Meet the Phenomenal

Karolina Wisniewska

- An Interview by Bartley Bard

I first met Karolina Wisniewska in 1982 when she was 5 years old. She had just arrived in Canada with her family from Poland via Finland. Her father, Witek Wisniewska, was designing sets for my theatre company, Lunchbox Theatre in Calgary, Alberta. When she and her mother, Bozenna, came to the theatre, I didn't realize that she was disabled. I thought that her loping gait and occasional tumble were indicative of a restless, energetic little girl who, unlike her poised sister Veronica, just couldn't sit still for a minute. I was, of course, right.

Early in 1998, Witek, by now the sole and resident designer for us, came into a production meeting with the biggest grin I'd ever seen, even on his usually happy face. "Karolina got Silver in Nagano! Twice!! She won in two ski events at the Paralympics in Japan! You must come to the house to celebrate!"

Karolina is a History and Political Science major at McGill University in Montreal. She has arranged to take all her courses in the summer-fall sessions so that she can devote the winter months to skiing. Her difficult walking doesn't show at all on skis, but I was surprised to see her bound up a precarious ladder into an attic room under a dormer roof that her dad had built. I went up much more slowly. We sat by her exercise mat and chatted for hours.

Questions from Bartley are in bold, below:

Can you describe your disability?

"Sure. I was born with cerebral palsy. Mainly in my legs but, I would say, pretty much from the waist down. It affects my balance and the motor coordination in my legs so ad the muscles and tendons in my legs are tight and spastic. I don't have good flexibility in my legs."

Why then did you try skiing?

"I actually started skiing because, (A) my dad loves to ski and (B) my physiotherapist in Finland suggested it. So, my parents got me to do it and they got me to go horseback riding to stretch my legs. Any sports to keep me active."

Do you view your disability as a difficulty?

"It's just the way I get around. As one of my friends put it, 'Karolina, it's like you have brown eyes, but you have cerebral palsy, too.' It's just part of who I am. But then, on the other hand, I had surgery when I was fourteen to have my right Achilles tendon lengthened and after that I had to learn to walk again. I walked differently. I also realized the following ski season how much better my right leg worked than my left. It was ready frustrating for me to know, even though my right leg wasn't even close to perfect, that it was much closer to normal and. . . wow! I was such a good skier!"

Do you mean like other skiers?

"I'd always compared myself to Veronica, my sister. I'd raced able bodied from the age of seven to the age of seventeen. It stopped being frustrating at around the age of sixteen when I was getting good. That was after years of (as one of my coaches put it) falling on my head. Then I switched to

disabled racing."

Why did you switch?

"At that age there's really nowhere else to go, in Canada, anyway."

You don't appear to be disabled when you're skiing.

"I ski on two skis. I ski with two poles. Nobody's jaw drops open at the sight of me skiing by, and I'm like, 'I wish they knew what I've gone through to get here -- to look normal on skis.' Because I never did look normal on skis to begin with. I was technically an wrong."

In your life off the slopes, are there any limitations you have to accept?

"I was raised by parents who encouraged me to do anything I wanted to, but I still think they were protective of me because, you know. They said, 'Oh, you can do this, you can do this, but be careful!' I was like an egg. I had to be taken care of because I would fall over in whatever I did. Just walking, when I was younger, I fell all the time. Like every two blocks, I just tripped and fell. It was just normal. I'm prone to injury a bit more than most people because, I'm athletic and I do a lot of things with my body and I don't think it can necessarily take that much abuse."

How about cross country skiing?

"I'd like to try it, but I love alpine skiing. Cross country would probably be easier because you're not going at high speeds, you don't have to maneuver around people and gates. I'm more of a risk taker, you know, I want to go rock climbing! Downhill is more exciting. That's why I want to learn snow boarding. Trying that last year is the first time that it hit me that I do have cerebral palsy, and it's going to be harder for me to learn this. On skis I go with my old body problems and I beat them. Obviously. I've been doing it my whole life, so I'm used to it, but it's taken that long for the muscle memory to kick in. With cerebral palsy, too, it's a question of the learning curves a lot. I don't learn as fast. It'll take me longer to learn something. Not me, personally, but my muscles. So I say it's taken me my whole life to learn how to ski and I still have such a long way to go."

