By: Bella Varghese
“I didn’t know what sport I was going to go in, but I knew that I wanted to go to the games so bad,” said Paralympic alpine skier Kelsey O’Driscoll. In March, O’Driscoll competed in the Milano-Cortina 2026 Paralympic Winter Games. She is a registered nurse, working at the Albany Medical Center in Albany, New York.
“I fell in love with the concept of going to the Olympics in 2002,” she said. O’Driscoll began skiing and surfing as a child, and eventually competed in track and field at the Division I level during college. At eight years old, while watching the Salt Lake 2002 Winter Games, she was captivated by the athleticism she saw. While a collegiate track athlete at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, she prepared to compete in trials for the Rio de Janeiro 2016 Olympic Games.
“My lungs had other plans,” she said. “My regular exercise-induced asthma morphed into this very severe, difficult-to-control version, and I kind of had to give up running and my Olympic dream.”
Despite her athletic career pause, O’Driscoll found a path that brought her joy and purpose. Shortly after ending her track career, she moved to the Adirondacks and began working as a ski patroller for Gore Mountain in North Creek, New York. She resumed her studies at the State University of New York Adirondack, where she graduated in 2019 as a registered nurse.
During the early stages of the COVID-19 Pandemic, O’Driscoll started working at Albany Medical Center, continued working at Gore Mountain, and kept skiing and surfing recreationally. In March 2021, her life changed forever. She fractured her spine in a sledding accident.
“The initial bit was pretty brutal and honestly fairly dark,” she admitted. “I was looking at life where I didn’t think I was gonna ever do any of the things I love again. I was never gonna work as a nurse again. I was never going to surf again. I was never going to ski again.”
Though O’Driscoll grappled with her circumstances and the many possibilities that came with them, she refocused and was willing to see what each new day would bring.
“I kind of set my sights for starters on walking,” she said. After extensive physical therapy and physical rehabilitation, she was back to walking and ready to revisit athletics. About four months into her recovery, in June 2021, O’Driscoll was introduced to the Hi-5 Sports organization.
Hi-5 Sports is a volunteer-based, nonprofit organization that aims to provide sports training, competitions, and social events for individuals with physical and intellectual disabilities.
Through Hi-5 Sports, she connected with a community of adaptive athletes who rediscovered sports after life-altering accidents. “That really helped shift my mindset,” she said, “and find that drive again.”
Just under a week after connecting with Hi-5 Sports, she was already relearning how to surf. “I got home, and I called one of my friends who runs the adaptive program at my mountain and was like: ‘Okay, I just surfed, which means I think I can ski…how do we make that happen?’” she said.
Since then, O’Driscoll has worked with various programs to help her solidify her athletic career. Starting with Gore Mountain’s adaptive program, she learned adaptive skiing. She trained with the National Sports Center for the Disabled in Winter Park, Colorado and Vermont Adaptive Ski & Sports.
O’Driscoll, no stranger to competing under the spotlight, notices a difference in how she is celebrated as a para-athlete compared to how she was celebrated as a non-disabled athlete.
“I’m just trying to do my thing and enjoy my life,” she said. “The ‘Oh, you’re doing great, sweetie,’ [compliments]…no one wants to hear that.”
“I’d much rather someone be like: ‘Yo, that was badass,’ ‘you picked a really good line,’ or ‘you’re an incredible skier,’” she said.
Along with the differentiated treatment between para-athletes and non-disabled athletes, O’Driscoll also notes the lack of media coverage, public interest, and support para-athletes receive in comparison to non-disabled athletes.
“We’re striving towards getting closer to closing that gap,” she said. “This Paralympic Games had–at least for NBC–some of the most viewership and some of the best coverage of the Paralympic Games.”
Many of the Paralympic events struggle to develop fan bases. O’Driscoll notes that para-alpine ski racing has the largest fanbase and receives more coverage compared to other events.
Another disparity she mentioned is the minimal funding para-athletes receive compared to non-disabled athletes. “We’re begging just to get our costs of ski racing covered,” she said. This issue stems from the lack of sponsors willing to partner with para-athletes, and it is perpetuated by the infrequent media coverage of para-athletes.
“I made not a single penny this entire winter. Not one. I barely broke even,” she admitted. “When you’re looked at as less than or less important, you’re not going to get the same media coverage. I think that’s a societal thing.”
When attempting to understand the inequity in media coverage of para-athletes and non-disabled athletes, O’Driscoll feels—after years of viewing the Winter Olympic Games—that non-disabled athletes are no more exceptional than para-athletes.
“As a woman who can’t feel either leg all that well, I keep the same downhill [line],” she said, recognizing the equal course structures both para-skiers and non-disabled skiers compete on.
“Watching someone [ski] on legs they can’t feel has got to be insanely cooler…holy shit, this person’s disabled. This person has no legs. This person has no arms. They’re doing the same thing. That’s the story that needs to be told.”
Compared to other para-teams, O’Driscoll feels Team USA does a reasonable job supporting para-athletes. Team USA involves para-athletes and non-disabled athletes in social media campaigns with relative equality, but the algorithm tends to favor non-disabled athletes. On Team USA’s Instagram page, several posts celebrating para-athletes consistently receive fewer likes and comments than posts celebrating non-disabled athletes.
“Team USA puts out the message that we are one team, and one isn’t any less than the other,” she said.
As of April 14th, 2026, an Instagram post, published on April 8th, highlighting Team USA’s most notable Paralympic accomplishments from the Milano-Cortina Games, received fewer than eight hundred likes, twenty-nine comments, ten reposts, and fifty shares. In contrast, as of April 14th, 2026, an Instagram post, published on April 2nd, highlighting Team USA’s most notable Olympic accomplishments from the Milano-Cortina Games, received over five thousand four hundred likes, over one hundred comments, over two hundred forty reposts, and over two hundred eighty shares.
Despite its efforts to promote its para-athletes, Team USA’s audience is comparatively less expansive than large sports news companies such as ESPN. Team USA’s social media following consists only of about 8 million accounts–many of which stem from the same social media users:
- 2.8 million Instagram followers
- 3.7 million TikTok followers
- 1.9 million X (formerly Twitter) followers
- 354K YouTube subscribers
On the other hand, ESPN’s social media following consists of about 158 million accounts:
- 28.6 million Instagram followers
- 57.1 million TikTok followers
- 58.1 million X (formerly Twitter) followers
- 14.3 million YouTube subscribers
In a report published by ESPN Press Room on February 17th, 2026, ESPN’s digital and social performance results from the first quarter of the 2026 fiscal year consist of over 500 million monthly global unique users, placing them first in global reach. This audience is more than twice as expansive as the second-place competitor, CBS Sports.
Given ESPN’s large global audience, the opportunity to present Paralympic stories to the masses did arise. However, fewer than ten stories about the Paralympic Games and Paralympians were covered by ESPN during the Milano-Cortina 2026 Paralympic Winter Games. As of April 3rd, ESPN published only one Instagram post regarding the Milano-Cortina 2026 Paralympic Winter Games.
According to a recent Instagram post from Culxtured, a media group that aims to bring more attention to para-athletics and stories, ESPN published one hundred forty-nine posts about the Milano-Cortina 2026 Olympic Winter Games to its Instagram page while only posting one about the Paralympic Winter Games.
“The little guys can do as much heavy lifting as they want,” O’Driscoll said. “But until the ESPNs of the world decide to make it a story, we can scream from the top of the mountain all we want.”
“We still have such a long way to go,” she said, “without the media and the press, you can’t grow.”