When the Winter Paralympics open next week in Italy, Mexico’s delegation will fit on a single monoski.
Arly Velásquez, a 37-year-old para alpine skier from Cancún, will be the country’s only athlete at the Milan-Cortina Games, the 50th anniversary of the Winter Paralympics. The opening ceremony is March 6.
More than 600 athletes are expected to compete across six sports, with China favored to top the medals table again.
Although Mexico has won 328 medals, including 107 golds, in the Summer Paralympics — with 67 athletes winning 17 medals at the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games, including three gold medals — it has never won a medal at a Winter Paralympics.
Moreover, its delegations have long been among the smallest in the field. Since making its Winter Games debut in 2006, Mexico has sent no more than two athletes to any edition.
This year, the entire Mexican presence will be Velásquez, who will race in downhill on March 7, super-G on March 9 and giant slalom on March 13 in the LW10-1 sitting category.
The opening ceremony will be held at Verona’s ancient Arena, a UNESCO World Heritage site retrofitted with wheelchair ramps and accessible restrooms.
“Receiving the Mexican flag on my way to my fifth Paralympic Games is a profound honor,” Velásquez said at a flag ceremony this week in Mexico City. “Representing Mexico in five Games is not by chance. It is the result of discipline, resilience and reinventing myself physically and mentally time and time again.”
Velásquez is the Mexican athlete with the most appearances at the previous 13 Winter Paralympics, having debuted at Vancouver 2010 and also raced at Sochi 2014, Pyeongchang 2018 and Beijing 2022.
In Sochi, he posted his best Paralympics finish ever, 11th in super-G, before a crash in his next race left him in an induced coma for three days and forced a two-year break from competition.
After moving from Cancún to Mexico City as a youth following his parents’ divorce, Velásquez took up mountain biking and became a national champion at age 12.
At age 13, however, he suffered a major accident that left him with broken vertebrae and an irreversible spinal cord injury, according to the newspaper Milenio. He was told he would never walk again.
But around age 15, he began practicing wheelchair sports such as shot put, basketball, javelin and swimming.
On a trip to Canada a few years later, he happened to see Mexican Paralympic athlete Armando Ruiz competing in the slalom and giant slalom. That led him to seek out ski lessons.
Fourteen months later, he was competing in the 2010 Paralympic Games in Vancouver.
With reports from TV Azteca, Olympics.com, Associated Press and Conade
