The National Sports Center for the Disabled hosts a winter racing program that continues to produce some of the world’s most elite disabled skiers.

Where the Athletes Roam 

The locker room is hot, humid and funky. There is barely enough space for the lockers let alone the athletes.

The pipes in the ceiling are exposed, the air is laced with the smell of sweat, and people can hardly slither around one another to get out the door. The fact that everyone is either carrying crutches or seated in a wheelchair only complicates the situation.

Athletes labor to squeeze into ski gear, stuck between a wooden bench and walls that seem to shrink with each person who enters the door. One of them, Adam Hall (at left), is nestled in the corner, screwdriver in hand, tweaking a ski pole.

Hall, though, doesn’t seem to mind the close quarters.

“We’re all friends here,” he says. “We all get along really well.”

And then, from the other side of the locker room—which, mind you, is about six feet away—someone illustrates just how happy of a family it is.

“F*** you, Adam!”

Instantly, everyone bursts into laughter.

NSCD's Competition Program 

It’s just another day in Winter Park in the locker room of the “Competition Program,” part of the National Sports Center for the Disabled (NSCD). In a state flooded with skiers and ski resorts, NSCD’s Competition Program stands out, even if its participants sometimes have trouble simply standing. True, the locker room may look like an unfinished basement, but what the program has helped its athletes accomplish is golden. Literally.

The program spawned 18 athletes who competed in the 2006 Paralympics in Tornio, Italy, bringing home three gold medals, and was responsible for a total of 20 medals in 2002 at the Salt Lake City Paralympics. The Competition Program is but a branch of the much larger NSCD, but it’s the branch that has produced world-class athletes for 24 years—and it figures to keep on churning them out as long as snow keeps falling in Colorado.

For Hall, just getting down a flight of stairs and into the locker room is a laborious process. Ranked as a top-15 disabled skier in both slalom and giant slalom, Hall was born with spina bifida (“split spine” in Latin), a prenatal condition that prevents the spine from fully developing. But it’s not just Hall. Everyone in the locker room has a disability and they are here to overcome it. 

One has a pair of legs that are twig-thin and unusable. Another had a leg amputated because of an accident. And another, Allison Jones, was born without a femur in her right leg, which was removed when she was less than a year old.

They all have trouble getting around on foot, especially in this claustrophobic locker room. But get them on the mountain, and they can fly.

“I have one leg, and there are definitely challenges that come with that,” says Jones (at left), one of the Torino gold medalists. “But when I’m on skis, there’s no limitation to what I can do. I beat my sister, I beat my mom, I beat my dad. There’s no disadvantage anymore. It’s a tool to be free. You’re not limited by your disability at all.”

NSCD deserves much of the credit for allowing these athletes to escape their limitations—at least while they’re on the mountain. The organization was founded in 1970 when 23 child-age amputees from a Denver hospital were treated to ski lessons at Winter Park Resort, about 90 minutes west of Denver. The Competition Program came about 14 years later, in 1984, and has since emerged as the premier disabled sports training program in the world. 

The Competition Program is so highly regarded within the disabled skiing community that Hall, 21, leaves his native New Zealand for four months a year to train with NSCD. Last winter was the fourth in a row that Hall has spent December through March—which is New Zealand’s summer—training at Winter Park.

“Even in New Zealand,” Hall says with a thick but charming accent, “NSCD is known as the best disabled training program in the world. There’s a reason that I keep coming up here.”

Hall proves with each trip to the Rockies that for athletes who have disabilities and dreams, NSCD can help them overcome the former to reach the latter.

“For me,” Hall says, “if you put me in a thousand meter race I’m not going to do very well. But on skis...”

Hall never finishes the sentence, but he doesn’t really need to. A quick glance at him darting through the gates of a slalom course is all the evidence one needs to know that he leaves his disability at the bottom of the ski lift.

Just seeing him walk highlights how much of a difference the Competition Program can make. Each step looks like a chore. With his right foot never lifting off the ground, Hall lunges forward and plants his left one in the snow. He then drags the right foot so it’s even with the left, but never in front: it can’t go in front. He has to repeat these steps until he reaches his destination, which takes him longer than almost any other 21-year-old.

Jones, 23, also does not at first appear to be a world-class athlete. She relies on crutches to get around. But when the Denver native trades the crutches for ski poles, she is no longer crippled: suddenly, she is one of the world’s best skiers, a gold medal winner and the 2005 U.S. downhill champion.