Carving the Mountain Kyle Taulman Para Alpine Skiing Feature

You say that I'm crazy, but you don't think I know what you've done. I stay motivated with music. I've just always loved music. It's funny, no one in my family has any musical talent, but for some reason I've been able to sing my whole life. I was paralyzed when I was two by a cancerous tumor that wrapped around my spinal cord and shut it off. So I ended up with stage three, treated as stage four, high-risk neuroblastoma, which is a form of pediatric cancer, but I was paralyzed from the waist down from that. I also grew up in a mountain town in Colorado in the United States. Skiing is one of the biggest things there, and so I started skiing from a young age. I started skiing at the age of three, and when I was about 11, I found alpine skiing as racing, and I started competing. I feel like the most important moment for my career so far is being here. It was just always a dream of like, oh yeah, people go to the Olympics from here, and I wanted to be the first Paralympian. I love all aspects of ski racing, but I really love slalom just because I am someone who loves to think. I love the actual technical, tactical side of skiing, and I just love that just like boom, boom, boom, fast, cross the hill. I would say the biggest challenges I've had to face up until this point have mostly just come from myself. I've had a lot of struggle with the mental side of sport. This is elite competition, this is elite sport. My head for a couple years just wasn't in the game. I was trying to do school at the same time, trying to do all these other things, like piling too much on, and I was just falling apart in every area. In the last couple years, I've finally resetted myself, started going to therapy and just figuring myself out, and through all of that, I was able to come into myself and just start to enjoy skiing again. My journey here to the Games in Milano Cortina was a little interesting. I hadn't really fully competed in about a year. I came back to it, and it was the grounding that I needed to put myself back together. Just in this last year, I finally felt like the skier I used to be. I've been really looking forward to these Games, so my expectations going into it are just to enjoy it. I've been skiing well, and I expect myself to put down my best skiing on the hill, and if that brings me anywhere near the podium, anywhere near the top ten, as long as it's my best skiing, I'll be happy. I think sports changed my life in a lot of ways. It's just given me opportunities that I never would have had otherwise. That's changed my life too, of wanting to bring sport to more people, wanting the Paralympics to be bigger, for more people to know what this is, what this feels like, to get outside and do some incredible things. Having people who are like you is an incredibly empowering thing. I want everyone to watch the Paralympic Games, to enjoy para-sport, to see the highest level of Paralympic competition, of para-competition, here in Italy.