Waddell in the finish corral
at the Salt Lake games.

Halfway Down
A Paralympic monoskier's grand finale
Text and photos by JAMES MACALISTER MEYER

Chris Waddell takes too much air over Draba Drop. He's flying three feet above the race course going 60 miles per hour. He doesn't think about the 30 pounds of metal he's strapped to, nor does he dwell on the fact that if he goes down, the monoski—essentially a seat bucket and footrest attached to a ski by a shock absorber—and its jagged parts go down with him. Soaring above the hard-packed snow and zooming toward the next gate, all Waddell can think is Shit, am I ever going to land?

He sticks it. The full three and a half inches of play in his monoski's shock absorber cushion the impact. Hunching his chest over his slightly bent knees for more aerodynamics, he looks like a rower reaching forward for a stroke. Instead of oars, he holds outriggers—ski poles with a foot-long section of ski hinged at the bottom—for balance. He concentrates on the next gate.

Moving his ski in efficient carving arcs, powering from one edge to the other, he burns down the rest of the course. Coming into one gate a little hot, he skids sideways to get back on line.

The crowd below screams when he finally shoots into view coming over Lindh's Launch. He holds his form, hunching his body so the chinstrap of his helmet is almost touching the fiberglass hood he wears over his legs for wind resistance. The throbbing sound of clapping hands becomes louder, reverberating between the stacks of bleachers and the steep slope face, increasing in pitch as Waddell flies through the finish line head down, outriggers in front like a bull's horns.

In the finish area, he banks quick hard turns, the sides of his seat bucket almost hitting the snow, until he comes to a stop, snapping to perfect upright balance on his outriggers. Breathing hard, he looks up at the scoreboard to find he's in first place in the 2002 Men's Paralympic Downhill at Snowbasin. For now.

Without a smile, Waddell moves off the course into the finish corral and waits to see if the score will hold up. Ronny Persson from Sweden, one of his toughest competitors and also a close friend, is now on course. Resting his elbows on the handles of his outriggers, Waddell watches Ronny's progress on the Jumbotron screen. At the halfway point, Waddell is still ahead by a few tenths of a second, but it's going to be tight. He holds his breath as the Swede cruises down the final face.

At these Winter Paralympics, Waddell feels high expectations, most of them self-imposed. As he considers retiring from international competition, the Salt Lake City games could cap off an extremely successful 10-year monoski racing career. Just the night before, Waddell and teammate Muffy Davis were sitting in their wheelchairs high above a stadium packed with 50,000 spectators, lighting the Paralympic flame together. Retired athletes, such as the former members of the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team, can sit back and relish experiences like that for a while. But for current athletes, it's different. They're still competing. The next day, they still have to produce.

Waddell's mastery of the monoski is accidental. In December 1988, running practice gates at his hometown ski resort in western Massachusetts in preparation for another NCAA Division-I ski season, Waddell pre-released from a binding. Careening off the course into the slopeside trees, he broke his back and suffered spinal damage so severe it paralyzed him from the chest down. He remembers nothing about the crash. There were no witnesses.

Less than a month later, he was back at Middlebury College in Vermont where makeshift wooden ramps were hastily constructed in front of dorms and dining halls for his return. Psychiatrists might argue he recovered too quickly, that he was in denial and hadn't properly let the severity of the injury sink in. But watching Waddell race today, it seems he may have found his own brand of therapy.

As Ronny crosses the finish line, Waddell's eyes dart up to the electronic timer. Last night's pride is gone, replaced by the focused anxiety of competition. Only after seeing Ronny's name pop up underneath his on the scoreboard does he dare exhale. By the time he's drawing in his next breath, Martin Braxenthaler is on the course. Braxenthaler has made a name for himself on the European Disabled World Cup tour this year as a German monoskier who never laughs, rarely smiles, and always wins.

Ronny barely has enough time to ski over and congratulate Waddell before Braxenthaler scoots across the finish line, nipping Waddell's time by .021 of a second. Waddell closes his eyes and lets his head drop. In disabled skiing, where victors often win by several seconds, this is a close race. But for Waddell, who has already won 15 Paralympic and World Championship medals in his career, a silver medal is hollow consolation.


