DREAMS OF FLIGHT


100- and 200-meter sprints and in the long jump. She expected to win in Atlanta. But 20 minutes before the 100, she saw her competitors’ times in the time trials— all at least two seconds faster than hers. When she stepped onto the bus that would take her and her fellow competitors to the Olympic Stadium, she understood why. All of her competitors were missing hands. She was the only competitor on prosthetic legs. She came in last.


Tat was not the first time, nor was it the last, that Mullins faced adversity.


Mullins became the first woman with a disability to compete in track and field at the NCAA Division I level, entirely against able-bodied athletes.


CHANGING AN IMAGE “Adversity in general is just a natural part of life,” she said. “We have words like ‘speed bumps’ and ‘hurdles’ and other words which help people visualize chal- lenges—however we choose to see them, just know that they’re coming. And that’s OK. Te waves of challenges will keep coming, so let’s get better at surfing.”


But Mullins had caught people’s notice. After profiles in several magazine and TV news shows, Mullins began speaking at international design conferences. Her discussions of changing the way we think about disabilities, body image and beauty attracted the attention of renowned fash- ion designer Alexander McQueen, who in 1998 put her on a London runway— in 6-inch heels on handcarved wooden “boot” prosthetics—with supermod- els from around the world. She signed a contract to become the face of L’Oréal Paris, the largest cosmetics company in the world.


OLYMPIC EFFORT


Mullins finishes the 100-meter dash at the 1996 Paralympics in Atlanta. She was the only competitor with even one amputated leg. She came in last. (Photo by Phil Cole, ALLSPORT)


More press followed—Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, W, Glamour, Elle. She was named one of People magazine’s “50 Most Beau- tiful People in the World” and celebrated as one of Sports Illustrated’s “Coolest Girls in Sports.”


“Tere was no template for me,” she said. “Tere was no trail that I could follow, no amputees in sports, fashion, the arts, you name it.”


But it was her TED Talks that really elec- trified her growing audience. She is one of TED’s most popular speakers and was named a TED All-Star. Her talks have been translated into 41 languages and have been seen by millions of viewers worldwide.


She did her first in 1998, at age 21, trying on different pairs of legs for the audience. In February 2009 she talked about “My 12 Pairs of Legs.” And then there’s her devas- tating October 2009 talk, where she reads the synonyms for “disabled” found in her 1982 Webster’s New World Tesaurus: crippled, helpless, useless, wrecked, stalled, maimed, wounded, mangled, lame, muti- lated, run-down, worn-out, weakened, impotent, castrated, paralyzed, senile, decrepit, laid-up, done up, done for, done in, cracked up, counted out. See also hurt, useless, weak.


In the meantime, she became an actress— “I started acting professionally when I was 27, which is like you may as well be 90.” She is in the cast of the Emmy Award- winning Netflix series “Stranger Tings” (she’s Eleven’s mother).


In 2018 she delivered the graduation commencement address at Northeast- ern University in Boston and received an honorary doctorate. “Oh, that was such a—you know, really only the second time in my speaking career where it’s been 20,000-plus staring back at you,” she said.


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Army AL&T Magazine


Summer 2020


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