Paralympian Scout Bassett pushes boundaries to become the role model she once needed
Scout Bassett is one of Paste BN’s Women of the Year, a recognition of women who have made a significant impact in their communities and across the country. Meet this year's honorees at womenoftheyear.usatoday.com.
SAN DIEGO – For Paralympian Scout Bassett, it’s not the roaring crowds or what place she finished that remains a lasting memory from the 2016 Rio Games. Rather, it’s the moments before the 100-meter race in a Brazilian stadium as she approached the starting line.
Feeling overwhelmed by how far she’d come from maneuvering around a Chinese orphanage as a little girl with a makeshift leg, tears streamed down Bassett’s face.
“In that moment I thought about my entire life journey and my entire story and how improbable it is,” she says. “It wasn't tears of sadness, but of just incredible gratitude, of, ‘Oh my gosh, we've done it. We've made it, and how unlikely this story has been.’”
The Paralympic athlete had “unthinkable” and “unspeakable” experiences early in life, and her childhood was spent in part navigating her disability alone. She had no role model or mentor who looked like her. Now, at 36 years old, she has worked with the world’s leading brands, published a memoir, broken records and become a spokesperson for representation of visible disabilities by posing in magazine spreads.
“If I had seen (someone like me) as a young girl going through what I went through, I would've felt far less alone in my journey,” she says, adding that she hopes “some young girl's going to see these photos and think, ‘OK, I have a future. I'm going to be OK.’”
Bassett sees herself as “pushing the boundaries all the time of how people look at other people with disabilities. … I'm hoping to continue to change those perceptions and the stories that are told.”
An ultimatum at Scout Bassett’s first race kicked off a lifelong love of running
Born in Nanjing in eastern China, Bassett had her right leg amputated as a toddler due to injuries from a chemical fire. She was abandoned on the street before being taken into a government-run orphanage, where she says she experienced “immense trauma.” At 7, she was adopted by a white American couple, Joe and Susan Bassett, and grew up with two adopted Chinese siblings in Harbor Springs, Michigan.
Being a minority – due to both her ethnicity and disability – in her small town made her feel “excluded” as a child. But she now realizes this experience laid the foundation for “the resilience, the courage (and) the perseverance that I have today.” One particular memory from her teen years stands out as “a really pivotal moment" that shaped her.
A 14-year-old Bassett was at her first track meet with a new, never-tested running prosthetic to compete against other athletes of all ages with disabilities, but the “little bit of shame” about her disability was plaguing her. The feeling nearly kept her from racing.
She was having “the breakdown of all breakdowns” over the realization that she would have to “show the world who I was” with no cosmetic cover or pants concealing her prosthetic, for once. It was the man who made the device, renowned prosthetist Stan Patterson, who issued the ultimatum: “We are not leaving this meet until you run this race.” And with that, she was off to the races.
“As soon as I'm running, I forget about all those things,” she says. “And it's just about getting to the finish line.”
From sleeping in her car to competing at the 2016 Paralympics
Since that day, Bassett has pushed herself to new heights around the world.
She’s a sprinter and triathlete, setting records in the 400-meter (a world record for women’s T42, which is Bassett’s classification) and 200-meter (in the United States). She’s also medaled in championships for the World Para Athletics and World Triathlon.
But those are the Instagram-worthy highlights. Behind the scenes, Bassett’s journey to competing on the world stage required years of hard work and sacrifice.
After quitting her job to train full time for her track and field career, the UCLA graduate struggled to get the “super expensive” equipment she needed, turning to nonprofits and grants to help her raise funds $1,000 at a time. A year before the Rio Paralympics, she was “living out of my car, on friends’ couches and spare rooms” while training in San Diego. She didn’t have a single commercial sponsor.
Getting to Rio involved a “whole army of people,” Bassett said, including Patterson; her San Diego coach, U.S. Olympic medalist Tonie Campbell; and her agency. Bassett credits her success to people who “saw something in me that I didn't always see in myself at that time.”
She ultimately didn’t medal in either the 100-meter sprint or long jump, but she's not sweating that. Instead, she focuses on the "many miracles along the way that had to have happened for it all to come to this moment."
Bassett found her voice off the track
Bassett’s personal journey also involved facing her demons at the Nanjing orphanage “that had really broken me as a young girl.” In her 2016 visit, she faced “the very same people that had brought on tremendous pain and trauma” 20 years prior – and she found forgiveness for them.
Journeying into her past propelled her into her future.
Besides medaling at the 2017 World Para Athletics Championships in London and taking home gold for T42 long jump at the 2019 Parapan American Games, Bassett has found her calling as a leader in her field.
In 2023, she started the Scout Bassett Fund, which bridges a financial gap for Paralympic athletes, whose “monthly stipend is pitiful compared to what Olympic athletes” earn, Bassett says. Last year, she says, the fund doled out five “substantial” grants, and three recipients competed at the Paris Paralympics.
“The hope is to invest in a pipeline of talent of young women that will hopefully be competing at those (Los Angeles 2028) Games,” Bassett says.
She also serves as president of the Billie Jean King-founded Women’s Sports Foundation and as a member of the LA28 Athletes’ Commission. She is passionate about improving visibility and equity for athletes at the 2028 Los Angeles Paralympics. (On that topic, she says she is “near the sunset” of her track and field career and likely won’t compete but hopes to get out for “one more or two more seasons.”)