Two months earlier, members of the U.S. Disabled Ski Team sit looking over a small crowd in Wildschonau, Austria. Roughly translated as "Wild Beauty," Wildschonau is a marketing name created to promote three tiny, nondescript resorts about an hour outside of Innsbruck. Scouring guide books and ski magazines, you would be hard pressed to find any significant mention of it.

At the beginning of each World Cup race week, the host village holds an Opening Ceremony for the athletes. Whereas able-bodied World Cup ski races like the Hahnenkamm are held in premier ski towns like nearby Kitzbuhel and attract upwards of 70,000 screaming fans, disabled World Cup races are often relegated to obscure shadow resorts with smaller mountains and anemic crowds. Sarah Will, one of Waddell's teammates, calls the scene an "Elks Club version" of the able-bodied World Cup festivities. Theirs is a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants existence; team members very often don't know which hotel they'll be staying in until they arrive in the host town.

At Wildschonau, typical of opening ceremonies on the Disabled World Cup circuit, the athletes talk among themselves while a couple dozen enthusiastic townspeople mill about. Although some of these events are downright intolerable, Waddell doesn't think the scene at Wildschonau is too bad. "We can fake it through this one," he says.

A couple of motherly-looking women stand behind folding tables selling hot mulled wine, beers, and Austrian bread with mustard. A classic-rock cover band plays on a stage downhill. Within minutes, the bandmembers' intense facial gestures and over-the-heads clapping turn the athletes' initial curiosity into cringes of embarrassment.

Making it through another ho-hum opening ceremony is easy, but a host of other frustrations await the racers. First and foremost is the lack of snow in Europe. Leafless brown trees and large patches of mud flank the area's slopes. Most affected are the so-called "speed events": Downhill, Super-G, and Giant Slalom. In fact, not a single downhill has been run so far on the European leg. The U.S. team, which specializes in speed, feels the impact most of all.

One of the biggest challenges created by the thin snowfall is simply getting racers to the start. For the first day's Super-G, each monoskier and his or her wheelchair are squeezed into a tram car for a 25-minute ride to the top. Monoskis follow in the cars behind. At the top, volunteers must offload the bulky monoskis and run them over to the skiers by the time they have wheeled over to the edge of the loading platform. Only then can the racers re-mount their equipment and be on their way. In anticipation of this tedious and time-consuming process, teams arrive at the mountain at 6:45 am to make a 9:15 course inspection time.

At the Giant Slalom course the next day, the resort's T-bar ends five gates below the starting gate, so racers wanting to inspect the first five gates have to take the Gondola to the top of the mountain and ski back down. The race committee, in a fit of desperate creativity, enlists a snow cat to help transport the racers from the top of the T-bar to the start gate. Sitting on a wooden bench attached to the front of the cat, skiers are pushed up the remaining section of the mountain. Even so, the cat drivers manage to drop racers a couple yards downslope of where they need to be. Mere minutes before his start time, Waddell poles furiously across the hill and makes it into the starting gate just as the starter sounds off "3, 2, 1, go!" Not exactly the best recipe for pre-race mental preparation. But as Waddell's teammate Chris Devlin-Young says, "You've got to be prepared for all situations, including just making it to the start."

Racers who make it to the starting gate and onto the course cross the finish line with no clue of their time. In the absence of either a scoreboard or a time display, a local woman stands at the bottom, diligently scribbling down the times on a flipboard with a black magic marker.

Whereas able-bodied World Cup fans take over entire ski towns and fill the entire length of the race courses ten people deep, the spectators at the Wildschonau races comprise busloads of local schoolchildren who have been given a day off from classes. Overcoming the distracting sounds of screaming kids and the wafting fumes from a neighboring farm's fresh ten-foot manure pile near the liftline, the U.S. team is still able to dominate their competitors. On the podium, top-three finishers receive medals as well as a sponsor's prize pack containing a pair of lovely oven mitts and a bottle of cooking oil.

Back at the hotel after the races, the American racers endure a hotel owner who insists on playing "Hey Jude" loudly on his harp during their team meeting. Dealing with conditions like these would be enough to drive anyone to drink, and the U.S. team is no exception. They look forward to the awards ceremonies held at the end of each race week, when they can finally lose their game faces, throw back copious amounts of alcohol, bust some moves, and maybe even get lucky.

