Arch Sponsorship Fuels Paralympian’s Quest

There she was, halfway around the world from her island home, a guest of the Bermuda Paralymic Association sent to China to be a spectator at the 2008 Beijing Games.

Jessica Lewis sat next to her mother, Lorri, lost in the crowd of 40,000 people. From her perch in the massive stadium, Lewis looked out over the track and saw the future.

Her future.

In that moment, Jessica Cooper Lewis’ spectating days were over.

“I remember it clearly,” she says. “We were watching athletics, and I just saw how fast everyone could go. I was like, ‘This is definitely the sport for me — this is what I want to do.’ I was sitting in the stands with all these thousands of cheering people, and I turned to my mom and said, ‘At the next Games, I’m going to be on that track, and I’m going to be racing.’ And that’s exactly what happened.”

Lewis hasn’t slowed down yet. She has competed as a wheelchair racer in four Paralympic Games — London in 2012, Rio de Janeiro in 2016, Tokyo in 2021 and Paris last summer — and she’s training hard for Los Angeles in 2028.

Arch Sponsorship

Arch is helping with those efforts, signing on as a sponsor to support Lewis in her quest to be the fastest she can be.

“I’m so grateful to have Arch’s support and their belief in my journey,” Lewis says. “It takes a load off my mind. I don’t have to worry about how I’m going to afford getting to competitions, and that’s huge. Arch’s support allows me to focus on training and competing.”

Lewis still calls Bermuda home, but she spends most of her time in British Columbia, Canada, working with coach Geoff Harris. The training is intense. It’s a full-time job, six days a week for much of the year, half in the gym lifting weights and cross training, half on the track or rolling cross country in her racing chair.

Her T53 racing rig is a six-foot long, three-wheeled chair with two in back and one in front.

“You don’t really sit in it, you kneel,” Lewis says. “My legs are underneath me, so it’s not like sitting in a day chair. It’s a very different push technique. We wear racing gloves, and I don’t actually grip the rim like I would in a day chair. I punch the rim. It’s a faster way to do it.”

The fastest T53 racers — a classification for athletes with limited abdominal muscle control — can reach speeds of 15 mph in the 100 meters.

Lewis’ quest clearly aligns with Arch’s commitment to hard work and dedication to continuous improvement.

And like Arch, cycle management matters. Ever since that day in Beijing, Lewis has lived her life in four-year cycles to ensure she’s at her peak in the Paralympic year.

Following the cycle works. She placed eighth in the 100-, 200- and 400-meter races in London. She improved to sixth in the 100 in Rio, fourth in Tokyo — just shy of a bronze medal — and fifth in Paris after setting an Americas record while qualifying.

The road to L.A. includes milestones along the way.

Lewis competed in Switzerland in the spring and raced throughout the summer. This year’s World Championships are in India. The 2026 Commonwealth Games are in Scotland, and Peru will host the 2027 Parapan American Games.

“We have different benchmarks throughout the year,” Lewis says. “There are goals we want to accomplish, each one building toward the next.”

The Way Here

To understand where Lewis is going, take a look at where she’s been.

Lorri and Mark Lewis’ daughter was born in Bermuda with a disability called diastematomyelia.

“It’s a really long word, and I still have trouble spelling it,” Lewis says. “Basically, I had a bone that split my spine in half. That happened at birth and left me paralyzed from the waist down.”

At a young age, Lewis got involved with WindReach, an organization that offers therapeutic, educational and sports programs for people with disabilities.

Her first love was wheelchair basketball, but Bermuda — a nation of fewer than 65,000 people — didn’t have enough para-athletes to assemble a national team.

“I needed to pick an individual sport if I wanted to represent Bermuda, which I absolutely wanted to do,” Lewis says. “I’m so glad I made the decision to choose wheelchair racing.”

Epilogue

Four years after that day in Beijing, Lewis lined up for her first Paralympics race in London.

It’s a moment she’ll remember for the rest of her life.

“Oh my gosh, it was an absolutely incredible experience,” she says. “I still get goosebumps thinking about it. There were 80,000 people in the stands, and the emotions were overwhelming. It was crazy to be competing in front of that many people. London really helped me see what everything was about. I knew that I was exactly where I needed to be, and racing was what I wanted to do with my life.”

The London Games sailed by in a blur, setting the stage for all that was yet to come.

In the years since, Lewis has traveled the world. Racing has taken her to five of the world’s seven continents, missing only Africa and Antarctica.

“I’ve lived my life in four-year cycles,” she says, “and it’s been an incredible journey.”

A journey that continues with a little help from Arch.