Eight years ago, while undergoing emergency treatment for aggressive throat cancer, Arman Shahzadeh feared he would never run again.
This month, he competed with the Canadian track and field team in the long jump at the FISU 2025 Summer World University Games in Rhine-Ruhr, Germany and set a personal best with a jump of 7.61 metres.
The psychology student and member of the Western Mustangs track and field team has been preparing for this moment since the early days of his career.
Arman Shahzadeh, a Western Mustangs student-athlete, competes in long jump at the FISU 2025 Summer World University Games. (U SPORTS)
Shahzadeh was 13 years old when he was diagnosed with cancer. A year after his surgery, with his cancer going in remission, he placed poorly in a provincial championship track meet. He was only in Grade 9, but the performance drove him, becoming a tool he used to push himself harder than ever before.
He calls the moment “very humbling.”
“My biggest goal at that point was to redeem myself,” Shahzadeh said. “I remember also missing out on Grade 10 and 11 due to COVID, so those three years I really put in a lot of work.”
By Grade 12, it was a different story.
He placed first in that very same competition. It was a significant moment in his journey and a reminder that hard work pays off.
Arman Shahzadeh warms up at the FISU 2025 Summer World University Games in Rhine-Ruhr, Germany in July 2025. (U SPORTS)
Now as a full-time student in Western’s Faculty of Social Science, Shahzadeh not only competes for the Western Mustangs – he was part of the U SPORTS national championship winning track and field team in March, also winning an individual silver in his competition – but balances athletics with his career aspirations.
Shahzadehbut is studying for his LSAT, with the goal of one day becoming a lawyer. The balancing act is sometimes difficult to strike, he admitted.
“It is challenging, you have to have efficiency with your time.”
His method for success is to recognize that “balance is not 50-50; it’s 100-100.”
When Shahzadeh began at Western, he didn’t believe there was a way for him to achieve his career goal of becoming a lawyer while also competing as a great athlete. Seeing two of his teammates, Josh Duckman and Aaron Thompson, attend medical school while competing gave Shahzadeh a new perspective that anything was possible.
He is not the only Western Mustang who competed at the FISU world championships – 17 other student-athletes, including 10 of Shahzadeh’s teammates and recently retired coach Vickie Croley, represented Canada on the world stage.
