It was in the stands of Beijing’s Bird’s Nest stadium that David Brown’s dreams of a career in track and field started to take hold.

Brown, who has been blind since the age of 13, remembers taking in the “spots and colors” of the Paralympic Games in Beijing as his friends dictated what was happening down on the track.

“I’m like: ‘Hey, some of these guys have the same sight that I do, it sounds like,'” Brown recalls. “They’re down there running and they’re doing this … and I’m like: ‘Yo, this is possible. I can do this.'”

That was in 2008, but fast-forward 13 years and Brown is now preparing to defend his crown in the 100-meter T11 event at the Paralympics in Tokyo.

Aside from winning a Paralympic gold medal in 2016, the 28-year-old Brown also lays claim to being the first totally blind athlete to run under 11 seconds in the 100m with his classification record of 10.92 seconds.

But the transition from fan in the stands to record-breaking athlete didn’t happen overnight. Growing up, Brown turned his hand to many sports — basketball, wrestling, goalball (a team sport designed specifically for visually-impaired athletes) and volleyball to name a few — before settling on the track.

He raced in 600 and 60-meter events with the track team at the Missouri School for the Blind in St. Louis — gripping a clothesline-like wire that ran alongside the track for assistance — and from there gradually transitioned to running with a guide.

“I was in very big denial of my sight, which is one thing, so there were times when I would run and I didn’t run with a guide because I thought I could see,” Brown says. He was diagnosed with Kawasaki disease at 15 months old, which resulted in glaucoma and ultimately losing his sight years later.

Brown continues: “I was able to see well enough to not necessarily stay in my lanes when I was racing, but I was able to see well enough to stay on the track. So that’s how I got through a lot of things for a while. I didn’t start running with a guide officially until I was 17 years old.”