In Wildschonau, the awards ceremony is more like a pre-bash. Trophies are handed out and the drinking commences, but people still mingle in fairly civilized fashion until around 11:30 pm. The full-volume group singalong of John Denver's "Country Road" seems to change things. After that, word goes out that everyone should head to the Cave Bar, a local dive.

Waddell decides to wheel to another bar first for a quick game of foosball. Playing defense and goalie, he whacks the ball with unmerciful ferocity. After a few games, two drunken Scotsmen come in to watch, still dressed in their ski clothes. One of them is basically understandable, but the other one, a chunky, large-headed bloke, is fixated on pounding the table and yelling out the color of whichever team has the ball.

"Red! Blue!" he roars at the miniature soccer players. As soon as someone scores, he screams out a slurred chorus of "Who Let the Dogs Out?" in barely comprehensible Scottish brogue. "Who lit the doogs utt? Who, who, who, who-who?"

From his wheelchair, Waddell starts giving him shit, telling him to behave. "What's he going to do, kick my ass?" he says under his breath.

Inside the subterranean Cave Bar, dripped stucco on the walls resembles stalactites. The air is smoky. Hard rock music cranks from the speakers. Athletes laugh and catch up with each other in small conversational clusters, oblivious to the angst-ridden lyrics. A double amputee from the Canadian team rocks back and forth to the music, balanced perfectly on his tilted wheelchair. He moves through the crowd, avoiding other wheelchairs while scouting the dance floor for any mildly receptive women. Athletes are starting to couple up. In a booth just off the dance floor, an American girl crosses cultural borders with a guy from the Polish team, engaging in an international display of public affection that would make even the French blush. Besides the wheelchairs and missing limbs, it's basically your typical Euro club scene.

Most of the athletes carry themselves with a cool confidence at these events. They're a good-looking group, outgoing, with great senses of humor. A past night at the Cave Bar found Monte Meier, an American single-leg amputee, playing air guitar with one of Sarah Will's legs. With all the muscle atrophy, a paralyzed leg can be quite flexible. In the role of human Stratocaster, Sarah laughed. The athletes invite a different kind of staring at than, say, a crippled veteran begging on a street corner. It's one part fascination, one part curiosity, and two parts just wanting to hang out with them. They're just cool.

Sarah takes in the action on the dance floor, music throbbing in the background. She says a woman once approached her after a speaking engagement and said, "You're so great! How can I get my paralyzed friend to be positive like you? He just sits around in his house all day smoking pot and getting drunk."

"Well," Sarah responded, "did he do that stuff before he got paralyzed?" The woman thought for a moment, then answered yes.

"Then he has other issues to deal with."

At around 3 am, with the bar still rocking, a group heads back to the hotel. Most of them pile into one of the rental cars while Waddell and Sarah reach in through open windows for a solid grip and grab a tow back up the hill, riding like sidecars.


Another night in Austria finds Waddell and some teammates sitting around a table at the hotel bar. Waddell assumes the role of interviewer. He's had more than a few cocktails.

Teammate Stefani Victor bitches about not getting named to the Paralympic team. After hiring a private coach, she spent 280 days on snow the past year training for the Salt Lake City games. Citing team politics, she sued—a tactic that guarantees her a healthy dose of resentment from her peers regardless of the outcome of the case. Victor has made the Paralympics her ultimate goal. Waddell patiently hears her out, then cautions her about placing the games on too high a pedestal.

"Nobody cares," he grumbles.

Chris Devlin-Young, on the other side of the table, agrees. "I guarantee you'll hear at least 10 people skiing down the side of the hill saying 'Oh, my God, there's a ski race going on?'" His high-pitched wail mimics the voices of clueless local skiers.

"Nobody cares," repeats Waddell. "If you tell them you're in the Paralympics, they're like, 'Woo-hoo! Big whoop!'" His tone is ironic, considering he's the guy who will soon be featured in nearly every Paralympic commercial that will pepper national cable TV in the coming months.

