A Late Trip To Mexico Got Teen Noah Busch Classified Just In Time For His Parapan Ams Debut

Noah Busch and his family live in southern Maryland, where you’re never very far from the water.

They also enjoy boating and other activities that take advantage of their location, so it was natural that his mom, Andrea, wanted him to learn how to swim.

The only trouble was that as a young child, Noah had no desire to get in the pool.

“I don’t know, I think I saw ‘Jaws’ with my dad or something,” the 14-year-old high school freshman said.

Fortunately, the private lessons Andrea secured with the captain of the local swim team did the trick, because now Noah Busch is a Paralympic hopeful in the sport. He recently competed at the 2023 Parapan American Games in Santiago, Chile, winning bronze in the men’s 50-meter freestyle S9.

“I was happy,” he said. “After I realized I was only two-hundredths of a second off silver I was a little mad, but other than that it was really fun. I loved it, honestly.”

Busch was born without his right hand and half his right forearm because of a blood clot in utero. Just after learning to swim, he joined the local team at the age of 5 and then competed in his first adaptive swim meet at Rutgers University in March 2017 at the age of 7. Not long after, the family learned about the U.S. Paralympics Swimming program, and two years later Busch was the youngest male competing at the U.S. Para swim championships in Dallas, Andrea said.

When he was invited to compete at the Parapan Ams for the first time this past fall, however, he didn’t yet have the required international classification. He and his mom had to travel to Mexico, where he raced in a meet to earn that classification just weeks before the U.S. team left for Santiago and before his roster spot would become official.

He also won a gold medal in the 50-free, his strongest event, and got to hear the national anthem played as he stood on the podium.

“It was cool,” he said. “It was my first time out of the country. It was an experience.”

Arriving in Santiago was an even greater experience. The pool was by far the nicest he’s ever seen, Busch said, and he knew nothing about the athlete’s village — or the free food — until he got there. He just assumed that they’d be staying in hotels.

But the races were the best part.

“I was having so much fun it was hard to stay serious with it,” said Busch, who also plays on his school’s basketball team and enjoys snowboarding. “The hard thing was people were talking in different languages and I didn’t know what they were saying, and I like to know what people are saying.”

Busch said he didn’t truly enjoy swimming until he started competing in Para meets, primarily because it gave him the opportunity to see and be around other swimmers with disabilities. He still loves that part of it, including the friendships he’s made, but having the chance to be competitive is also one of Busch’s greatest motivators.

Andrea remembers seeing that competitive nature when Busch was around able-bodied competitors at the pool growing up.

“This one time a kid just looked at him and made an assumption that he wouldn’t be a fast swimmer and challenged him, and Noah was like, ‘OK, I’ll race,’ because he’s a competitor,” she said. “And lo and behold, Noah beats this kid across the pool. So just seeing him achieve at these different levels has been great.”

Busch isn’t sure if competing in Paris is a realistic goal, since he still has to drop time to reach the qualifying standards in his events. Los Angeles in 2028 may be where he makes his Paralympic debut. But he’s doing all he can, from strengthening his cardiovascular system to working on technique, to try to make that goal a reality this summer.

And competing at the Paralympics isn’t the only thing he’s thinking about when it comes to his future in the sport.

“I just want to get the world record in the 50 free,” he said. “I think that’s my only goal.”

Karen Price is a reporter from Pittsburgh who has covered Olympic and Paralympic sports for various publications. She is a freelance contributor to USParaSwimming.org on behalf of Red Line Editorial, Inc.