But you went all the way to Nagano and won silver.

"Yeah, I did."

You come from an artistic family. Wouldn't it have been easier for your parents to encourage you to explore that artistic talent instead of athletics?

"When I was younger my parents encouraged me to do sports in a kind of physiotherapy way and just to stay healthy, but I was never what you'd call, even in high school, athletic. I wasn't on any varsity teams or anything. I was academic. I was into academics and art, as well. I had these two things in my life that I was good at: art and school. And I was a skier, but I didn't go anywhere until I switched to disabled racing and got really serious about it."

Was it your disability that made you become an athlete?

"On the Canadian Disabled Ski Team, I say that we're athletes first and then we're disabled. I really believe that because I see how hard we all work. That's what I'm aiming for. That people will look at us as athletes."

Does it help that you live an hour's drive from some of the world's greatest ski slopes?

"I don't think I could be a top athlete in any other sport. Maybe swimming, but if I didn't live here, I definitely wouldn't be a skier. No way. I'd be something else."

Like what?

"Not gymnastics! My sister did that but it was horrible for me. I can't do a cartwheel to this day. I'm sure she could. That's a problem. I shouldn't compare myself to her. It's a question of what I can do and I'm very. .. I know what I can do. In swimming, I like butterfly 'cause it's so upper body, and I had a really good upper body when I was younger."

How does the timing of disabled skiers compare with the able bodied?

"No, no, no, you can't compare the times unless they ski the same race."

Have they?

"Some do. They go to able bodied US Nationals and they race against able bodied kids, and they beat some of them. That's because, for instance, in Slalom, you only have to get one leg around -- so, with one leg they go through those Slalom gates a lot faster than anyone else. In a way, they have an advantage. In a disabled sport, obviously there are various disabilities and that cause a problem, especially on the women's side, because there aren't as many women. So, if you're a woman reading this article and you ski... Go skiing!!!"

What's the problem with various disabilities?

"They have something called 'the factor' which gets groups of people together that have different disabilities. It's like the handicap thing in golf. You get a raw time, like your actual time and then they multiply that time by your factor, so it's statistically based on how people with your disability did before you in the same event. For instance, my disability is considered very... pretty severe for skiing because that's both your legs and your balance, which are the two big things you use in skiing, as compared to my roommate, Ramona Hoh, who's missing her fingers on her right hand. It really doesn't effect her skiing except for her start. She skis with one pole which isn't really a big deal so her class doesn't have much of a factor."

Was Nagano your first Olympic competition?

"Yeah. It was my first Paralympics. Paralympics comes about two weeks after the Olympics, and it's at the same venue. At least since Albertville. In Calgary it wasn't, so Albertville was the first time it was right after the winter Olympics. Then Lillehammer and Nagano. Salt Lake City will be next."

What was it like in Nagano?

"It was awesome! Now looking back on it, it was great. I'd never been to Japan. And I studied a little bit of Japanese so I was kind of, y'know, excited. I took Japanese, because I figured I'd make it and I did. Of course I had to qualify first. You have to be on the national team and then you have to qualify, actually, internationally. You have to be within a certain percentage of your group. It depends on your group, but it boils down to: you have to have a pretty good chance of winning a medal. I qualified in '96 at the World Championships where I got a gold and a silver... a gold in Super G and a silver in GS. It was my first international event and I qualified right there."

Super G? GS?

