Hunter Woodhall Enters 2024 With Added Perspective After Reality Check

Hunter Woodhall is entering the new track season with more motivation than ever.

He wants to win, and he now knows better than ever what that will require after failing to medal at a world championships for the first time in his career.

“For a lot of my career, I’ve just been able to make things happen,” the 24-year-old said. “Regardless of the circumstance, we’ve always had a solution, and I go out there and I do my thing.”

Woodhall has long been touted as one of the best sprinters in the country. In 2017, the Syracuse, Utah, native became the first double amputee to receive a Division I track and field scholarship. After a stellar three years at the University of Arkansas, Woodhall won a bronze at the Paralympic Games Tokyo 2020 to give him three Paralympic medals on top of his four career world championships medals.

This past season brought a different kind of ending for Woodhall.

Having traveled to Paris in July for his third world championships, Woodhall opened the meet by finishing seventh in the 100-meter T64. Five days later, he was forced to withdraw from his signature event, the 400-meter T62, due to a malfunctioning prosthetic.

Track athletes with prosthetics are required to keep their legs under a certain height. Woodhall got measured prior to worlds and realized he was one centimeter too tall. New holes were drilled in his running blades, but the drilling ended up stripping a hole that connects the back of his blade and made it loose.

Woodhall was unaware of the stripped hole, and he noticed his blade started to slide back and forth during warmups before 400, an event in which he’d medaled in at each of his four prior global championships. Ottobock, an orthopedic technology provider for Team USA, had personnel on site to assist. They tried everything, but the blade was too lose. All their creative solutions — even double-sided tape — were not holding up.

“At that point, it was over,” Woodhall said. “I knew I wasn’t going to be able to run, and there’s no fixing my leg.”

He had to remove himself from the competition. Woodhall posted a photo on social media of him in tears after realizing his time in Paris was over.

“I just kind of had to sit there and understand that was the reality of the situation, because of me not doing the right things leading up to that meet and preparing,” he said.

Woodhall said he takes full responsibility for his malfunctioning blade. He said he knew it wasn’t in perfect condition and that he procrastinated on fixing it.

“This year, I’ve changed that,” Woodhall said. “I’ve started with, let’s make sure that the things we’re relying on, just like a Formula 1 team would do, are right. Let’s control the controllable and really try to take all those things that can go wrong out of the equation, so we can win more medals.”

Woodhall, who’s already getting back into the swing of training, is leveraging this experience to improve his performance like never before.

After the world championships, he worked with a prosthetist in Europe for two and a half weeks. Woodhall said it’s more affordable to work on prosthetics overseas, and they took a data-driven approach to reconfiguring things like new feet and sockets.

“If I can take the knowledge from my prosthetist, which is here in the U.S., and the knowledge of what they’ve learned over there (in Europe), I think I can create the best product to put me in a position to win, which is what ultimately is my goal this year,” he said.

Woodhall said dropping out of that 400-meter final in Paris also taught him a lesson in humility. He learned he has to separate his personal life from his athletic career.

“I can’t put my value in how I performed at a big championship,” he said.

Woodhall doesn’t have any competitions until late January, and his next major meet is a few months thereafter. He’ll get the chance to qualify for the 2024 Games at the U.S. Paralympic Team Trials, which will take place July 18-21 in Chula Vista, California.

Until then, he is doing everything he can to put himself in the best position to win.

“I’ve been the young kid in the sport for just showing up and hoping things go well,” he said. “It took a real big reality moment to be like, no, we have to have our things in check. We have got to solve these problems before they start.”

Ryan Wilson is a writer and independent documentary filmmaker from Champaign, Illinois. He is a freelance contributor to usparatf.org on behalf of Red Line Editorial, Inc.