For Dani Aravich, Dominating One Paralympic Sport Isn’t Enough

Aravich was just a few months into training seriously for Tokyo when a developmental coach for the U.S. Paralympic Nordic Skiing Team reached out. Had she ever thought about skiing? Aravich had never even been on a pair of cross-country skis, let alone considered adding the winter Paralympics to her training regimen. The coach invited her to a developmental camp in Breckenridge, Colorado, anyway. “I kind of went in with a mindset of, okay, if I’m good at this, maybe we’ll make this a thing. But if I’m not good at this, it would be a good week of fun,” she says with a laugh. 

She was good. Or at least, she knew she could be. “After I finished the five day camp, I looked at my now coach and I’m like, ‘Will I be able to qualify for this? If I’m gonna try this sport out, I’m not trying it for fun—I don’t have time for that. If I’m trying it, I’m going to go to the Paralympics,’” she says. “He was like, ‘I dunno, you started skiing five days ago.’”

Aravich got a pretty good indication of how far she could go just two weeks later at the U.S. National Championships, where she won her first ever race. “It was only me and one other skier in that race,” she caveats, “but after getting in a race setting, I was like, Okay, I can do this. So suddenly I became a dual-sport athlete without realizing it.” 

Now, Nordic skiing is where Aravich sees her Paralympic future—which may have been influenced by a negative experience in Tokyo. Heading into the games in the Summer of 2021, Aravich—like most of us—was not feeling on top of her game. “Prior to Tokyo, I had only had one other international competition experience and that was in skiing the previous year. So to have my first international track meet be the Paralympic Games, it was just really emotionally taxing,” she says. “I was setting pretty realistic expectations about that. I wasn’t ranked very high, I hadn’t been hitting the times I wanted to hit, so I knew even making the finals would be tough. I at least wanted to run a good race and feel good about it.”