Mat Hotho sits down with Leo Merle for a conversation that covers the full arc of what it means to build a life around the things you love. Leo competed at the Paris 2024 Paralympics in the T38 class in the 1500 meters, and his journey to that stadium started not with a coach's invitation or a scout's eye, but with a YouTube rabbit hole at 19 years old that ended with him watching other athletes who ran the way he ran.

Leo has hemiplegic cerebral palsy affecting his right side, and the conversation spends time unpacking what that's looked like across a lifetime. 

The episode goes deep on para athletics classification in a way that's genuinely useful. Leo explains how cerebral palsy is classified through spasticity testing, why classification has to be renewed every four years (and why letting it lapse could end your career), and what it means to travel to Switzerland to get reclassified because that's just where the classifiers are. The T38 classification gets a full walkthrough, including the combined 37/38 race dynamics that make para sport more complicated than it looks from the outside.

Leo is also in his dental residency. His framework for managing both elite sport and a demanding medical career is less about balance and more about alignment: two things that tax completely different systems, both powered by the same core drive to give something back to community. It's a thread Leo returns to again and again.

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