Updated March 10, 2026 05:44PM
The start of the 2026 Milano Cortina Paralympic Winter Games won’t just mark Kelsey O’Driscoll’s first Paralympic Games. It will also land exactly five years to the day after a sledding accident shattered her T11 and T12 vertebrae — and, she feared, her future.
“The first thing that went through my mind was that I just ruined my life,” says the 32-year-old pediatric nurse and lifelong Gore Mountain skier.
Fast-forward five years. O’Driscoll is now one of three American women competing in the standing category in para alpine skiing — and a legitimate medal threat in downhill and super-G. This comes just four months after her first World Cup start and five months after an ICU stay for severe asthma.
“It’s honestly turned into quite the gift,” she says of the accident. “The things I’ve lost from my spinal cord injury are infinitely less than the things I’ve gained.”
The Accident
On March 6, 2021, O’Driscoll was sledding near Gore in upstate New York, the very same mountain where she grew up skiing and now works as a ski patroller. She and her boyfriend decided to take one last lap. They hit a divot. She went airborne. The impact compressed T11 and burst T12 in her thoracic spine.
“All I could think was, I’m not going to be a nurse again. I’m not going to ski. I’m never going to surf. I’m not going to be a patroller,” she recalls. “It was all gone in an instant.”
Recovery meant relearning how to move through the world. O’Driscoll has partial sensation and some motor function in her legs; she walks with elbow crutches. The following winter, she returned to snow as a four-track adaptive skier, using outriggers — forearm crutches with mini skis on the tips for balance.
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She pointed them downhill, linked big turns — and burst into tears at the bottom.
“I was terrified I wasn’t going to love it anymore,” she says. “I didn’t know how to exist in a world where skiing didn’t bring me joy.”
But it did. And it still does.
When she slid to a stop that first day back, patrollers and instructors poured out of the lodge, cheering. Soon, her patrol colleagues helped her adapt her job. She wears a sling to carry a drill and can run a toboggan on moderate terrain. She was back in uniform — and back in her community.
Then came another blow. Two years post-accident, a severe asthma attack landed her in the ICU. Weeks on high-dose steroids led to corticosteroid-induced myopathy.
“The steroids zapped all the muscles in my whole body,” she says. “I couldn’t even put my hair in a ponytail.”
More PT rebuilt her upper body, but her lower-body strength would never fully return. She adjusted. Again.
The Lure of Ski Racing
In January 2023, O’Driscoll was patrolling at Gore during the FISU World University Games. Watching the racers rip down the course stirred something in her. Could she race as a four-tracker?
As a kid, she’d only run a single NASTAR course. A coach once told her mom she had talent. Her mom famously shut it down: “Absolutely not. We don’t need to encourage her to ski any faster!”
But now, she had racing on the brain again.
At an adaptive camp in Vermont later that winter, she and another skier talked a coach into setting a few gates. O’Driscoll attacked the course with the same fluidity she shows freeskiing—then kept trying to find a tighter, faster line.
“It was just a fun challenge,” she says. “I loved it.”
Unbeknownst to O’Driscoll, a coach filmed her and sent the footage to Erik Petersen, competition center director at the National Sports Center for the Disabled. Petersen invited her to Winter Park to train. Soon, someone floated the idea of the Paralympics.
“I literally laughed,” she says. “I was like, ‘That’s insane.’”
Then she reconsidered: Why not?
Those around her weren’t surprised. They know her to be focused and driven—always with a smile.
“When she decided to pursue the national team and beyond, we had no doubt that she would achieve those goals,” says Bone Bayse, Gore’s general manager.
“She has an incredible ease to her skiing,” he adds. “It looks effortless — and it’s lightning fast.”
World Cup Breakthrough
Last season, O’Driscoll earned a national team nod and raced at the 2025 World Para Alpine Skiing Championships. In the spring, she claimed U.S. titles in slalom and GS and finished runner-up in super-G, earning her way to the World Cup circuit.
Then, in October, another asthma flare put her back in the ICU for five days. Upon discharge, she flew straight to the U.S. Ski & Snowboard Center of Excellence to rebuild.
“I’m making that first World Cup race come hell or high water,” she told herself.
In December, in just her fourth World Cup start — a super-G — she won. She bested the reigning Paralympic downhill and super-G champions. Two more podiums followed.
“I didn’t even know I was capable of winning a World Cup until it happened,” she says. “When it clicks, it clicks.”
The U.S. women haven’t won a Paralympic medal in the standing category since 2014. O’Driscoll, alongside teammates Audrey Crowley and 2022 Paralympian Allie Johnson, could end that drought.
But for O’Driscoll, the real victory came earlier — on that first day back, sliding toward a cheering crowd at the base of Gore.
Before departing for Italy, she wrote a letter to her “Gore Mountain Family”:
“When I broke my back, I gave up on dreaming. Between the spinal cord injury and my crappy lungs, I stopped dreaming because it was just too painful. The love and support from this community is what enabled me to start dreaming again — of patrolling, skiing in the woods, running toboggans, running gates, going to the Paralympics, and now dreaming of a Paralympic medal.
“No matter what happens in Cortina, I’ve already won. I’m so excited and honored to go show the world what a Gore Mountain skier can do.”
You can watch Paralympic ski events March 10-15 on NBC and Peacock.
