As a two-time Paralympic high jumper, Sam Grewe’s identity has been strongly tied to his athletic career.

But since the Paralympic Games Tokyo 2020, the Middlebury, Indiana, native put much of that aside as he pursued a career in medicine, a passion that will carry him for most of his life.

Grewe, 25, is finishing up his third year of medical school at the University of Michigan and will be applying for a residency in September along with his fiancée, Mady Martinez, who is in anesthesia and also in her third year.

Grewe is deciding between two specialties — physical medicine and rehabilitation or orthopedic surgeon. In both cases, he wants to help others who are facing situations he has dealt with since being diagnosed with osteosarcoma at 13 years old and having his right leg amputated.

“I’ve obviously had immense experience working with people with disabilities and I’ve gotten a good understanding of what sort of challenges they face,” Grewe said. “I think there’s a lot of ways to improve their lives as a physician.”

After winning a silver at the 2016 Rio Paralympics in the men’s T42 high jump, Grewe upgraded to gold at Tokyo in the T63 class. Having just started medical school two months before the Paralympics, he thought Tokyo was going to be his final competition. But the support he has received at Michigan allowed him to reconsider that plan.

With 2024 being a Paralympic year, the three-time world championships gold medalist (2015, 2017 and 2019) had to get back into competitive shape while balancing a crucial year in medical school.

His first test came in March with the U.S. Paralympics Track & Field National Championships in Walnut, California. Having not competed in nearly three years, Grewe wasn’t quite sure how he would do, but he still had high expectations of himself.

His best effort was 1.8 meters, which was good enough for second in the T63 class, trailing only the reigning world champion, Ezra Frech.

“Truthfully, it was a really frustrating day for me with the jumps,” Grewe said. “I was excited to be back in the setting, to be back here with all these folks who I haven’t seen in so long. The jumps themselves just didn’t really come together the way I wanted them to, but I’m trying to extend some grace to myself with the understanding that I’m in medical school, I’ve only been able to train a couple days a week here and there for about a month or two at this point.”

That moment of reflection changed Grewe’s outlook of the event entirely.

“To expect anything too crazy was probably not the most responsible thing on my part, so now that I’m a bit more removed from the event, I’m actually really happy with how it went and I’m proud to put that out there and I think it’ll be a great year,” he said.

Based on being the defending Paralympic gold medalist, Grewe was selected to represent the U.S. at the Para world championships that will run from May 17-25 in Kobe, Japan.

With more than a month to prepare for Kobe, Grewe said there are some things he needs to refocus on to get back into gold-medal form.

“I am overall pleased with how much has stayed with me in the time that I’ve taken off,” he said. “(About) 75 percent of what I do in high jump came back to me pretty well when I made my return. It’s just the 25 percent or so that I seem to have forgotten, so I need to relearn that.”

Shaking off that remaining rust will be key, but he must find time to do so.

Prior to nationals, he was in the surgical intensive care unit, often arriving at the hospital at 5:45 a.m. and not leaving until 9 p.m., then repeating the next day. That has created inconsistent pockets of time for him to train, but he said his support system has been understanding and helpful throughout the process.

“I’m really, really blessed to be with the University of Michigan adaptive sports and fitness team with a coaching crew who understands that my schedule is unpredictable, that we are going to have to make adaptations, we’re going to have to meet at weird times,” he said. “That’s something that moving forward is going to be a big part of training, is just sort of settling into as much of a routine as possible.”

With all of that going on, Grewe and Martinez didn’t want to throw a wedding and honeymoon into the mix. Instead, the couple plans on tying the knot in June 2025, shortly after graduating medical school and just before starting their residencies on July 1, 2025, wherever in the U.S. they are accepted.

“We recognize that there might be a little bit of stress involved with balancing all those moving parts,” Grewe said.

Steve Drumwright is a journalist based in Murrieta, California. He is a freelance contributor to usparatf.org on behalf of Red Line Editorial, Inc.

Sam Grewe Is Balancing Medical School With Training For The World Championships

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