the 1,000 meters at the 2015 World Championships. On Sunday, she completed the 2,000-meter competition in just 10:25.40 minutes.
Like many Israelis who have had to quickly adapt to life-changing circumstances, Samuel has risen to the challenges presented by her condition. Combining the education gained from her degree in physiotherapy with her master’s in early childhood education, Samuel has a successful career as a pediatric physiotherapist.
She is a mother to three children, whom she is raising with Goldberg. Samuel even trained for the Paris Paralympics during her pregnancy with their youngest child. Remarkably, she won the silver medal at the World Championships in Paris, just five months after giving birth.
Samuel believes that although the training is extremely hard, the same is true for all who compete at that level. She said that Paralympians “aren’t better than Olympians or the other way around” but that they “have the mission to make the world a better place for people with disabilities in general.”
In 2015, World Rowing named her "Para Athlete of the Year."
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Jo Elizabeth has a great interest in politics and cultural developments, studying Social Policy for her first degree and gaining a Masters in Jewish Philosophy from Haifa University, but she loves to write about the Bible and its primary subject, the God of Israel. As a writer, Jo spends her time between the UK and Jerusalem, Israel.
