U.S. Paralympian Mohamed Lahna Has Unfinished Business

Growing up in Morocco in the 1980s, Mohammed Lahna, who was born without a right femur and fibula, was told by the doctors that there weren’t many options for him to be mobile and it was too dangerous to try to run.

It wasn’t until he was 20 that he got his first real prosthetic and 25 when he rode his first bike. He started cycling all over the Atlas Mountains, tried wheelchair racing to see if that made sense, and even did his first triathlon using crutches. And then he ended up at a Challenge Athletes Foundation event in the U.S. in 2009. He had to use Google to translate from English to French to Arabic, but he met Sarah Reinertsen, who had the same disability he did.

“And she was like, no, you can run!” he said.

After that, he was ready to try everything.

He finished an Ironman, he raced Xterra, he swam across the Strait of Gibraltar, and he finished the extreme multi-day ultra-race Marathon des Sables across the Sahara Desert.

“I grew up hearing about it,” he said, but never thought he could do the event. Six days running through sand on a prosthetic leg “was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” he said.

When triathlon was added to the Paralympics, Lahna was ready for that, too. And in Rio, at the inaugural race, he took home bronze for Morocco.

But with a life building in the U.S. and relationships with many of the U.S. team members, who had helped him on his journey, he was already in the process of applying for U.S. citizenship and making the transition to the resident Paralympic national team in Colorado Springs. He was all-in to earn a U.S. medal in Tokyo.

Then, World Triathlon announced that Lahna’s category would not be one of the paratri categories contested at the 2020 Paralympics. “We started scrambling,” he said. He tried track cycling, some road cycling, and made the team for the PanAm Games — but when COVID hit, everything got postponed, and he moved on with his life.

He began Visa’s corporate training program for former athletes and started working in user experience. He and his wife had three kids and a home outside San Francisco. He was done chasing the Paralympics.

That was until he got a call that his category was back in for Paris and Team USA was willing to work with him on a hybrid option, where he could balance work, family, and training. He decided to give it one last shot.

His first race back he felt like he’d never done a triathlon before. He finished last at the World Championship. But he just kept plugging away, with the support of his teammates.

His second place at the World Championship in Spain this past fall earned him his spot back on the Paralympic start line. Now, he’s about to go on full-time temporary leave from his job (and be very poor, he joked) with all eyes on a U.S. gold in Paris.

“It’s unfinished business,” he said.