Sydney Barta

Sydney Barta (born February 16, 2004) is an American track and field athlete. An amputee, she became the first Paralympian to compete for Stanford University, running the 200 meter race on April 25, 2025 at the Payton Jordan Invitational. Barta won Gold in the 200m at the Parapan American Games in Santiago Chile in November 2023, and Silver at the World Championships in Kobe, Japan the following May. She also competed in the 100 meter and 200 meter races in the 2020 Tokyo Paralympic Games. Barta competes in the T64 classification. In 2019, she was awarded US Paralympics Track and Field Female High School Athlete of the Year. Her mother, Laura, played basketball for Princeton University in New Jersey. When Barta was six years old, she was finishing a fun run when metal scaffolding fell onto her, shattering her left ankle. She spent the next months in hospital and, while being treated for her injury, she developed compartment syndrome. Her wound became infected leading to a portion of her left leg being removed over the course of 21 surgeries. Barta competed in the World Para Athletics Championships in 2019 where she entered three events finishing 7th in the shot put T64, 4th in the 200 metres T64 and 9th in the discus throw T64. In the 2020 Paralympic Games, Barta qualified for the 200 metres final where she narrowly missed out on a medal, finishing 4th behind Kimberly Alkemade of the Netherlands.

Education Barta is a high school graduate of The National Cathedral School in Washington, D.C. She now attends Stanford University, and is in her final year concentrating in bioengineering and human biology. In 2023, she completed summer research on gait analysis as a Wu Tsai scholar with a prominent orthopaedic surgeon at Stanford, while training for the 2023 Para Panamerican Games in Santiago, Chile where she won gold in the 200 meters, T64.