Devlin-Young, at 40 the elder statesman of the team, has a simple solution for making the Paralympics more competitive. "We need more disabled people."

Victor deadpans, "I mean, I can hit people with my car for years, if that's what it takes."

Jason Lalla, a single-leg amputee, pipes up from the back. "If I put a flyer on the wall saying, 'I'm a one-legged guy who's going to go 110 miles per hour and there's a good chance I might put myself in the woods,' I bet everyone would come."

"You might even make enough to cover your hospital bill," adds Waddell.

Jason wants harder venues instead of the races simply being the "feel-good, happy fun clubs" that they are today. "You people are so inspiring!" he proclaims in a shrill, condescending voice. "If we had a dollar for every time we heard that, we'd be rich."

They're not looking for sympathy. They get that everywhere. A good race is much harder to find.

Disabled World Cup races award medals in three catch-all classes; visually impaired, sitting, and standing. In the upcoming Paralympics, however, medals will be awarded in any injury category that has at least six entrants. With 15 different classifications ranging from outrigger skiers, to skiers with one pole, to double above-knee amputee monoskiers, there are a lot of potential prizes. In effect, it can be easier to win a medal in the Paralympics than at a well-attended World Cup race. Some of the athletes complain it's getting to be like the Special Olympics, where everybody wins.

As he closes in on his own retirement, Waddell increasingly plays devil's advocate to his teammates' goals and aspirations. Perhaps he's just externalizing the tough questions he's been asking himself lately. What does being an athlete really mean in the grand scheme of his life? Has the U.S. Disabled Ski Team just been a halfway house on his way to the real world?

As a motivational speaker, Waddell earns as much as $7,500 per appearance. With more business than he can handle, he's hired an agent to manage the scheduling details. What he lacks in visibility compared to someone like former Olympic speedskater Bonnie Blair, he makes up by being a better presenter. The larger the audience, the better. "It's easy for me," he says with straightforward confidence, but inside he knows that a big part of his speaking popularity depends on his success on the slopes.

Business school might be a good next step, he figures, because he could build upon his entrepreneurial talents in a competitive setting. He thinks maybe he'll apply to one school on each coast: Harvard and Stanford. It is hard to imagine an admissions director, after having sifted through thousands of applications from whiny dotcom refugees, not salivating at Waddell's accomplishments.

Waddell has put a lot of pressure on himself to do well at the Salt Lake games. By moving to nearby Park City, Waddell assumes the title of local favorite. He's become a fixture on the streets there and everyone is rooting for him. He was even hired as a consultant by Mitt Romney and the Salt Lake Olympic Committee. And then there's all the commercials promoting the Paralympics...


Back at the Paralympics in Utah, a week has passed. Waddell blew out in the Super-G and was able to muster only a Bronze in the Giant Slalom. Martin Braxenthaler has swept three events so far, putting Waddell's previous four-gold-medal record in jeopardy. Only one event remains; the Slalom. Waddell has two runs remaining on this, his last day of international competition.

Racing early in the start order, he leads after the first run. He makes a quick break through the finish corral and debriefs with his brother, Matt, once a top-ranking junior skier himself. Martin Braxenthaler is now on his way down. "The master is on the course!" the announcer yells. Waddell grimaces.

Braxenthaler ends up finishing three seconds ahead of Ronny and almost five seconds faster than Waddell. Waddell and Ronny look up at the scoreboard and shake their heads. It's going to be tough to make up that much time on the second run.

At the end of the finish corral, a fan stops Waddell. "Can you sign this ticket?"

"Yeah, I can do that," he responds quickly. He raises his eyebrows when the one ticket turns out to be a stack of a dozen. He signs them mechanically and hands them back.

Waddell pulls his monoski next to Sarah Will, who is fielding some cell phone calls. Waddell is visibly frustrated, but Sarah knows there is nothing she can do to appease him. This week, she calmly swept her events and collected three gold medals of her own. Any words of encouragement might be patronizing. She knows him all too well.

Five years ago, she dated Waddell. They were the poster couple for disabled sports; their accidents happened the same year, their injuries were strikingly similar, and their dominance on the slopes equally spectacular. Reluctantly, they played the part, but in the end the stresses of competition and the relentless media took its toll on the relationship.

