Life as Paralympics Broadcaster a New Challenge for Medalist Michelle Konkoly
Michelle Konkoly understands the emotional resonance of making a return. It’s fueled her professional journey, long before her second career in para swimming.
Konkoly was a freshman swimmer at Georgetown in 2011 when she fell five stories from a dorm room window. Broken bones, a shattered vertebra and initial paralysis necessitated several surgeries and brought her to the Magee Rehabilitation Hospital for months of rehabilitation.
The decade since has been marked by returns. First to Georgetown, where she swam and was a team captain. Then to the pool more broadly, where she won two gold and four total medals at the 2016 Paralympics. And eventually to Magee, first on a clinical rotation as a student at Sidney Kimmel Medical College, studying with the doctor who treated her nine years earlier in 2020, and now as a fourth-year resident in pediatric physical medicine and rehabilitation.
The same kind of loop occurred for Konkoly out of the pool. She retired in 2018, having deferred med school to train for the Rio Games and found fulfillment outside of swimming. But she managed to stay connected as a member NBC’s broadcast team for consecutive Paralympics.
What she lacks in broadcasting experience she more than makes up for in her diligence and knowledge, both as a swimmer and a clinician. Paired with veteran play-by-play man Todd Harris, Konkoly formed a formidable partnership for the Paris games, delivering 10 days of coverage to keep straight the dizzying array of Paralympic races.
“I just feel so fortunate that I have this uncommon combination of skillset, of being comfortable talking on camera, having my personal experience and success and having the clinical background,” Konkoly said. “I’m very lucky that I have the opportunity from NBC to combine all of those things and hopefully increase public viewership of the Paralympics, perception of people with disabilities, day-to-day quality-of-life things for people with disabilities. So I feel really lucky that I’m able to make it work.”
A swimming journey diverted
Konkoly’s swimming pathway, like so many of the athletes she now covers, was unplanned yet ultimately fulfilling.
Konkoly grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs, a standout at Methacton High School. She earned a spot to swim at Georgetown, but that plan changed during her freshman year, when a fall left her with life-changing injuries.
Photo courtesy: Michelle Konkoly
It would take months of rehab – with physical therapist Jeffrey Trexler, who would later oversee her clinical rotation, and a number of care providers that are now her coworkers – that left her with a permanent limp. When Konkoly returned to school, she was newly determined on two fronts: To return to swimming, and to pursue a career in healthcare to approximate what had been provided to her.
She worked her way back onto the team at Georgetown, serving as a captain in 2014. She fell short of qualifying for the 2012 Paralympics but set her sights on Rio.
Swimming in the S9 classification, she twice set the world record in the 50 free at Paralympic Trials, then set the Paralympic record in the 50 and the world record in the 100 free to win golds in Rio. She had finished second at the 2015 World Championships in both in 2015.
“When I decided to commit to Rio, I was ranked third in the world,” she said. “And then that whole year leading up to it, I was second, second, second at Worlds, silver medals everywhere. And I was very hungry to finally get on top. So I think in a good way, it set me up really well. And then in Rio to finally have those performances come together and win two golds, set a world record and the other medals in the relays, everything really came together at the perfect place and the perfect time.”
Konkoly added two relay medals, silver in the 34 points free relay and bronze in the 34 points medley relay. She served as a captain for Team USA in Rio.
In 2017, she started medical school. She planned to swim through 2020, albeit with training moved from her previous base in Naples, Fla., with coach Paul Yetter to a 20-yard basement pool beneath the anatomy lab at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. But a reclassification to S10 and devotion to her studies shifted her priorities and led to her retirement in 2018.
“I started to just become more fulfilled by things outside of swimming,” she said. “And I really liked my day-to-day life in medical school.”
That, Konkoly thought, was it for her and para swimming. But she would end up focused on Tokyo nonetheless.
Behind the mic
Konkoly’s fear of missing out on the next Paralympics got the better of her, but during a global pandemic, her response wasn’t a return to the water.
Instead, she reached out to NBC and U.S. Para Swimming about helping out on broadcasts, touting her knowledge of the athletes more than any previous broadcast experience, which was limited to the Methacton student news and morning announcements. (“We announced what was for lunch that day,” Konkoly said. “I would do it with sopping wet hair from morning practice.”)
