Ten-year-old Allison Jones is definitely going for the gold in Winter Park, Colo. She's already got a box full of ski-racing medals and competes any chance she gets. The fact that she's got one leg doesn't stop her at all.
"I'm going to be world champion," says Allison with supreme confidence, well aware of the many admiring glances she wins from fellow skiers as she flies down the mountain on her specially-adapted skis. She certainly left me in her wake one day recently. Her parents, she confides at the bottom, also ski much too slowly for her taste.
Allison, who lives in Colorado Springs, hopes eventually to join the the U.S. Disabled Ski Team, which competes around the world. Meanwhile, the skinny fifth grader with a lopsided grin considers Winter Park a second home. She learned to ski here, less than 70 miles from Denver, at the National Sports Center for the Disabled when she was 5. Now she is a proud member of the Winter Park Disabled Ski Team, the world's only year-round ski racing program for the disabled.
Tell kids with disabilities, Allison urges, to "be prepared that learning to ski is going to be hard. But it's worth sticking with it. It's adventurous and risky."
For children and adults who can't walk or hear or see or are mentally impaired, skiing offers a lot more than that, says Hal O'Leary, who directs the center and, as a young ski instructor, helped found it 25 years ago. He's literally written the book on the subject and is recognized nationally as an expert. "Skiing is such a huge confidence booster for those with disabilities that it can change the course of people's lives," Mr. O'Leary believes.
Mr. O'Leary has seen parents cry when they see their youngsters skiing for the first time. "When you see this child with disabilities doing something that their siblings are doing, your attitude soars. You realize there's a future for this child."
The skiers themselves feel just as energized. Ask 25-year-old Brent Elisle, who learned to ski in the program as a teen-ager and later worked for the center as an intern and volunteer instructor. Now, while waiting to start graduate school, he's working on the mountain. "I can ski better than other people, and that makes me feel good," says Mr. Elisle, who has cerebral palsy. "I can ski better than I can walk. Skiing helps you feel like you can do anything."
Today, nearly one in five Americans has a disability -- some 49 million people, the federal government reports. That includes nearly 5 million children. Their numbers grow annually.
The center's 25th anniversary comes at a time when more families than ever with disabled children are traveling, enjoying active sports like skiing. The center also offers a range of action-packed summer programs from mountain biking to rock climbing. (For information about the center or to sponsor a center athlete for $400 a year, call [303] 726-5514.)
This ski season, the Center for the Disabled will be host to 2,500 disabled skiers from all over the world. Participants include children with severe learning disabilities and birth defects, adults paralyzed in diving accidents and people who have lost arms or legs.
What started as a one-time effort to help a group of pediatric amputees from Denver enjoy the winter is now the world's model program for teaching disabled adults and children to ski. The center even has a large workshop that provides adaptive equipment for people with 45 different disabilities -- from those who must sit to ski to those who need extra help balancing.
"The Winter Park program helped legitimize skiing as a real sport for those with disabilities," observes Ed Harrison, a spokesman for National Handicapped Sports, the leading non-profit organization that promotes sports for disabled individuals. Mr. Harrison says there are now some 75 disabled skier programs around the country, from Maine to Colorado to California. (Call [301] 217-0960 for a listing of winter and summer sports activities.)
The program commands a $2.5 million budget, a staff of 35, including 12 certified ski instructors and a dedicated force of 1,000 trained volunteer instructors who donate 10 days a season to the program. A new group of young volunteers has just signed on: local school kids who will become "ski pals" to the youngsters in the program.
"This has made a tremendous difference in Allison's life, says Diane Jones, Allison's mother. A physical therapist, she served as a volunteer instructor for the program. "Here's a sport where she excels -- where she can do better than me and her sister. And she meets people with disabilities far worse than she's got. The skiing has helped her learn to focus and go after what she wants."
There's a less obvious benefit too for the more than 1 million able-bodied adults and children who enjoy the Winter Park slopes every season: seeing a child like Allison on skis or a paralyzed adult deftly navigating a "sit-ski" sends a positive and powerful message about those with disabilities. My kids, for example, seemed inspired by watching the disabled skiers race down the mountain.
For their part, the disabled skiers loved being able to do what everyone else on the mountain did.
The other day, Vicky Bishop and her 13-year-old son Jeremy were getting ready to return to New Braunfels, Texas, after Jeremy's first ski trip. It had been a hard year for Jeremy: Born with spina bifida, he has had to rely on a wheelchair.
That made his success on the ski slopes even sweeter. It didn't matter that he had to sit in order to ski.
"I felt so free," Jeremy said with a satisfied smile. "I could do what I wanted. I had the whole mountain."