Snowboarder Brenna Huckaby has everything she needs right now, in this moment, as she chases a fourth Paralympic gold medal.
Her two daughters, Lilah and Sloan, are at the Milan Cortina Paralympics and waiting at the bottom of the hill. Her husband, Tristan, is with them. Even her cat named “Mouse” — her third kid, she proudly exclaimed — is represented by being pictured on her snowboard.
Just as important, her mental health. It's in a good place, too.
Because the road to three Paralympic gold medals for the 30-year-old Huckaby hasn't always fulfilled everything she thought it would fulfill. But being in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, for her third Paralympics and surrounded by family and friends, feels genuine.
“For me, it’s just about enjoying the experience,” said Huckaby, who's the top seed heading into the women’s snowboard cross SB-LL2 competition Sunday. "I just feel like I have nothing left to prove. My first Games, I felt like I had to prove myself to my sport. I had to prove myself around my disability, which wasn’t really healthy for me.
“My second Games, I felt like I was proving to myself that I was enough beyond any achievement. For this one, I'm just here. I have nothing left to prove. I'm just excited to be in the experience.”
To think, she really didn't see snow — significant accumulation, anyway — until she was a teenager. Huckaby grew up in Louisiana and was a nationally ranked gymnast. After dealing with constant pain, she was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, which is a rare bone cancer. She had her right leg amputated above the knee when she was 14.
Soon after, she was introduced to snowboarding as part of a rehabilitation excursion to Utah.
It was love at first snow. From there, a quick progression, winning a world championship just two years after discovering the sport. She then captured gold in snowboard cross and banked slalom at the 2018 Pyeongchang Paralympics.
A career highlight, for sure. With that, a struggle, too.
“I truly believed that those medals were going to make me feel different about myself,” Huckaby explained. “I thought that they were going to make me feel happy and fulfilled. And so when I won my two gold medals, and I actually felt the opposite, it was like, ‘Oh (crap), what now?’ I actually feel worse.
“That was the moment where I was like, ‘I need help.’ It’s a little weird that one of the best accomplishments in my career actually was the fall of my mental health.”
Therapy helped. Talking helped.
“I remember the first time that I went into my therapist's office, and what I ended up saying was just like, ‘I don’t want to feel like this anymore,'" Huckaby recounted. "But I don’t know why I’m feeling it. I just feel like I’m in pain all the time, in my gut, but it’s emotional pain.
“I realized later this is life and how lucky I am that I get to go through another circle of the (crap) and the growth and the other side. Because that means I’m still alive. It means I am still here. I’m still experiencing.”
Huckaby had to fight just to get to the starting line for the 2022 Beijing Games. The International Paralympic Committee (IPC) eliminated her event classifications given there weren’t enough women in the field. Classified as an LL1 athlete — for her above-the-knee amputation — she lobbied to compete in the men’s LL1 category or in the women’s LL2 classification (lower-limb impairments).
She won in a German court and then on the slopes, taking the women's banked slalom SB-LL2 gold medal, along with bronze in snowboard cross (Cecile Hernandez of France is the defending champion in Cortina).
“There was just a lot more pressure,” Huckaby said. “But I remind myself, too, of why I’m doing this and it’s for representation and to build a more inclusive society. It literally just melts all the pressure of medals away.”
To get to that perspective, though, took, as she explains, “a lot of healing. In the last eight years, that’s what I’ve been doing: healing.
“I think many of us are afraid of those big, scary feelings,” Huckaby added. "We try to shut them down. But when we do that, we’re taking our humanity away. But it’s important not to shut those away.”
On Sunday, Huckaby can't wait to look over to the side and see her kids and her husband. To experience this moment with them.
“I truly believe I've already won," Huckaby said. "I've already won with the life that I live. I've already won with the incredible people that I get to meet. I’ve already won with my kids and my husband.
"My gold medal is getting to the bottom and being there with them.”
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AP Winter Paralympics: https://apnews.com/hub/paralympic-games