"It's tough to both be doing the same thing," Waddell concedes. "Couples in the same occupation tend to talk shop too much. There was a lot of pressure to be the perfect couple for the media, but then you start to lose your own identity."

There were other issues, too. Waddell, a perfectionist armed with a liberal arts degree, was always correcting her grammar and vocabulary, and it drove Sarah crazy. They're still friends, but sometimes it's tough, she admits. The last couple weeks he has been in a pissy mood and there was nothing she or anyone else could do about it. She guesses Waddell was probably worrying about his post-Paralympic future at a time when he wasn't skiing well, double dipping in self-doubt.

After signing a seemingly endless stream of autographs for fans, Waddell takes a snowmobile tow back up to the waxing cabins to rest before his final run. The afternoon sun reflects off the snow and warms the air and Waddell seems relaxed, chatting and joking with other racers. He looks at his watch.

"1:25 already? But I don't want to get into the torture chamber, yet!" He looks down at the blue fiberglass hood that he'll have to snap over his legs.

Reaching around his back with his left hand he pulls a velcro strap around to the front, lashing himself into the neoprene back support affixed to the monoski's bucket seat. Taking two pieces of foot-long foam, he inserts one lengthwise between his legs and lays the other across his lap. The pads keep his legs separated and give him more control and better efficiency of movement. All the while, Waddell keeps his balance by pushing against an outrigger with his right hand.

Before fastening down the fiberglass hood, he wraps a piece of Gore-Tex black fabric over his thighs to keep them from moving around. Finally, he puts on his gloves. He's ready to go. One last run.

From the top of the chairlift, Waddell burns down the mountain to the start area, laying down hundreds of hard, short turns, working his ski quickly from edge to edge. It's fairly easy for a strong, able-bodied skier to keep up, but matching Waddell turn-for-turn will get your thighs burning.

Fifteen minutes later, Waddell is on course. Jack Benedick, a board member of the IPC, sits in the announcer's booth as a guest. "There's too much disparity among U.S. racers now," he says over the loudspeaker as Waddell skids his way down the steep final face beyond Lindh's Launch. "Someday, I hope to see them finishing closer together, not 10 seconds apart."

Waddell crosses the finish line in the lead, but looking up at his time he knows it probably will not hold up unless Ronny or Braxenthaler crashes. Ronny makes it down in one piece, though, and his combined time is 4.19 seconds better than Waddell. It doesn't look good. Finally, Braxenthaler hits the course, sweeping down towards a fourth gold medal. Waddell finds himself clapping. He remembers winning four golds himself back in Lillehammer. For years, he was the one to catch. Now they've caught him. With a sense of duty, Waddell pushes through the finish corral to deal with the journalists.

Reporters flock to him, pestering, asking the retirement question. "I don't know," he repeats several times. "This is the toughest time to answer those questions."

When someone finally asks Waddell about his experiences here in Salt Lake, he goes into auto-pilot, dealing out formulaic responses to often-asked questions. For Waddell, being a spokesman for the sport is easier than being retired from it.

Are you disappointed?

"I don't train to be second or third," he replies sharply. "I put it all out. I did what I could," he adds with a shrug and a forced attempt at a smile. Waddell steers the conversation back to the Paralympics, bringing up the fact that the organizers sold ninety percent of all available tickets. To him, this says a lot about the future of the Paralympics.

"There's a lot more to the games than just the color of the medals," he adds, giving the journalists their obligatory sound bite.

Will you ever race in the Paralympics again?

"Doesn't look like it now. It's getting to the point where I wonder if there's another thing I want to be doing. It's a full time job, training and focusing."

Are you married?

"No," Waddell shakes his head. "I hope to see that in the future. It's tough, though, being an athlete. It's one of the most selfish things you can do."

Riding the chairlift back to the waxing cabins to change out of his ski clothes, Waddell reflects on the race today. "It's disappointing. I would've liked to have gone out better."

Earlier in the week, Waddell had explained how it felt not to be at the top of his game anymore. "On one hand, you're up there thinking to yourself, 'You're here, let's just do it,' but then it's just not there anymore. It's not as easy to pull off."

