Marlon Shirley

Profile

GOLD MEDALIST SPRINTER Marlon Shirley has captivated the sporting world as the fastest amputee in the world. When he’s not working out at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, he’s most likely flying his Beechcraft airplane. Charismatic and handsome, Shirley enjoys lucrative sponsorships and celebrity status with profiles by Sports Illustrated, USA Today and HBO’s Real Sports with Bryant Gumble.

Twenty years ago, when he was featured on Wednesday’s Child, a TV program showcasing hard-to-place orphans and foster kids, his life was anything but charmed. Shirley was 5 years old when social services picked him up wandering the streets of Las Vegas. His mother was a prostitute, his father her pimp. For two years, he lived at an orphanage. While he was there, his foot was sliced off by a lawnmower blade.

“Marlon never wanted pity,” recalls social worker John Sprouse. “Immediately after his release from the hospital, we were chasing him off swings and fences. He wore out those prosthetics faster than they could put them on.”

Later, Shirley was placed in adoption, where he was physically abused, then in a foster home, where he was badly neglected. At 7 years old, finding a permanent home proved difficult.

“I was an older child, black and missing a foot,” Shirley says. “Not too many people wanted me.” But it was love at first sight for Marlene Shirley of Tremont, Utah, when she saw him on Wednesday’s Child and adopted him at age 9.

“The Shirleys gave me a family and home. But I still had anger that I didn’t understand myself,” he says.

In February 1997, Shirley, then just shy of 19, accompanied a friend to the national Simplot Games at Idaho State University. Coach Bryan Hoddle spotted him practicing the high jump.

“I was sitting in the stands and saw this kid with an artificial leg jump head first over the bar,” says Hoddle. “They raised it higher and higher. Afterwards, I asked if he had heard of the Paralympics. He hadn’t. I told him I thought he had just broken the high jump world record and convinced him to go to [the Olympic Training Center].

“All along I thought Marlon was a sprinter. I’d say, ‘There’s going to be a day when you are going to win the ESPY award.’ He’s won it twice.”

Shirley took the gold medal for the 100-meter dash at the 2000 Paralympics in Sydney and again at the 2004 games in Athens. Today, he holds the world records for the 100-meter dash and the long jump. He broke his own world record in the 100-meter dash on June 30 at the U.S. Paralympics Nationals in Georgia, and hopes to shatter it again at the Parapan American Games in Brazil August 12-19.

And he’s set another goal: launching his Champions in Life program, targeted to San Diego’s homeless and foster children. The project teaches kids about sportsmanship, life skills and character qualities so they can be champions on and off the track. The highlight of the project is a “Day of Champions” held at the Olympic Training Center. (Details can be found at mshirley.com.)

“This isn’t a program anyone’s designed for me,” says Shirley. “I still have struggles, but there are a lot of people I can depend on. Nobody does everything on their own.”

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