One Year Later: Paratriathlon's Hailey Danz Reflects On Her Gold Medal In Paris

In the PTS2 triathlon at the Paralympic Games Paris 2024, Hailey Danz came out of Seine all but tied for the lead with three others, including teammates Alyssa Seely and Melissa Stockwell. Then in the bike leg, Danz left them in her wake. By the time she transitioned to the run, she had a lead of almost two minutes.

But Danz did not yet dare dream of gold. Four years prior in Tokyo, she had let off the gas after the bike leg and ended up with the silver medal — her second Paralympic silver after also finishing second in the Paralympic Games Rio 2016. She did not want that to happen again.

With a half-mile to go in Paris, Danz passed her physiologist who gave her the split to second place.

“No one can catch you,” he yelled to Danz after doing the math. “You’re going to win it!”

Only then did Danz let down her guard and soak it all in.

“I could feel the energy of the crowd and spot people who I knew in the crowd,” she remembers. “I got to the final stretch on the blue carpet and truly was just taking it all in because sometimes those moments can be very surreal, and it’s hard to be present while they’re happening.”

“It was something that I had been working for for so long that I really did want to just be able to fully appreciate it while I was in it.”

So what helped Danz win Paralympic gold?

Paratriathlon made its Paralympic debut at the 2016 Rio Games, and Danz was on the roster (PT2 category), along with world champions Melissa Stockwell and Allysa Seely. She was only five years into her triathlon career, having been introduced to it in 2011 during an internship at Dar2Tri, which Stockwell co-founded in Chicago. The only job requirement? That Danz give triathlon, well, a try.

Thanks to a strong bike leg in Rio, Danz took silver and Stockwell bronze behind Seely, who claimed Paralympic gold. Five years later, at the Paralympic Games Tokyo 2020, Danz again used her cycling strength to pull into the lead. But Seely again passed her on the run for the gold medal.

With the Paris Paralympic Games up next, Danz knew that the bike course around the Pont Alexandre III Bridge might not play to her cycling strength. She likes hilly courses, with long straightaways where she can really use her power. In Paris, the course featured corners and cobblestones.

“I focused on making bike handling a strength, because it wasn’t in the past,” Danz says. “That specific preparation really paid off.”

Mostly, though, she credits the consistency she had gained over the previous 14 years in paratriathlon — of showing up for training every day, even on the days when she did not feel like it.

“It wasn’t one thing, it was a thousand little things,” she says. “It’s really a testament to how in sport and certainly in triathlon, it really is about the long game.

“Triathlon is a sport that rewards years of consistent quality training and getting a lot of race experience where you’re in so many situations that you just kind of learn to trust your intuition.”

In Paris, one of Danz’s favorite race memories was passing Stockwell, who was heading out for her final lap of the run as Danz was approaching the finish. Stockwell heard the announcers say that Danz was about to win her first Paralympic gold medal.

Stockwell stopped in the middle of her own race and began urging the crowd to cheer for her friend.

“It was such a beautiful testament to [Melissa’s] character,” Danz says. “It represents the relationships that I have come to make in this sport, and those relationships have been a big driving factor for me and a large reason why I am still doing it 15 years later.”

After the fan-free environment at the Tokyo Games (due to the Covid-19 pandemic), Danz also valued having her family and girlfriend Hayley in Paris to support her — over a dozen “Danz Fans” cheering in the crowd. The day before the para triathlon in Paris, she stopped at their accommodations for a visit.

“Other athletes like to stay very focused on the goal, on the race,” says Danz. “I’m someone who likes to connect to a greater purpose. Being able to see them the day before that race was the best thing that I could have done.”

Danz also credits a pre-Paris training camp in the idyllic town of Vichy, France, with lighting her fire again.

“Everything clicked for me,” she says. “I was so excited to race.”

Danz returned from Paris with a plan to slow down and think about the next chapter. But life threw her a curveball in early October. She developed a severe infection on her amputated leg that spread to her bloodstream. She had three surgeries, including one to remove hardware in the leg’s femoral head, then another to have a bone graft. Then, as she healed, her prosthetics were remade because her leg, without the hardware, was a half-inch shorter. Unable to walk for three months and on IV antibiotics, she describes the whole experience as humbling.

But Danz also realizes that it happened at the right time, if there ever is a right time for a serious infection. Had it happened even a month earlier, it would have ruined her chance to win a Paralympic gold medal.

“My body had been giving me signs that I needed to take it easy,” she says. “I kept ignoring them. So I kind of feel like it was the universe’s way of just being like, ‘No, seriously, you need to stop.’”

While she healed, Danz scrolled through Zillow and found a house in Denver for her and Hayley. In November, while Danz was still on crutches, they moved into the house, and Danz said good-bye to the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs — her home since 2017.

Danz was able to walk again in December and run by February. Since then, Hailey and Hayley have been “living their lives and having fun.”

“I swear we go somewhere every weekend,” says Danz, listing skiing, camping, gravel racing, and a triathlon, among other activities they have done on the weekends.

Danz is also working part time for the USOPC in the performance innovation department, helping other athletes interpret data and use technology to gain a performance edge.

She is also training again but at age 34 is not ready to commit to any specific career plan — in sport or out.

“I want to use this year to figure out what's next,” she says. “The easy option would be for me to just say, ‘Oh, I'm going to keep doing sport because that's what I've always done.’ But I want to make sure that I'm choosing it for all the right reasons.”

As for LA2028, “it’s not off the table,” says Danz. “But it’s also not an official yes.”