The Paralympics ended Sunday marking the close of an epic summer of sports in Paris. The 2024 Paralympic Games were 12 days of jam-packed competition in 22 sports.
China is at the top of the medal leaderboard, boasting the most medals overall (220) as well as the most gold medals (94). Great Britain followed in second with a total of 124 medals (49 of them gold), and Team USA finished in third with 105 total medals and 36 gold medals.
Three of those medals were earned by San Diego County athletes. Courtney Ryan is bringing home a Silver medal in wheelchair basketball and swimmer Noah Jaffe won silver in the men’s 100-meter freestyle S8 event as well as bronze in 4x100-meter freestyle relay.
Courtney Ryan
Thirty-three-year-old San Diegan Courtney Ryan is now a two-time Paralympic medalist. The wheelchair basketball player won silver at this year’s games. Ryan won bronze at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
Ryan was an All-American defender on the Metropolitan State University of Denver women’s soccer team where she got injured her junior year leaving her paralyzed from the waist down.
Later she was recruited by the University of Arizona to play basketball. While at U of A she studied special education with an emphasis on disability studies.
Ryan now is an assistant coach of U of A’s wheelchair basketball team.
Noah Jaffe
Twenty-one-year-old Carlsbad native, Noah Jaffe is bringing home two medals from Paris, both in para swimming: silver in the 100-meter freestyle S8 competition and bronze in the 4x100-meter freestyle relay. Paris was Jaffe’s first Paralympic Games.
Jaffe started swimming when he was 10 years old at North Coast Aquatics in Carlsbad. According to his official athlete bio, he decided to pursue para swimming after watching the 2016 Rio Paralympics. He made his splash onto the international competitive scene winning four medals (including a gold) at his first world championships in 2023.
In 2024 Jaffe was the only para athlete to be named a finalist for the Amateur Athletic Union's prestigious Sullivan award.
He was born with spastic, quadriplegic cerebral palsy, which primarily affects his legs and right arm.
He plans to go to medical school to specialize in physical medicine and rehabilitation with the goal of working with kids with cerebral palsy and other neurological conditions.
