12 Women Athletes to Watch at the 2022 Paralympics
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The Beijing Winter Paralympics, which start on March 4 and conclude on March 13, will feature athletes competing across six sports: alpine skiing, cross-country skiing, biathlon, snowboarding, para ice hockey, and wheelchair curling. Around 600 athletes are set to compete, although individuals from Russia and Belarus will be banned. This comes amid Russia's continued invasion of Ukraine with Belarus's support.
The Beijing Paralympics will showcase world-class women aiming for a medal, and we've rounded up a list of standout names you'll want to keep tabs on. We've included past medalists, such as now six-time Paralympian Oksana Masters; alpine skier Natalie Wilkie, who was the youngest person on Team Canada at the 2018 Winter Paralympics; and snowboarder Lisa Bunschoten, who won two medals in Pyeongchang.
Of course, there are more women athletes besides the ones featured here, and you never know what will happen in competition. Keep track of the Beijing Paralympics schedule on Paralympic.org and see your streaming options from channels like USA Network, NBC, and the Olympic Channel here.
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Oksana Masters
Sport: cross-country skiing and biathlon
Country: USA
Follow Oksana Masters on TikTok: @oksanamasters
Follow Oksana Masters on Instagram: @oksanamasters
Oksana Masters is a 10-time Paralympic medalist and has competed in the Summer and Winter Paralympics in rowing, cycling, cross-country skiing, and biathlon. She made her Paralympic debut with a bronze in rowing, then switched to winter sitting sports and hand-cycling events for summer. Most recently, she won two gold medals at the Tokyo Paralympics (time trial and road race).
Masters, who was adopted from Ukraine when she was 7, tweeted, "It's the stars and strips 🇺🇸 that keeps my Ukrainian🇺🇦 heart beating. I've always been proud of where I come from. And I can't wait to race for the two countries that make me whole."
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Dani Aravich
Sport: cross-country skiing and biathlon
Country: USA
Follow Dani Aravich on Instagram: @theonearmdan
Dani Aravich made her Paralympic debut this past summer in track and field — she finished fifth in a preliminary T47 400m heat — and will now make her Winter Paralympic debut. she calls it "the double debut" in her Instagram bio. Aravich told NBC Olympics that she looks up to Masters. "She has competed in four different sports and grinded away. I am hoping to make the leap to a new summer sport in the future, so Oksana is a great role model to have."
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Oyuna Uranchimeg
Sport: wheelchair curling
Country: USA
Oyuna Uranchimeg, who is originally from Mongolia, made her world-championship debut in 2021. She will be Team USA's lead on the wheelchair-curling team (note: the lead delivers the first two stones). She began curling in 2016 and will compete in her very first Paralympics in Beijing. She told a journalism student at the University of St. Thomas, where she is employed, that she cried upon finding out she made the Paralympic wheelchair-curling team.
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Marie Bochet
Sport: alpine skiing
Country: France
Follow Marie Bochet on Instagram: @mariebochet
Maria Bochet will be one to watch in alpine skiing. She's an eight-time Paralympic gold medalist, having won four golds in both Sochi 2014 (downhill standing, super-G standing, giant-slalom standing, and super-combined standing) and Pyeongchang 2018 (downhill standing, super-G standing, giant-slalom standing, and slalom standing).
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Natalie Wilkie
Sport: cross-country skiing
Country: Canada
Follow Natalie Wilkie on Instagram: @natalie_wilkie_
Natalie Wilkie won a gold (7.5km classic standing), silver (4 x 2.5km mixed relay), and bronze medal (1.5km sprint classic standing) in skiing events at Pyeongchang 2018 in her debut Paralympic Games. "For the longest time after PyeongChang, I didn't realize how well I had actually done and what an amazing experience it was," she told Canada's Paralympic.ca. "I thought at best Pyeongchang would be a preparation for Beijing 2022. I got there and my plan was just to do my best with no expectations."
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Henrieta Farkašová
Sport: alpine skiing
Country: Slovakia
According to her Paralympic.org athlete profile, Henrieta Farkašová was the most decorated Winter Paralympian at Pyeongchang 2018, with four gold medals and one silver medal (her guide at those Games was Natalia Subrtova). Farkašová has 12 medals total across three Paralympics in the vision-impaired classification of alpine skiing.
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Lisa Bunschoten
Sport: snowboarding
Country: Netherlands
Follow Lisa Bunschoten on Instagram: @lisabunschoten
Lisa Bunschoten won SB-LL2 banked slalom bronze and SB-LL2 snowboard-cross silver at the 2018 Pyeongchang Paralympics. She and her boyfriend, Chris Vos, who is also a snowboarder for the Netherlands, were selected as opening ceremony flag bearers for Beijing 2022.
"I'm feeling good and ready to go," Bunschoten told Paralympic.org. "I am really looking forward to racing in Beijing. Of course I'm going for the highest [gold medal], but most of all, I want to give it everything I have and put down the best runs I can."
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Danelle Umstead
Sport: alpine skiing
Country: USA
Follow Danelle Umstead on Instagram: @danelleumstead
Danelle Umstead, who competes alongside her guide and husband in the vision-impaired classification of alpine-skiing events, has three Paralympic bronze medals. This is Umstead's fourth Paralympic Games to date, and she was chosen to be one of the opening ceremony flag bearers for Team USA.
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Kristina Ulander
Sport: wheelchair curling
Country: Sweden
Every wheelchair-curling team is required to have at least one woman player in Beijing 2022. This is Kristina Ulander's third Paralympics after she finished seventh and tenth with her teams at the 2014 and 2018 Paralympics, respectively. She won team world championship silver last year.
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Grace Miller
Sport: cross-country skiing
Country: USA
Follow Grace Miller on Instagram: @gracemillerak
Follow Grace Miller on TikTok: @gracemillerak
This is Grace Miller's second Paralympic Games — in Pyeongchang, her best finish was 10th in the 15km free standing event. Born in China and adopted at the age of 3, she wrote on TikTok recently: "Crying as I land into Beijing because I was adopted from China 20 years ago. And now I am back for the first time representing Team USA. All I wish is that I could tell my birth mom that I'm ok and that I forgive her." Give her TikTok page a follow — she's already posted so much behind-the-scenes footage from the Paralympic Village, which, like the Olympics last month, has a closed-loop system.
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Carina Edlinger
Sport: cross-country skiing
Country: Austria
Follow Carina Edlinger on Instagram: @carina_edlinger
Carina Edlinger, who competes in the vision-impaired classification of cross-country skiing, won 7.5km classic bronze in Pyeongchang 2018. Paralympic.org calls Edlinger the "biggest medal contender in the women's vision impaired event."
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Kendall Gretsch
Sport: biathlon and cross-country skiing
Country: USA
Follow Kendall Gretsch on Instagram: @k.gretsch
Kendall Gretsch won PTWC triathlon gold at the Tokyo Paralympics this past summer, adding to her two gold medals from the Pyeongchang Winter Paralympics in 2018 (biathlon 6km sitting and cross-country 12km sitting). She was the first woman athlete from Team USA to win an Olympic or Paralympic biathlon title, NBC Sports reported. Now, she'll be competing in the biathlon and cross-country skiing events in Beijing 2022.
Gretsch had six months or so to transition to winter-sport mode after the Tokyo Games, and she said during a Team USA media summit last fall that she tried to take some time off between the two seasons to recharge: "There's a lot of mental energy that goes towards preparing for a game, so I think that was the most important part for me, is really making sure that I took a mental break and a physical break between Tokyo and then leading up into Beijing."