She had a bad feeling before she hit the ground.
Caldwell native Kelsey O’Driscoll—an avid athlete who was on skis in her backyard at age two, a surfboard at the Shore at seven, and a running track throughout high school and college—was sledding with family in New York when her sled caught a divot in the icy snow. She lost her grip, sailed through the air and came crashing down.
“I knew instantly my back was broken,” O’Driscoll recalls. “There was a lot of screaming. The first thing that went through my head was, Crap, I just ruined my whole life. I was face down in the snow, waiting for an ambulance. And I was just like, Well, never skiing again. Never surfing again. Never doing any of the things I love to do again.”
An EMT and ski patroller, O’Driscoll began assessing her limbs: “I was like, Okay, what moves? What doesn’t move?” She could see and wiggle her fingers, but wasn’t sure about her toes. When she tried her ankles, she only heard her boots scratching against the snow. The sound reassured her that she wasn’t paralyzed, “but I also couldn’t really feel anything,” she says.
Her back was indeed broken, in two places, compressing and damaging her spine. She would need to relearn how to walk, let alone ski.
That was March 6, 2021. Exactly five years later to the day—March 6, 2026—the Winter Paralympics kick off in Italy, where O’Driscoll, 32, will compete as a member of the U.S. Para Alpine Ski Team. “It’s very serendipitous,” she declares, her infectious grin lighting up the window of a Zoom call from Switzerland in mid-December. Just days earlier, in Austria, she won her first World Cup race in the Super-G. “I’m still a bit in shock,” she laughs.
O’Driscoll won her first World Cup race in the Super-G in Austria in December. Photo: Courtesy of Kelsey O’Driscoll
As grueling as her recovery has been, including rigorous physical therapy, chronic pain, and an asthma-induced ICU stint where the steroids that saved her life caused further permanent damage to her legs, O’Driscoll is dazzlingly cheerful. “Sometimes walking is really overrated,” she quips.
She’s also fiercely proud of her Garden State roots. She may be traversing Europe on the World Cup circuit, but she’s still dreaming about the Taylor ham sandwich she’ll devour when she returns. “You can take the girl out of Jersey, but you can’t take the Jersey out of the girl,” she says.
The summer after her accident, O’Driscoll made her first foray into adaptive surfing in Spring Lake. “That first wave back in the ocean was the first time I felt like, Okay, I’m still me,” she says. “I had the life jacket on over the back brace. I’m not sure it was orthopedist recommended, but my brain and my soul needed to be in the water. And it served as a huge turning point.”
She began plotting her return to the slopes, though she was terrified: “I just didn’t want to exist in a world where I didn’t love skiing.” That winter, she carried a pair of outriggers—“like forearm crutches with mini-skis on the bottom”—up the lift and tried four-track adaptive skiing, beaming all the way down the bunny hill. At the bottom, staffers raced over, cheering. “It was just so cool to get to fall in love with skiing all over again,” she says. The following season, she became the first adaptive ski patroller at New York’s Gore Mountain. (Though she had learned to ski at Mountain Creek Resort in Sussex County as a child, she’d later cross the border for the Adirondacks’ tougher trails.)
A pediatric asthma care coordinator, O’Driscoll only began ski racing in 2024 and was invited to join Team USA this past May. The accelerated trajectory has been extraordinary, especially given her two recent shoulder surgeries and severe asthma—the latter often more debilitating than her spinal injury. She uses inhalers daily and carries an emergency stash while skiing. “All my doctors at home…are so excited about all of this,” she says. “The whole hospital system is pumped.”
Last winter in Colorado, Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run,” a song that both calms and exhilarates her, was blaring at the top of her racecourse. “The coaches at the end were like, ‘Were you singing Springsteen as you went by?’” she recalls. “I was like, ‘Um, not consciously, but apparently!’”
O’Driscoll is “stoked” for the Paralympics. “If I can bring home the medal, that would be insanely awesome,” she says, “but I think it’ll be a dream come true no matter what happens.” Her Jersey grit is sure to serve her well: “I was raised in a place where people don’t give up—you just keep fighting all the time.”
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