Jessica Long’s journey to gold and mental health

PARIS – This isn’t a story about a disabled person. This is a story about a complex, competitive and powerful person.

Jessica Long has won 31 medals in swimming events at the Paralympics, making her the third-highest medal winner of all time — any sport, any country. But only now, with some changes in lifestyle and a commitment to talk therapy, is she beginning to understand just how and why she did it.

Back in Baltimore

At home in Baltimore, the alarms ring a little later in the mornings these days.

It’s quite a contrast to last year, when Long spent nine months at the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Training Center in Colorado Springs before traveling to the games in Paris. Her workout routine hardly varied: wake up, train and train some more, eat, nap, and as the exhaustion caught up at the end of the day, it was right to bed before doing it all over again the next day.

Now her husband, Lucas Winters, always has a coffee ready in the morning that he either buys or makes himself before she spends time with Goose, the couple’s goldendoodle.

Growing up, Long had five siblings but never a dog. Goose, a gift from Long to Winters for their second wedding anniversary, continuously teaches her about a different kind of love and family as she settles into life after the Paralympics.

Goose is very aware for a 3-year-old pup: He notices when Long goes from walking on her knees to her elevated height once she puts on her prosthetic legs. She was born with fibular hemimelia, a genetic disease that occurs during pregnancy, leaving her without fibulas, ankles and most bones in her feet. A double amputation was necessary.

There’s a park not far from the condo that is home-away-from-home to Goose, Long and Winters. With lacrosse sticks in hand, the humans play fetch with their dog as often as they can while Long soaks up these family moments.

“She’s taking time to experience some of those things that she put on hold for so long,” Winters said.

At home, he has to pry if he wants to talk about swimming. Out in public, Long won’t bring it up unless she’s recognized.

Once a week, Long and Winters have a date night. They have a few favorite places in Baltimore but she’s using this post-Paris time to take up cooking — with the help of some TikTok recipes.

The goal is protein. Her latest meal attempts have been protein pancakes, lemon chicken noodle soup and spaghetti squash.

The kitchen isn’t a pool, but she wants to master it, and brings a mindset to the hobby that echoes the one she takes to her vocation.

Every night the couple plays Yahtzee, but it’s never just a game. Long is too competitive for that, and regularly updates their running score.

The truth is, it’s a quiet but idyllic interlude for someone who has been competing on a global stage for two decades. While far from a household name, Long is an elite American athlete when it comes to success, with a workout regimen every bit as grueling as those in the very highest tier of other sports.

Being away from family “was hard,” Long said in an interview. “But that’s the sacrifice that people don’t always see, right?”

Adoption

When Long was 13 months old, she was adopted by Steve and Beth Long from an orphanage in Russia and, five months later, her legs were amputated just below her knees. Throughout her childhood, Long went through several other surgeries removing bony overgrowth that came with growing spurts.

Long always felt different: an adopted, leap-year baby born without legs. As a little kid, she said, she couldn’t help but feel unwanted.

Tatiana was her birth name and now it sits in the middle of Jessica and Long as a link to her origin. A decade ago, a Russian newspaper found Long’s biological family (something she did not approve of) and she met them much earlier in her life than she anticipated, at 22 years old.

She has felt the need to forgive her birth mother for abandoning her. It’s been a journey.

“It’s such a wild world and for so long I thought it had to be very black and white,” she said, “but I realized that it’s okay to live in a gray area, that I can be thankful I was adopted but also mourn the life that I would’ve had.”

Success didn’t always feel right

Long’s been a Paralympian since she was 12, bursting on the scene in the 2004 Athens Paralympics and winning three golds out of the four events in which she competed.

After winning two golds a full 20 years later in Paris, Long has only been in the pool about eight times since. She’s always trained rigorously, swimming sometimes up to three times a day to fit 10 practices into one week. But right now what she swims could hardly be compared to her normal training warmup.

“I’m just trying to remind myself I love swimming,” Long said.

Throughout her career, Long was obsessed with medals because they were how she felt people liked and valued her. Gold was everything and silver and bronze weren’t good enough.

Competing for the top spot on the podium became consuming. Her performance in Rio de Janeiro was a “failure” because, even with the six medals she won in the 2016 Paralympics, only one was gold.

Long went from a high regimented training schedule to sleeping a lot more than normal after those games concluded. She felt alone, struggled to find her worth, and was grappling with an unfamiliar feeling of depression that exercise couldn’t cure.

“It’s so easy to say that you’re enough without a gold medal,” Long said, “but it’s really hard when you’re not winning.”

Helpful husband

Long wasn’t looking to date anyone at 22 and Rio was right around the corner. Swimming was the priority. It had always been that way.

But when she went to a Flannel Friendsgiving, Winters wouldn’t stop following her around. His hair was overgrown and he had a mustache and she wasn’t really interested, but by the end of the night Winters got her phone number.

Three months later, Winters, clean-shaven, met Long for coffee and they created a foundation of friendship before getting married in October 2019.

He saw Long compete for the first time in Rio and spent two weeks with her family. Although Winters didn’t know much about swimming beyond the obvious – finish first – and still doesn’t, he recognized the Paralympics was not like the World Cup he’d been to, or the 2012 London Olympics.

