Bend paraplegic skier qualifies for 2026 Paralympic Winter Games

Next Friday, the 2026 Paralympic Games kick off in Milan Cortina, the same region in Northern Italy that hosted the recently concluded Winter Olympics. Anna Soens is an alpine skier from Bend with incomplete paralysis who earned a spot on the Team USA roster. She will now head to Italy to join more than 650 athletes from around the world vying for victory in nearly 80 medal events.

It is her first time competing in the Paralympics where she has qualified for five events: downhill, super-G, alpine combined, giant slalom and slalom. The achievement is even more impressive considering that she has only been skiing with the use of adaptive equipment for less than a decade after an accident at a Portland rock climbing gym left her with incomplete paralysis below the hips. In 2018, Soens became the first woman with paraplegia to summit Mt. Hood, which she did with her father, and she is the first person to descend its summit using a sit-ski.

Soens joins us to share her remarkable athletic journey and hopes for her Paralympic races.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. The 2026 Olympic Games ended in Italy on Sunday. The Paralympic Games kick off there next week, and Anna Soens, a skier from Bend, will be on the U.S. team. Soens had a spinal injury while rock climbing a decade ago that left her with incomplete paralysis below the hips. Three years later, she became the first paraplegic woman to summit Mount Hood. Now she has made the U.S. alpine ski team for the Paralympics and could do the downhill, Super-G and other events.

Anna Soens joins us now from Sun Valley, Idaho, where she is finishing her training before she heads to Cortina. Congratulations, Anna, and welcome back to the show.

Anna Soens: Thank you, Dave. Happy to be back.

Miller: What do you remember about finding out that you had made the team?

Soens: Oh my gosh, overwhelming relief. It’s been a stressful season, trying to vie for just a handful of spots, and a lot of family and friends supporting. [I] didn’t want to let them down, so excited that it’s official.

Miller: How did you go from never being a ski racer – if I understand that correctly – before you became paraplegic, to making it onto this team?

Soens: I have a handful of friends who race currently or raced previously. I’ve always been encouraged by them to give racing a try. The pool of athletes is fairly small in the world of adaptive skiing, so they thought I could be potentially competitive, based on just a small number of female athletes.

Miller: I mentioned that you qualified for a number of different alpine events, I think five different alpine events. Do you plan to do all of them?

Soens: I am most on the fence about the downhill, which is the first event. It’s basically the fastest Alpine skiing event, with the least amount of turns. It’s the one that Lindsey Vonn notoriously just crashed on. I don’t have any downhill experience, so I plan on going to Italy, getting into one of the organized downhill training days and making a decision from there.

Miller: It’s interesting that you mentioned downhill in particular. All alpine skiing has some inherent dangers, maybe downhill most, because it’s the fastest, straightest and most terrifying. But I’m curious how you think about risk in general right now yourself, after suffering your own life-altering climbing injury?

Soens: I definitely didn’t pick the safest sport [laughs]. It’s something all of us face every day when we’re on the hill, whether it’s a race day or a training day. Everybody’s been kind of, I’d say, a bit more on the conservative side while we’re here training in Sun Valley, trying to stay sharp, but continue to be strong going into the games. The last thing you want is the last-minute injury heading to the biggest competition of your life.

Miller: Why did you choose skiing? I mean, what is it about the act of skiing that drew you in?

Soens: I think it is one of the most freeing sports, adaptive sports, I’ve been able to find since breaking my back. I spend a lot of the summer biking with a hand cycle. But biking with biceps is a lot different than biking with your quads. You start moving, but it’s a lot more effort. With skiing – downhill skiing – lift access puts you on an even playing field, and I can ski as hard, aggressively, as technical as anybody else on the mountain.

Miller: And the gravity helps you fly?

Soens: Exactly, yeah.

Miller: You have, if I understand correctly, what’s known as incomplete paralysis, some sensation below the knee, but not muscle movement. Can you give us a sense for the range of disabilities and abilities that people you’ll be competing against might have?

Soens: Sure, it’s kind of the interesting component of the Paralympics or any adaptive sport. Everyone’s competing against each other, but they are starting with a different deck of cards, a different hand of cards. So it’s interesting watching people with different levels of physical function compete on the same playing field.

Within para-alpine skiing, we all get formally classified based on our disability, and from there we race basically a factored system. So what an able-bodied racer might race in a minute flat, if I were to also run a minute on the same course, I would basically get 80% of that time or whatever. So I guess for lack of a better term, it’s a handicap system, just like in golf or whatever.

Miller: And the more serious a disability or the less sensation a skier might have, the more seconds might be shaved off their final time?

Soens: Correct. So as a sit skier, I’ll be racing just other sit skiers. Some people might have some leg function, so they have the least amount of time off, basically. And then some people might have a really high thoracic injury where they don’t have any abdominal function at all, which definitely can be a disadvantage when skiing.

I generate a lot of my turns using my core, so if you don’t have that, you might have less ability to control your turn through really bumpy conditions, for example. So they’ll have a higher factor and get more time off.

Miller: How would you describe the relationships or the level of camaraderie between different athletes?

Soens: Yeah, it’s cool. Like I was saying at the beginning, it is a fairly small world. Even outside of just the U.S. team, we often see the same athletes from other countries on the same race circuit throughout the season. And while you’re all competing against each other, ultimately you are just racing the clock. So everybody’s cheering for each other at the start. If someone has an equipment failure, it’s not uncommon for somebody from another team to offer support or say, “I have another part or I know where to get that fixed,” which is pretty cool.

Miller: How do the resources at your disposal, whether it’s equipment or gear, what you’re wearing … how does that compare to other elite athletes that we just saw at the Olympics?

Soens: Most athletes, I would say, are self-funded. In general, within the disabled community, adaptive athletes often have to jerry rig things together to make things work because we, to be perfectly candid, are not the image of the end user that most gear is designed for. For me, for example, in a slalom course able-bodied athletes have specially designed guards for their hands, their shins and their helmets, to be able to hit these plastic poles, or we call them gates, out of the way as they’re skiing, they have that designed for them. It makes it very easy to assimilate that into their skiing.

Whereas for a sit skier, my arms are busy. I have what we call outriggers on my arms that help initiate turns and help me balance. But because of that, I’m not able to block the gates out of my way and I’m hitting gates a lot differently. So I’m just taking them across the chest or taking them in the face. Because of that, I need different padding. I need a different helmet. I have modified existing gear on the market in a much different way, and that’s fairly standard for adaptive skiers. We are the MacGyvers of the ski world.

Miller: What are your goals for the games?

Soens: I keep joking that I’m a golden retriever going into this. I am just so excited to have made it to this point. I am very new to ski racing, so I am thrilled to have made it to this stage. I’m incredibly honored. I’m incredibly grateful for all the support that I’ve had from work, from home, from friends and family. And I’m going to just absorb every moment of the experience, and I hope I don’t fall over and embarrass myself on international television.

Miller: You mentioned supporting friends and family. We have just about a minute left, but will any of your friends and family be going to Italy?

Soens: There’s a whole spreadsheet. I think I have like 35 friends and family coming from all over the country.

Miller: Oh, wow, three dozen!

Soens: [laughs] Like I said, it was a huge relief to make the team so that they weren’t all going to Italy without me.

Miller: Oh, they were going to go no matter what, but now they can actually cheer you on. Anna Soens, congratulations. It was great having you on the show.

Soens: Thank you so much.

Miller: That’s Anna Soens, a Bend-based paraplegic skier and a member of Team USA, competing starting next week in the 2026 Paralympics Games. She’s also a wildlife biologist.

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