Pretty soon, her command of the subject matter shined through. Konkoly worked the Tokyo Paralympics as well as Paralympic Trials with Harris, a veteran announcer who has worked Olympic sports dating to the 1998 Winter Games. Harris, who Konkoly calls “a legend in the field,” and the NBC production team helped her work through finer technique points. But Konkoly set herself apart with her preparation. Originally, that owed to being familiar with former teammates and rivals. But it’s expanded to new generations of competitors nearly a decade after the end of her career.
Konkoly worried originally that being around the sport again might trigger a desire to compete again. But she’s relished her new vantage point even more.
“I was so happy to still be involved, and I was able to look at para sports from a different lens, especially with this lens of my job as a physician,” she said. “And I’m pleasantly surprised that it is not at all triggering or hard for me to watch my teammates compete.”
One of the traits that distinguishes Konkoly’s broadcasting is her medical knowledge. Her understanding of certain classifications – of how a given limb difference or physical limitation affects how a swimmer might approach a race – comes from her competitive history. But Konkoly can also derive insight from a clinician’s perspective on a swimmer’s history and conditions.
“I really found, especially in the difference between the Tokyo Games and the Paris Games this year, my clinical experience has been very helpful in watching someone come out from behind the blocks and at least having a sense of what their disability is and then predicting a little bit how that may impact their event,” she said. “Of course, I’m not these people’s physicians and don’t know the details of their medical history, but just by observing, I can tell, OK, this person has poor coordination, so we might expect them to need assistance, something like that. And I think it helps the viewers know what to look for.”
An Olympic task
If the Olympic program is a marathon, then the Paralympics is an ultramarathon. Instead of 17 sessions over nine days, it’s 20 sessions over 10 days. There are no semifinals, and some events lack prelims. But everything is multiplied – four strokes times two distances times 14 classes, plus mixed relays tallied up by classification points.
Michelle Konkoly and Todd Harris at U.S. Paralympic Swimming Trials in Minneapolis in 2024; Photo courtesy: Michelle Konkoly
Konkoly had to track more than 2,500 individual swims at the Paralympics. A total of 423 medals were handed out; that number for the Olympics, including open-water, was 111. The final Paris Paralympic results book runs 518 pages.
“It is pretty overwhelming,” Konkoly admits.
For Paris, the team added a full-time researcher. Konkoly augments the nuts and bolts with her connections, especially to the American contingent, checking in with individuals and coaches. With the variety of conditions Para swimmers have, form from year to year is trickier to ascertain, not just in how an individual is training but how a condition may have progressed or a functionality may have deteriorated.
Both Paralympics have been called off the monitors remotely in NBC’s headquarters in Connecticut. The timing of the Paris games was more challenging, Konkoly said, than Tokyo. Paris required going to bed in the late afternoon for a 1:45 a.m. wakeup call, then 10 or so hours in the studio for prelims and finals. Tokyo, at least, was a flipped schedule of day for night, mimicking what Konkoly’s on-call schedule as a resident.
Konkoly is thankful that her job allowed her the freedom to take two weeks off for the Games, though she wrapped up broadcasting on Saturday and was back in the hospital Monday morning. The preparation was the most onerous, fitting broadcast calls and reporting inquiries into her jigsaw of a schedule. She and Harris were also in Minneapolis for Trials in June.
Once the Paralympics began, the adrenaline took over, at least from the start, with the joy of seeing former teammates and friends succeed helping her get through the adjustment phase.
As much as Konkoly’s medical training informs her broadcasting, the connection works the other way, too. Delving deeper into parasports beyond her individual focus on competing has opened Konkoly up to the wide range of differing abilities and personal stories, not just of swimmers but of all athletes. It makes it easier to treat patients in some of the most difficult days of their rehabs – people stuck where she was a decade ago – and offer a light at the end of the tunnel.
“I was just talking with a young kiddo yesterday who was an amputee, and he is swimming on able-bodied swim team, and he is well-familiar with the Paralympic movement,” she said. “But it’s just really cool to be able to say, Yes, I have seen someone exactly like you swim and swim really well, and you could just see his eyes light up.”