"Well, I'll explain all four... I do all four events. There are four events in alpine skiing. Downhill, which is a traditional event where you're in a tuck, a low position to the ground and you're going fast like in Kitsbuhl, Austria. It's the most famous downhill in the world and it's the steepest one. Super G is a new event. Super Giant Slalom is the actual name of it. It's a combination of Downhill, which tests your speed, and Giant Slalom, which is considered one of the biggest tests of your technical ability of doing turns. In Downhill you always have training runs, but in Super G (I love it), they set the course the night before or the day. . . the morning of... you go and look at it... so you don't get to ski it; you just look at it. You inspect it. You memorize it. And you race it. So I love it 'cause it's one run. In Giant Slalom you have two runs and it's the combined time. It's big turns and you're pretty much in an upright position the whole time... maybe in a high tuck, but only in the flats. Then there's Slalom which is my favorite event. That's where you see the racers hitting the gates and going, like, almost straight through them, and it's very tight through the turns. It's what Alberto Tomba excelled at. In Nagano he blew out. He raced the GS and he fell on the same hill that we raced. It had a lot of terrain changes, and the rollers in Japan were nothing like I'd ever seen before. You're skiing along on a flat and it falls away on to a face or a steep. That's the roller part. Usually it's kinda gradual like at Nakiska, here in Calgary, but in Nagano it was like a staircase. It's tough on the buckets... the paraplegics on the "sitskis"... they sit in a bucket, and they are so much closer to the ground that every little bump, or every little ripple or every air gets magnified. If I get five feet of air, they're going to get fifty feet of air. For me at high speed my legs shake because they're so spastic. There's nothing I can do about it and I can't really tell. I don't feel it when I'm skiing, really, unless I'm tired, but I see it on video. It's just my cerebral palsy kicking in."

So how did you races go in Nagano?

"When the women's Downhill went off, it was sheer ice. You couldn't do well in the Downhill. Then came the Super G and I'm always happy on Super G day because I'd won every Super G this season. Maybe I was a bit too cocky and didn't know they had changed the set. Even so, I skied well and I was in first place by the time I got to the bottom. One of my main competitors was an amazing woman, Reinheld Moller of Germany. She's 42! That's what's great about disabled sport. You're not categorized by age, but by disability. And gender, of course."

Could you, though? Race against some of the guys in your own class?

"Yeah, I do. I beat them all. That's another thing. The factor is set differently for men and women and, because I'm a good skier, I've made the factor for women with cerebral palsy more difficult. In regional events, I beat other women by as much as ten seconds, which is a significant amount of time, but when Reinheld came down she beat me by a couple of tenths and I was devastated! I can still hardly talk about it. Anyway, that was the Super G. Then came the Giant Slalom which was held in a horrible rain storm and it was so bad that even someone as experienced as Reinheld, she blew out the first run. I had learned after Super G not to take anything for granted. I just wanted to ski well and have a good time. I was third after the first run and my teammate, and roommate, Ramona was first. That was hard because we'd been totally together since November and we'd assumed that we'd be in separate classes. She's an arm amputee and I have cerebral palsy. Unfortunately for us, there were only four groups at the Paralympics. There were the blind, the sitting, that is the paraplegics, the above the knee amputees and then everybody else. So Ramona was first and I was third. I had a good second run so I bumped up to second and Mary Riddle, a below the knee amputee from the States, got first."

That's three events. What else?

"Well, then there was the Slalom, which is my favorite, my best, but I was skiing so fast on my first run and I was so aggressive and into it because you have to be really aggressive in Slalom, that I went through this one combination and I wasn't sure if I'd skied it right, but I just kept going and I got more aggressive because my coaches had taught me, 'Don't give up. Make it up!' So I hauled down to the bottom and I was in first by over three seconds and the whole crowd was going wild! Right? And I just collapsed because I'm like, 'I think I got disqualified! I think I missed a gate!' And the Manager of our team is like, 'Hey! Wicked!' But I was like, 'No. I'm not sure.' And then I found out for sure that I was disqualified. So there, I blew it. Not only the Slalom, which always slips through my fingers, but I blew my gold medal chance which is harder to swallow than the Super G or anything because Slalom is the one thing that I want so much more than anything in the world. I know I'll have other Slaloms but this on... It' Japan... It's Quality. It's the Paralympics."

And your overall standings at Nagano?

"OK. I didn't do too well in the Downhill. Got Silver in Super G and was devastated. Got Silver in Giant Slalom and was content. Got disqualified in Slalom and was once again at the bottom of the barrel, so it was kind of a roller coaster. But then, as things stand now, I'm going to Salt Lake City in four years, but you never know, I might get hit by a train tomorrow. Even so, if I did and I was more disabled, I'd still ski."

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