How Daniel Romanchuk, a Top Wheelchair Marathoner, Moves Through New York City

One of Daniel Romanchuk’s most frequent challenges, it turns out, is at the finish line.

Tearing through the tape — which Romanchuk does with astounding regularity — can turn into a bit of a mess. If it’s too high, it can hit him in the face. If it’s too low, it can catch in the front wheel of his wheelchair. And then there are the photographers and event officials standing mere feet from him as he careens across the line at speeds that can exceed 20 miles per hour.

As Romanchuk described a scenario that could easily become a fiasco, his brother-in-law, Sam Pritt, stopped him. “Such a Daniel problem,” he said. All that winning.

Romanchuk, a 24-year-old marathon veteran, has spent most of his life at the top of the sport. He was born in Maryland with spina bifida, a condition in which the backbone and the spinal cord do not develop properly, and began participating in adaptive sports programs as a young child.

Romanchuk, who now lives and trains in Champaign, Ill., started competing in the wheelchair division of marathons at age 14. He has won races in Boston, Chicago, London and New York. He has a Paralympic bronze medal in the marathon, earned in Japan this past summer, and a gold medal in the 400 meters.

So in terms of inconveniences, finishing tape doesn’t rank too high. The bigger issues come after the wins, after the red carpet of a road race is rolled up and Romanchuk returns to a world that all too often is not built for anyone with a disability.

That juxtaposition was never more apparent than on a sunny day in November 2018, when Romanchuk became the first American and the youngest athlete to win the men’s wheelchair division of the New York City Marathon. He had confidence in his fitness, having won in Chicago a few weeks prior, but it was still a signature moment in his career.

He had a few hours to celebrate before tending to a champion’s obligations, and he and his mother decided to go see his sister’s new apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. His mother, Kim Romanchuk, found the nearest subway station. There was an elevator from the street level to the ticketing area, but no elevator from the turnstiles to the platform.

“Maybe there was construction?” he said as he recalled the day. His mother interrupted. “No, there was no elevator at all!” she said, as flabbergasted in 2022 as she was in 2018.

“It was going from this high to this low,” she said of the joy of her son’s victory and the dejection of their travel difficulties. The station attendant tried to help them, directing them around the marathon-related road closures and subway construction. But it would be nearly impossible to get to his sister Kathryn’s apartment.

The attendant was apologetic, Kim Romanchuk recalled: “He looked at Daniel and said, ‘You are the one who won the race right?’ And he was like, ‘I am so sorry — I am so sorry that public transit can’t get you to visit your sister.’”

She admits that her son can take these situations in stride in a way she cannot. Sure, she is his mother, and his manager, but she’s also simply fed up at the lack of simple accommodations.

“It was a little frustrating to not be able to go and see them, but I knew it wasn’t the last time I was going to be there,” Daniel Romanchuk said. “People with disabilities, we are very good at adapting. A lot of daily life is planning extra time into things and adapting where necessary.”

It’s something that Sasha Blair-Goldensohn, an accessibility advocate who is also an engineer at Google Maps, has experienced all too often. A native New Yorker, Blair-Goldensohn has used a wheelchair since a debilitating accident in 2009, and only then, he said, did he realize what had been “hidden in plain sight” his whole life.

“So many things are built inaccessibly,” he said. “You don’t have to be in a chair to realize that many people can’t get on the subway, but you don’t see us when we aren’t there.”

In June, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority said it would add elevators and ramps to 95 percent of the subway’s stations by 2055 as part of a settlement agreement in two class-action lawsuits.

Romanchuk said the subway stations were better now than they were a few years ago. He made that observation a few days before the race on Sunday as he approached his sister’s new apartment in Queens. He started his morning in Central Park with a training session and by visiting a children’s race, and then fulfilled some media obligations and visited the High Line and Little Island — all before 5 p.m.

The sentiment is uniquely Daniel, his family says. He will adapt, pivot and adapt again. He has spent his adult life “teaching kids they can before someone says they can’t,” he said.

When he was young, his family members would zigzag across the country from their home in Maryland for competitions. They liked going to national parks near events, and Romanchuk was always determined to see everything he wanted to see, regardless of how inaccessible those attractions might be. So he would pack kneepads and gloves. “We would go hoping I could push to wherever we wanted to go,” he explained, “but if it got too hard I would crawl.”

It’s something he says matter-of-factly, as a person who has existed in a world that was not built for him, that was not constructed for anyone with a disability.

When asked how his days in New York before the marathon went — was he able to get everywhere he wanted to go? — he responded bluntly: “I’m here, so it all went fine.” The elevators worked, the tourist destinations were very accessible, and there was only one incident in which an open cellar door prevented him from entering a restaurant. And, he was able to take an accessible Uber to the marathon expo at the Javits Center and an accessible taxi back to his hotel. All in all, a win.

On Saturday, Romanchuk was asked to reverse roles and hold the finish-line tape with Emily Sisson, who holds the American women’s marathon record, for three races in Central Park. It was more stressful than expected, he said, because it could be dropped, positioned incorrectly or prematurely broken. “Everything went well,” he said with relief.

Then it was time for the race on Sunday. Romanchuk took the lead, powering over the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge into Brooklyn ahead of Marcel Hug of Switzerland. Hug caught him on Fourth Avenue, and Romanchuk spent the rest of the race in no-man’s land, occasionally looking over his shoulder to make sure the third-place competitor wouldn’t catch up.

He was not the racer to break the tape this time. That would be Hug, who won his fifth New York City Marathon by finishing in 1 hour 25 minutes 26 seconds, breaking Kurt Fearnley’s course record by nearly four minutes. Romanchuk also beat that record time, from 2006, and set a new personal course best by almost nine — yes, nine — minutes. He finished in 1:27:38.

The Romanchuks were already driving back to Illinois on Sunday night. “I’m recovering nicely,” he said over the phone on the road.