For the first time in a while, former Hiram student-athlete Jamal Hill will head back to the drawing board. In Hill’s second time competing on Paralympic Team USA, he finished in fifth place in the 50-meter freestyle with a time of 25.62 seconds on Sep. 2 in the Paralympic Games in Paris.
“I felt like I had less to prove but I still felt like I had to do well and represent our country well,” Hill told The Weekly Villager on Sep. 27. “It was a strange thing of trying to find new inspiration and new motivation that would still communicate the integrity and the athletic prowess of US in the pool.”
Hill qualified for the 50-meter freestyle finals by finishing with the third fastest time in the preliminaries and a personal record of 25.34 seconds.
According to the former Terrier, a lot went wrong after that.
“My body got tight and I did not have a great start off of the block and ultimately it ended up costing me the race but it was a strong competitive field,” he added. “The person who won first place broke a world record, that race was pretty much his to begin with but from second to fifth place it was pretty much a toss-up.”
It was Hill’s second time competing at the Paralympic games after making his debut in 2021, when he qualified to race in the 50-meter freestyle, 100-meter freestyle and the men’s relay.
Hill earned a bronze medal in the 50-meter freestyle in 2021 and once again qualified for the event three years later. While Hill did not experience the same success he had in 2021, he said that the 2024 Paralympic Games will not be the last anyone sees of him on the circuit.
“The next games are coming home to my home city in Los Angeles so I will definitely be there,” he said. “I will win. I am making changes to my home training facility. I have moved into a building so my actual work office and my entire training facility from recovery to athletics are all in the same building and I am investing more in tertiary coaches, strength and conditioning coaches, nutrition coaches and sleep coaches and just becoming a better student and applying all of the good things I have learned over the years.”
Hill said that his change in training will take him away from competing in some national Paralympic races for several years but it will be all toward building for a better performance for the 2028 Paralympic Games.
Having been Diagnosed with Charot-Marie-Tooth disease, a muscular neuropathy disease that leaves him with little to no motor function in his legs and arms, Hill said that he has spent each day since figuring out how to maximize his strengths.
“I have been living with this for 20 years,” he said. “I don’t know any different and it has been a consistent part of my life for the last 20 years. We all have challenges so it really just becomes a daily balance and struggle of how do I maximize what I do have?”
Hill said that he had always loved swimming because of the consistent nature of the sport; he continued swimming even after his diagnosis. He became a district champion in the 50-meter freestyle during his senior year of high school.
He continued his swimming career when he arrived at Hiram College and swam competitively for his first three seasons before he decided to leave school early and return to California to begin training as a professional athlete.
Having bet on himself, Hill is not only nationally recognized as a professional swimmer, but he is also the Managing Director of Aquatics Today, a media company that provides aquatics professionals the best practices, systems and leadership development and is the President/CEO of the Swim Up Hill Foundation, a for profit company that supports aquatic facilities across the nation.
“The biggest thing is just I took a risk,” he said. “I took a risk and got some good people around me. I am living my dream and that dream grows more every day. There was once a time where I wanted to be a pro swimmer and there was another time where I was a pro swimmer and wanted to make the Paralympic team and to be a part of the biggest swim brand in the world.”
Although Hill’s performance at the 2024 Paralympic Games left a lot to be desired, he said that he hopes people will forget about him for the next few years so he can come out of the woodwork and surprise his competitors when the next Paralympic Games come around.