He has supported her ever since and played a big role in why Long has decided to take her mental health seriously.

Self knowledge

For most of her 32 years, a swimmer has been who Long is. What started as a feeling of freedom in the water, and the fascination of playing mermaids in her grandma’s pool, led to a career spanning six Paralympic games — but there’s more to life.

“We all come to a point in our lives where we have to stop pretending to be okay and start feeling our difficult moments,” Long said in her book “Beyond the Surface,” which was released after she returned from Paris.

Swimming and exercise had always been her happy place, but they were replaced with feelings of abandonment after the 2016 Paralympics. Something was wrong, and Long – always so driven – felt lacking in purpose.

Winters pushed her to try therapy, and in her first appointment, Long spoke as fast as she could thinking she would just be talking about swimming and what happened in Rio.

But it was her adoption and unraveling her locked away feelings about being born without legs — all things beneath the surface Long didn’t think there was any point of talking about — that she finally addressed.

“I love swimming, but it’s also a way that I felt loved.” Long said. “I had to learn that I was enough without swimming.”

Now she no longer considers Rio to be such a letdown.

Long has a decorative bowl above the fridge that holds a fraction of her dozens of medals, the rest are in a storage unit. She's grown to understand the medals aren’t everything.

“At the end of the day, it wasn’t just about the medal, right?” Long said. “It was the journey. It was challenging my body to see if I could do it.”

All business

Nonetheless, if you think her healing process took away Long’s competitive edge, guess again.

Long is intimidating when she’s on the starting block of a race. She wears a black swim cap with “Long” and the American flag on each side, goggles over her eyes, strength exuding from her presence. There’s focus and a deadly determination in her eyes — it’s all business.

At Paris La Défense Arena, there was a packed house every night she swam.

NBC broadcasters Todd Harris and Michelle Konkoly called Long the “Queen of the Pool” as she took the lead over Great Britain's Alice Tai in the final turn of the 400-meter freestyle en route to her first gold of the Paris Paralympics. She was at the top of the podium once more in the 100-meter butterfly, for her 18th career gold medal.

But when the competitions are over, even now, it’s not always easy to feel so invincible. Healing is a process, not a battle won and done.

“When I’m not swimming a lot, I definitely struggle more with self-image and self-confidence,” Long said.

She doesn’t wear her prosthetics in the pool, which never made her feel out of place. Pilates has become her primary form of exercise back home, but with them off there, some insecurity creeps back.

“They’ll be like ‘Up on your toes’ and then like, you know, realize and they’re like ‘or your knees,’ and I’m like ‘Well, these are like my toes,’” Long said.

Pilates is a different physical challenge, one she tries to get better at four to five times a week, improving her posture and walking – plus she wanted to develop six-pack abs.

Exercise has always benefitted Long’s mental health and she has found different channels for that competitive energy outside of the pool during non-Paralympic years.

“Swimming has always made me feel so powerful, but I’m trying to find other ways that I can feel powerful and be strong,” she said, “but it does take time.”

One more in 2028

Not many see Long’s vulnerable side, but she’s never shied away from “protecting the integrity of the Paralympics” as she puts it, and promoting the games so awareness of them continues to improve.

She believes that the Paralympic classification system needs to be better. Athletes are classified based on the severity of their impairment to create fair competition. Long said more people need to be aware of intentional misrepresentation, which is when athletes manipulate or exaggerate their disabilities during classification.

For example, Long noted how she knows of people with cerebral palsy taking cold showers so their bodies become tighter – less limber – so they won’t function as well before classification review.

This became an issue in Paris when Long commented on an Instagram post regarding another U.S Paralympic swimmer that referenced this general issue. Christie Raleigh Crossley set a new world record in the 50-meter freestyle for the S9 classification during the Paralympics. S9 is for swimmers with coordination restrictions in the arms and legs or the absence of limbs.

Sarai Gascon Moreno, who also competes in that classification and who Long has known since they were 14, commented on a post from paraswimming saying “S9? It’s a joke?” Long replied to that comment and said, “I stand with you!”

Team USA ended up preventing Long and three others from attending the closing ceremonies in Paris because of these comments, but she sticks with what she said.

“I said, ‘I stand with you,’ like I stand with making the Paralympics better,” Long clarified, saying her words were not aimed at Raleigh Crossley directly. “We just want to have fairness and I will always use my voice for integrity.”

Long will retire after the Los Angeles Games in 2028, but she can’t imagine fully leaving the Paralympic movement. She plans to continue using her story to make others feel seen through the hopes of creating a foundation about adoption.

“So often I felt like I was the only one that was different, so I would love to try something to help young girls feel connected with their adoption and that they were wanted and they are loved,” Long said.

Long’s story stretches further than any distance she could travel in a 50-meter pool and her perspective on life is much deeper than three meters.

“I think if we all lived a little bit more like Jess did, we’d all have a lot more profound impact on the world,” Winters said. “She talks about how she only has this one life to live. I think she’s truly filling this life with so many good things.”