86 TIME July 19/July 26, 2021
TOKYO
OLYMPICS
Jo Brigden-JonesBeing both a world-
class kayaker and a
paramedic can be hectic.
“Sometimes I would do
three training sessions
and then go to do my
night shift,” says Jo
Brigden-Jones, who will
represent Australia in
this year’s Olympics. But
the 33-year-old, who has
worked for New South
Wales Ambulance since
2016, says her career
takes some of the pres-
sure off when she’s at the
starting line getting ready
to paddle. “I might have
saved someone’s life in
my last shift,” she says.
Although Australia has
handled the pandemic
well, with just 120 casesper 100,000 residents
to date, the Olympian
has come face-to-face
with the virus. She says
she helped transport
one of the fi rst confi rmed
patients from their home
to a hospital. “Then it was
still quite scary and con-
fronting because we didn’t
know much about the
virus, and everything was
evolving every day,” she
says. Brigden-Jones, who
will fl y to Japan on July 24,
says her health care
experience has helped her
accept the strict social-
distancing measures
and mask mandates that
athletes will face in Japan.
It’s worth it, she says:
“I recognize how special
it is to be able to still com-
pete at the Olympics in a
pandemic.” —Amy GuniaPaula Pareto
Paula Pareto is known as La Peque, or
the Small One—and not without some
justifi cation. What else are they going to
call you when you’re barely 4 ft. 10 in. tall
and tip the scales at under 105 lb.? But
based on her accomplishments, Pareto
is anything but peque. Entering her fourth
Olympics, the Argentine judoka is already
in possession of a silver medal won at the
2008 Beijing Games and a gold won at
Rio de Janeiro in 2016. But it’s her efforts
off the mat that truly distinguish her.
A physician working as a trauma specialist
in a hospital in San Isidro, she spent 2020
and much of 2021 on the front lines of the
COVID-19 battle, both caring for her own
patients—some of whom were suffering
from the disease in addition to the injuries
that landed them on Pareto’s ward—and
assisting the rest of the medical staff
that was working full time against the
pandemic. Throughout the past months,
Pareto continued to work her shifts at
her hospital, with the attendant risk
of contracting COVID-19 herself, while
also training for the Olympics. But that
challenging path is one she apparently
enjoys traveling. As Pareto wrote on her
Facebook page, “The degree of courage
you live with determines the degree of
satisfaction you receive.” —Jeffrey Kluger