Two-Time World Champion & NCAA D1 Shot Putter, Noelle Malkamaki Is A Paris Paralympic Games Favorite

Noelle Malkamaki has always thought of herself as an athlete. The 23-year-old competed in shot put in high school and at the NCAA Division 1 level for her entire collegiate career. But she never identified as a disabled athlete even though she was born without a right hand.

Then, after her college coach suggested it, she discovered para track and field.

“I’ve always been on an uneven playing field, what happens when the playing field is even?” she wondered.

This is what happens: Malkamaki becomes a two-time world champion and world record holder. Assuming all goes well at 2024 U.S. Paralympic Team Trials this summer, she will be a gold-medal favorite in shot put at the Paralympic Games Paris 2024.

But competing for both an able-bodied NCAA D1 track program and at para track meets has not always been easy for Malkamaki. She’s had to develop a new mindset to balance the two.

Born with a congenital birth defect called Amniotic band syndrome, which prevented her right hand from developing, Malkamaki (née DeJaynes) never let her disability slow her down. With only one hand, she just knew that she had to work harder.

Her first sport was volleyball. Then in eighth grade, a friend on her volleyball team who had just transferred to her school said that she wanted to join the middle school track and field team. Her new friend did not yet know many people at the school, so Malkamaki agreed to join her.

“But I’m not running,” Malkamaki told her. “I’m throwing.”

By the time she was a sophomore at St. Teresa High School in Decatur, Illinois, Malkamaki knew that she had found her sport. At 5’10”, she is tall, and she has broad shoulders — perfect for shot put.

“I was like, ‘Oh, my body is built to do this,’” she said. “Finding something that I was good at, that my body was really made to do, helped with [body image issues].”

Senior year at St. Teresa, Malkamaki finished sixth in discus and seventh in shot put at the Illinois State 1A High School Championships. The points she earned helped St. Teresa finish third as a team (of St. Teresa’s 38 points, Malkamaki scored seven). Her shot flew 39 feet, 9.25 inches, or 12.12 meters, and she knew that she wanted to continue competing in college.

Malkamaki looked at collegiate track and field programs in Chicago (about three hours from Decatur). The only one that met her criteria: DePaul University. So she filled out a recruiting questionnaire. Then when her throws improved, she filled it out again.

DePaul’s throwing coach Brandon Murer finally called her.

“I was so excited,” said Malkamaki. “In my head, it was a shot in the dark that they would recruit me.”

Murer had no idea that Malkamaki had one hand.

“She had good marks and a few intangibles that we look for,” said Murer.

One of those intangibles: Murer sensed that Malkamaki wanted to explore and expand her world.

The two talked for an hour and only part-way through the call did Malkamaki mention her disability. Murer did not care, her throwing marks were good, that’s all that mattered. He hoped that she was still interested in DePaul.

Malkamaki matriculated at DePaul in the fall of 2019. The Covid-19 pandemic cancelled the 2020 outdoor track and field season, so her college athletic career did not gain traction until sophomore year. During the outdoor season in spring 2021, she scored personal bests in both discus and shot put, and Murer asked if she had ever considered trying para track and field.

“No,” replied Malkamaki. “For lack of a better phrase, I told him, ‘I don’t think I’m disabled enough for that.’”

Murer explained that para sport was a parallel opportunity to collegiate competition; she could have her collegiate path and a para path, too.

“It was the potential to have a professional career — knowing my athletic career could extend beyond college — that was a huge selling point for me,” said Malkamaki. “It was alluring to be able to keep doing a sport that I love for more years, it was just a super attractive opportunity.”

So in June 2021, Malkamaki attended the Great Lakes Games, hosted by the Great Lakes Adaptive Sports Association. A national classification panel at the Games classified Malkamaki as F46 (for athletes with upper limb deficiencies).

Later that summer, she married Robert Malkamaki, who also attended St. Teresa High School.

Within the year, Malkamaki’s para career shot up faster than her throws. At the 2022 U.S. Paralympics Track & Field National Championships, she won her first national title and set an American record in the shot put with a throw of 12.18 meters. A year later, she claimed her second national title and set a new world record of 12.63 meters.

With her nationals win, Malkamaki was named to the team competing at the 2023 World Para Athletics Championships in Paris, her first international team.

In Paris, competing against the world’s best shot putters in the F46 class, Malkamaki broke her own world record on her second (of six) throws. Then on her final throw, she shattered her mark, taking the world title with a throw of 13.32 meters.

“She was on the world stage for the first time, and I was so proud of her,” said Murer.

Back home, Malkamaki was struggling to reconcile her dual lives: Noelle the D1 athlete who was not the best shot putter on her team, and Noelle the para world champion.

For example, in April 2023 — three months before she competed at world championships — she threw a personal best of 13.85 meters at the Jim Freeman Invitational, half-a-meter farther than she would throw at world championships. But it only landed her in sixth place at the Invitational.

“How do I judge myself as a good athlete when on one hand, I'm pretty dominant and on the other, I want to make finals at these college meets?” she wondered.

Even though it seems contradictory, she also struggled with her identity as an athlete after she started competing in para track and field. She had always had a chip on her shoulder in sports, thinking that she was not as good as her fellow competitors. Now suddenly she was the best.

“I formed my identity as an athlete around playing against people who look a little different than me, who don’t have the same hardships that I do with training,” she explained. “I work harder to compensate for that.”

By talking to a therapist, Malkamaki realized that she is the same athlete no matter who she is facing in competition. The shot is the same, the field is the same, she is the same person throwing the shot.

She came to realize that “the values that matter most to me as an athlete, discipline, hard work, being rugged in the face of adversity, they are present in college competition and in para, regardless of who I’m competing against.”

The only change she has made since her world championship win last July: “You get a taste of it, and then you train harder.”

But Murer said that Malkamaki is not, in fact, training harder.

“The work ethic was always there,” he said, and with a goal in mind, “she just became more focused.”

Malkamaki graduated from DePaul in December 2023 with a degree in English literary studies and attended grad school this spring to use her final year of NCAA eligibility (to make up for the 2020 season cancellation). She had quite a season.

After 11 months of throwing stagnation, where she was not able to hit a new PR, Malkamaki finally threw over 14 meters at a collegiate meet in April 2024, finishing fourth at the Gary Wieneke Memorial Meet in Illinois.

At the Big East championship on May 11, Malkamaki threw 13.77 meters and finished fifth (as well as ninth in discus). From there, she flew to Kobe, Japan, for the 2024 World Para Athletics Championships and won her second world title.

Malkamaki’s next biggest challenge in para competition? How to stay motivated when she is by far the best shot putter in her class. At 2023 world championships, her world-record-winning throw was 1.73 meters farther than the nearest competitor.

“When I throw at a para meet, odds that I get first are very, very high,” she acknowledged. “The odds that there’s a world record broken are pretty high.”

But shot put is an individual event, and if Malkamaki removes the competition from her mindset, then she is competing against only herself. The challenge then becomes to throw the shot as far as possible.

“I want to push this record so far out there that nobody can ever touch it,” she said. “That’s the perspective I feel like I’ve had to take on because otherwise how do you find the motivation to keep going?

“There’s always a personal record to be achieve regardless of what place you’re in.”