By Riley Overend on SwimSwam
Two-time U.S. Paralympic swimming champion Mikaela Jenkins is stepping away from the international racing scene at 21 years old, making her announcement just a few months before the Paris 2024 Paralympics are set to kick off in August.
Jenkins said she’ll finish out her competitive swimming career as a senior at Division III Grove City College (Penn.) next season, but she made the decision to skip the Paris 2024 Paralympics because she cannot dedicate herself completely to the sport right now.
“I love swimming, but I’ve not been able to give it 100 percent of my effort,” said Jenkins, who was born with proximal femoral focal deficiency that forced her left foot to be amputated as an infant. “And if I can’t dedicate myself fully to something, it makes me feel guilty for not being able to do that. It was hart to find a good balance being everything. Not giving 100 percent to too many areas of my life that I’m invested in was just putting more stress on me than I think I realized. I knew something needed to be dropped.”
“And obviously I can’t sacrifice school,” she continued. “I had become so stressed that it was making swimming not fun.”
Jenkins burst onto the international scene five years ago at the 2019 World Championships, where she captured a gold medal in the 100 butterfly S10. She followed that performance up a couple years later with Tokyo Paralympic victories in the 100 fly S10 and women’s 4×100 medley relay 34 points. Jenkins also placed 7th in the 200 IM SM10 and 8th in the 100 breaststroke SB9 in Tokyo.
Jenkins earned a bronze medal in her signature event, the 100 fly S10, at the 2022 World Championships in Funchal, Portugal. She opted out of Worlds last year to focus on her academics at Grove City. Last November, Jenkins attended the 2023 Parapan American Games in Santiago, Chile, collecting a silver medal in the 100 fly and bronze in the 400 free.
“I’m going to miss my friends who swim Para who I won’t get to see as much, and I’ll miss competing at that level,” she said. “Paralympic competition is definitely unique and something I am grateful for because I learned so much from competing at such an elite level. I will definitely miss it. But now it is time for me to focus on school and the next season of my life.”
Jenkins is a molecular biology major with a chemistry minor at Grove City, located about an hour north of Pittsburgh. She is aiming to continue her studies after graduating in 2025, maybe at medical school or a graduate school focused on chemistry. She envisions swimming staying a part of her life in some capacity in the future.
“In high school, I swam with the U.S. masters group in Evansville for extra training and I really loved swimming with the adults,” Jenkins said. “I could totally see myself continuing to swim with that group in the future.”
SwimSwam: Tokyo Paralympic Gold Medalist Mikaela Jenkins Retires From Para Swimming at Age 21
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