Now, as the chairlift grinds uphill, he pauses. "It's a big-picture question now: 'What next?'"

He wonders how long he can ride out his so-so performance this week. Will he still be able to attract enough speaking gigs? His income has risen steadily, and this year he earned the most he has ever made. He has a Volvo 840 and a new house with a pool table and a big-screen TV. "I kind of like it," he smiles before getting serious again. "Can I keep it going? That's what I'm asking myself."

The Paralympic Closing Ceremonies take place later that night in downtown Salt Lake City at the able-bodied Winter Olympics' Medal Pavilion. Sets of bleachers curl around the outskirts of the venue, but most of the crowd stands at ground level. The athletes sit up front near the stage. Once again, Waddell takes the spotlight. As the first athlete speaker, he thanks the volunteers for helping to make the games run so smoothly. "Although we may have lit the flame, you keep it burning," he enunciates clearly, pausing for effect between phrases.

Waddell appears calm, sitting tall in his chair at the podium, in his boxy Roots leather jacket and blue fleece hat. He waits for the applause to die down before speaking again. Mentioning specific athletes and their victories, he struggles to pronounce the name "Rahnhild Myklebust," a 58-year old medal winner. It's a momentary slip and he pushes on, unfazed. At the end of the speech, Waddell waves to the crowd, spins his chair, and rolls out of sight.


Waddell's house sits in a neat and tidy new neighborhood on the outskirts of Park City, just far enough off Route 40's frontage road not to be too noisy. The plot is small, but the two-story house is a comfortable 2,700 square feet. The back yard rolls down to a large shared meadow. The houses are set close together, side by side, but trees will grow and privacy will come.

Waddell's Volvo wagon is parked in the three-car garage, next to a custom-made, gradually sloping ramp that meanders up and around from his driver's side. At least twenty skis hang from a rack on the right wall. Inside, hardwood flooring covers the kitchen and top-floor halls of an open and airy plan. The smell of wall-to-wall carpeting from the other rooms reinforces the newness.

It's Sunday, the day after the Paralympic Closing Ceremonies. While Waddell checks e-mails in his office, Jen, his girlfriend, lies on a couch in an alcove off the kitchen, watching golf. Some friends arrive, and they all head downstairs to what Waddell's teammates call The Shrine. The bright green walls of the finished basement are covered with trophy cases and pictures of Waddell. Over here are five medal plaques from the 1999 World Championships in Breckenridge. Over there is a picture of Waddell wheeling alongside a jogging President Clinton (he had to slow down for Bill, he claims). Over here is a framed article from Outside magazine. The headline reads, "Could Chris Waddell be the Greatest Athlete in the World?" Over there is a framed copy of the 1998 "50 Most Beautiful People" issue of People magazine, featuring a close-up of Waddell packed into in a tight t-shirt. He says it's funny, but more people know him from People magazine than for winning 11 Paralympic gold medals.

For Waddell, the 46-inch projection television and pool table are the room's raison d'être. In the far corner, partially obscured by the pool table, is a wicker basket spilling with ribbons and medals. There's another basket of medals next to the couches. On the other side of the room are two guest rooms, one painted citron and the other snapdragon, both variations on yellow. The green of the main basement room is actually moss, Waddell explains, while his friends snicker at his newfound decorating prowess.

Regardless of paint color, the walls tell an incredible story of success and excellence recognized. But they don't tell the full story. After spending some time in The Shrine, it hits you. There are no pictures of Waddell before his 1989 accident. Amid the numerous photos featuring Waddell racing, Waddell next to someone famous, or Waddell smiling with family members, exists not a single picture of Waddell standing.

Maybe that's what people like Waddell do. Move on. Make the best of today and the future and put away the past. On a bookshelf above the television is a copy of his 1987 Deerfield Academy high school yearbook, lying on its side. It's well out of his reach.

Jen reclines next to Waddell on the couch, her legs stretched across Waddell's lap. He gives her a leg massage as the golf tournament continues on the TV. They talk about whether to go to Hawaii or Palm Desert after Nationals. It's agreed they need to go someplace warm. Someplace new.

It's been a long winter.


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