Imagine being an athlete so elite that you not only dominate a single sport, but you become the best in more than one discipline. Paralympian Dani Aravich is one of those.
Raised in Idaho, the 26-year-old made her paralympic debut in Tokyo running the 400-meter dash after a high school and collegiate career as a distance runner. At the 2022 Winter Paralympics, which started last week in Beijing, she’ll be adding two ski-based sports to her Paralympic resume: cross-country skiing, and biathlon (a cross-country race that finishes with target shooting).
Any one of these sports can take a lifetime to master. But Aravich has only been training for the Paralympics for just over three years—a rise to athletic superiority so speedy it calls to mind a certain iconic Elle Woods quote: What? Like it’s hard?
Aravich’s journey to her multi-sport Paralympic debut technically started in high school. Born without her left hand and forearm, she grew up racing track and field on able-bodied teams. She got a certificate from the U.S. Paralympic track team saying she’d qualified for the honor of being an All-American (a symbolic honor given to top high school athletes across the country). But, unfamiliar with the Paralympics and para sports at the time, she didn’t give the letter a second thought, going on to run Division I track at Butler University in Indiana.
The Paralympics didn’t land on her radar again until after she graduated. Feeling unfulfilled at work, she started “loosely” training on the track, mostly to have something outside of her 9 to 5 to focus on. “It was January of 2019 when I started picking up training while working. By the end of the summer, I was like, Oh wow. This could be something,” she says. So, she committed, moving to a part-time role in the office and shifting her focus to a career as an elite athlete.
As a runner with an upper body impairment, Aravich falls into one of the least-imparied categories of para sports. (The Paralympics operates on a classification system that groups athletes with similar impairments together in competition to keep the athletes with the least impairment from unfairly dominating any given sport.) And growing up, she benefited from the privilege of being able to compete on able-bodied teams—training for the Paralympics meant getting involved in the adaptive sports community for the first time. “For me, it was definitely a kind of a shock. And I probably had not the best reaction initially to it,” she says.
She decided it was important to her to get involved in para sports beyond simply competing, so she volunteered for a local downhill ski camp for kids with amputations. “I walked into a room full of amputees and for the first time in my life, I was like, ‘I don’t think I belong. I’m in the wrong place,’” Aravich says. “I probably had a little bit of an ableist mindset because the way I grew up, I just wanted to be like everyone else. It was almost a culture shock for me.” She’s grateful that she was able to compete in able-bodied sports growing up, she says, but “I also wish I was more aware that there is this vast community.”
That lack of awareness, speaks to just how little attention the Paralympics and para sports in general receive. It wasn’t until 2018 that Paralympians were first granted equal pay, and it wasn’t until 2019 that the U.S. Olympic Committee officially became the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee. Historically, the Paralympics have been all but forgotten by TV networks—it wasn’t until the 2020 Tokyo Paralympics held last summer that Paraplympians finally got a primetime slot on NBC. The network’s coverage of the Games on its various platforms reached over 14 million viewers this summer (an 81 percent jump from the previous Paralympics held in Rio in 2016). But the record 1,200 hours of Paralympic coverage—NBCUniversal’s “most ambitious effort ever”—still pales in comparison to the over 7,000 hours of content the network aired for the Olympics. “Until people at home are like, Did you watch the sled hockey match at the Paralympics last night? Until people actually care to watch the Paralympics, it’s not gonna change anything,” Aravich says.
This is one area Aravich hopes she can have an impact beyond the Games. The Paralympics are their own distinct and special display of athletic excellence—no better or than the Olympics. They’re parallel games (literally, where the “para” in Paralympics comes from) and should be treated as such. “I’m hoping the people I grew up with and my friends who aren’t related to para sport, get more comfortable with disability and take more of an interest in learning about the games and watching them,” she says. “Not just watching the Paralympics to see me, but watching it because they enjoy seeing good sports.”
Aravich was just a few months into training seriously for Tokyo when a developmental coach for the U.S. Paralympic Nordic Skiing Team reached out. Had she ever thought about skiing? Aravich had never even been on a pair of cross-country skis, let alone considered adding the winter Paralympics to her training regimen. The coach invited her to a developmental camp in Breckenridge, Colorado, anyway. “I kind of went in with a mindset of, okay, if I’m good at this, maybe we’ll make this a thing. But if I’m not good at this, it would be a good week of fun,” she says with a laugh.
She was good. Or at least, she knew she could be. “After I finished the five day camp, I looked at my now coach and I’m like, ‘Will I be able to qualify for this? If I’m gonna try this sport out, I’m not trying it for fun—I don’t have time for that. If I’m trying it, I’m going to go to the Paralympics,’” she says. “He was like, ‘I dunno, you started skiing five days ago.’”
Aravich got a pretty good indication of how far she could go just two weeks later at the U.S. National Championships, where she won her first ever race. “It was only me and one other skier in that race,” she caveats, “but after getting in a race setting, I was like, Okay, I can do this. So suddenly I became a dual-sport athlete without realizing it.”
Now, Nordic skiing is where Aravich sees her Paralympic future—which may have been influenced by a negative experience in Tokyo. Heading into the games in the Summer of 2021, Aravich—like most of us—was not feeling on top of her game. “Prior to Tokyo, I had only had one other international competition experience and that was in skiing the previous year. So to have my first international track meet be the Paralympic Games, it was just really emotionally taxing,” she says. “I was setting pretty realistic expectations about that. I wasn’t ranked very high, I hadn’t been hitting the times I wanted to hit, so I knew even making the finals would be tough. I at least wanted to run a good race and feel good about it.”
That’s unfortunately not how things went. Aravich describes her race as a “weird blackout experience.” She doesn’t remember a thing—not walking into the Olympic stadium, not the race, not crossing the finish line. “It was like I was so nervous about being nervous that I numbed my whole brain,” she says. Aravich ultimately didn’t advance out of her heat to the finals. In that one race, her first Olympic experience was over. “I kind of kept delaying my emotions. Two weeks after I returned home I just had like a massive crying meltdown for hours,” she says. She reached out to other athletes, including those who had been successful at their events, and was surprised to find that a lot of them felt the same disappointment after coming home. “As soon as it ends, it’s kind of a feeling of emptiness,” Aravich says. “It’s like four years for something. And then it’s just done.”
That’s been a powerful lesson for Aravich as she prepares for her second Paralympics in six months. As the conversation on athlete mental health gets louder, it’s something she wants to help other newcomers to the Games cope with too as part of a new generation of athletes thinking about experience and impact more than about medals. She’s prioritizing longevity over the kind of punishing drive that’s pushed so many athletes past their limits brink. “I’ve been cross-country skiing for two years prior to Beijing and a lot of these women that I’ll compete against have been doing it their whole life,” she says. “It’s definitely a patience thing. I’m reminding myself that I’m lucky to have this experience. Competing has brought me a full sense of purpose. Not only do I get the opportunity to help a community of people who are still fighting for the world to become more accessible, but I also get to discover things in me that I probably would never have gotten to see at a desk job.”
Find out more about the Paralympics and where to watch here.
