NIWOT — Inside a track and field program stuffed with collegiate stars, and often Olympians, is the boy who couldn’t walk.

Born in the country of Burkina Faso, Isaiah Richart spent the first years of his life in an orphanage. And though much of the detail around those years are murky, more can be pieced together.

Within a day of giving birth to Isaiah — her seventh child — his mother died from hemorrhaging, leaving Isaiah without any other family willing or capable of taking him in. His early caregivers weren’t sure what the future held for the child. Especially as he suffered through several early illnesses, including bouts of malaria that left his body depleted and his cognitive development impaired.

At nearly 3, he still wasn’t walking. There was hope, maybe someday he could, by the grace of God.  At least coming from his future parents who were waiting in Longmont.

“We prayed,” Jessie Richart remembered.

She and her husband Ross believe in the power of prayer and said it helped their adopted son walk by the time they picked him up in October of 2013. They weren’t given any other reason for it.

Jessie, a special education teacher in Longmont, and Ross, who has been a police officer in Boulder for more than two decades, were already in the business of helping others. Though they had two kids of their own, they sought out what more they could do. And adoption just felt right.

They worked with an agency. Then more than one. In the middle of the process, this out of Rwanda, they suffered disappointment when its country officials suddenly shut things down.

Finally, after 18 arduous months, they were able to pick up their new son. And today, 11 years later, he is a freshman at Niwot High School who — and you couldn’t make this up — runs track.

Two weeks ago, in fact, Isaiah won gold in the Unified 100- and 200-meter runs at the state meet.

“Just keep going no matter what,” Isaiah said when asked about his first season in high school track. “Just keep going, (even) if it hurts.”

The kind of attitude Niwot’s track and field coach loves to hear from his young athletes.

Maurice Henriques, better known as Coach Mo around the sport, played football for Bill McCartney at the University of Colorado in the 1990s. And like Coach Mac (who died in January after a long battle with dementia), the 52-year-old coach evaluates success with a long lens.

Reflecting on his own story, Henriques could start with the worst day of his life. Forty-three years ago, he recalled, his dad snapped, shooting and killing his sister and her boyfriend before jumping to his own death.

His dad’s last words to him were to take care of his mother, who would teach her son the importance of focusing on the two things in life you can control: attitude and effort. With hard work in those areas, she instilled into him that the possibilities are endless.

In his decades of coaching, Henriques has seen the power of his mother’s words in action. He remembers Jessica Watkins jotting down her desire to be an astronaut in a written exercise he’d assigned her back when he was the coach at Fairview in the early 2000s. Three years ago, Watkins became the first Black woman to serve on a long-duration space mission.

Elise Cranny, too. When she was a junior at Niwot, she marked down that she wanted to be an Olympian. And Henriques sent her the paper she wrote, ahead of her first of two Olympic Games in 2021.

“I think sometimes as adults in our society, we want to put people in boxes,” Henriques said. “And we’re not putting Isaiah in a box. Man, it’d be cool, that by his senior year, he’s on our 4×100 team at state.” He then doubles down on the notion. “He’s fast enough, and we should be able to teach him what he needs to do to be able to do that. You’re talking about a story. That would be a great story.”

It wouldn’t be the first great story about Isaiah, who despite disabilities had times from this past track season that gives Henriques vision merit.

Isaiah won the Unified 100 at state in 13.07 seconds, while his personal-best time on the year was slightly under 13. That’s promising considering the average leg for the last-placed boys’ 4×100 team at the state meet clocked in at 12.4.

“Yeah, Isaiah smoked cats,” Torrey Staton said.

Staton is a paraeducator for the school. He assists Isaiah and other special-needs students in anything from academics to athletics. He was the reason Isaiah first got involved with the track team, saying after he saw the freshman’s athleticism early into the school year he thought it could be a great fit.

“I said early on to Isaiah, ‘You’re going to be the fastest in Colorado,’” said Staton, who’d been convinced about the school’s track program years earlier, so much so that he and his son Kingston trek from their Arvada home to be a part of it. “I told him he is going to win Unified and it was going to be by a landslide.” He laughs. “And it wasn’t by a landslide, but he absolutely did win.”

The whole experience was fun, Isaiah said.

But he still prefers basketball.

“I just complain the whole time,” Staton said about working with Isaiah on his shot during gym class. “I’m like, ‘Get your elbow in!’”

Isaiah is always looking for ways to improve.

In track, he blossomed socially, too, something that would’ve been hard to imagine when he first came to the U.S. and only knew a broken variation of the African tribal language called Mooré and French. He’d asked his parents for yogurt in French when he got to his new home, then ate tons of it. His first word in English came quickly, “candy” — just in time for Halloween.

Today, his conversations are deeper. Isaiah is still quiet by nature out in public. But when comfortable, he often shares his thoughts about life and the world as he sees it. And those closest to him say they can’t get enough of his sense of humor. His dad sets him up, asking if he thinks his older brother would be any good at track. Isaiah deadpans, “Uh, probably not.”

Staton is let in, too.

“He is a slew of unknown knowledge,” Staton said. “Like he’ll say something about tsunamis or about galaxies, like something so random. He’s just a great kid. Awesome kid.”

Isaiah found kinship in his competition, too.

At one race this past season, he took some playful trash-talk from another Unified athlete, who told him he hopes he enjoys the view of his backside. Shortly after Isaiah handily beat everyone, Staton recalled, the other kid came up to say, “Wow, I didn’t know you’d be that fast. I don’t think I’ll ever be that fast.”

At another, Isaiah told someone else on the starting line that he hoped they would win.

“He just says that,” his dad recalls with a smile. “Just very nicely, ‘I hope you win this race.’ The Unified athletes are all very kind. They’re competitive, but they’re just very kind to one another.”

By the team’s year-end banquet, his mom still thought Isaiah would stay by her side. But he didn’t. When she found him, he was fist-bumping teammates. “They’ve embraced him,” she smiled.

He’s the boy who couldn’t walk. But now, he has certainly found his stride. “And,” his dad adds, “he has more in the tank.”

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