Kelsey O’Driscoll thought March 6 would be forever burned in her memory as the date that took so many things away from her.
Instead, it will also be the date that signifies what the Glens Falls resident and Albany Medical Center Hospital nurse has been able to overcome.
Five years to the day after she broke her back in a snow tubing accident, the opening ceremonies of the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Paralympics will be held in Verona, Italy. O’Driscoll won’t be in attendance for those festivities, but only because she’ll be three hours away in Cortina d’Ampezzo, ready to race as a member of the U.S. Paralympic Alpine Ski Team.
The timing “kind of brings it full circle for me,” O’Driscoll said.
The athlete, who gets around with the aid of crutches and a wheelchair, competes in four-track skiing, using a pair of outriggers attached to her forearms to help her navigate the course.
She’s doing it with the full support of her employers at Albany Med, where she’s been given a leave of absence from her role as pediatric outpatient asthma care coordinator to pursue her downhill dreams.
“Kelsey’s tenacity and dedication to her sport are an inspiration to her patients and colleagues and reflect the same heart and passion she brings to her nursing practice every day,” said Jason Mouzakes, the hospital’s executive vice president and general director. “We are incredibly proud to call Kelsey one of our own and wish her the best in her pursuit of gold.”
Recovering from injury
It’s been a long, arduous five years for O’Driscoll.
On March 6, 2021, she was on a family tubing trip to Dynamite Hill in Chestertown. Going on one last run while sitting in the lap of her boyfriend—now her fiancé—their tube hit a divot in the snow and she went flying.
“In the split-second I had to think, I was like, ‘Alright, don’t break your wrist’—because I’ve broken both wrists, like, three times from various falls,” she said. “I kind of stiff-armed the ground, and because we were moving so fast and it was really hard ice, my lower body kind of came up and went back down like a scorpion. I knew instantly that my back was broken.”
Using her experience as a nurse and ski patrol member, the first words out of O’Driscoll’s mouth were, “Call 911 and ask for a helicopter.” There wasn’t one available due to poor weather, but she was driven to Glens Falls Hospital. Her initial diagnosis was correct: Her back was broken.
O’Driscoll was transported to Albany Med and treated by a trauma team she knew well. She stayed in the hospital for two weeks, then spent a few more at Sunnyview Rehabilitation Hospital in Schenectady before leaving with a walker.
A New Jersey native who grew up skiing at Gore Mountain in the Adirondacks and surfing on the Jersey Shore, O’Driscoll was “hell-bent” on walking, and finding a way to get back to her favorite hobbies—and her nursing career.
“I was looking at life where I was never going to ski again, never going to surf again. I didn’t think I was going to work as a nurse again. I thought all of that was gone, but I knew that step one of getting back to nursing was walking. We have to be able to walk.”
“That was the very first time that I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to be OK.’ Like, I’m still me; I’m not a different person. I’m just going to have to do things differently,” O’Driscoll said.
Back to skiing
Immediately, her thoughts turned to skiing.
From the time O’Driscoll was 2 years old, she was on skis, wearing tiny boots with newspapers stuffed in the toes and gliding down a little slope in her parents’ backyard.
“I literally have no recollection of learning how to ski,” she said, “kind of like you don’t remember learning how to walk the first time.”
The sport was O’Driscoll’s relief valve when she dropped out of college after severe asthma derailed her track and field career at University of Massachusetts Lowell. She moved to the Adirondacks a little more than a decade ago and joined the ski patrol at Gore, eventually settling in the area permanently while she attended SUNY Adirondack and embarked on her nursing career.
The same day she got back on a surfboard, O’Driscoll called up a friend, James “Jimmer” Hayes, who ran the adaptive ski program at the ski resort outside North Creek.
Adaptive ski instructor learned to tailor approach
James Hayes helps people with disabilities enjoy alpine skiing, through his work as an instructor for a program at state-run ski facilities
“Jimmer, I broke my back a couple of months ago, but I just went surfing,” she told him. “And if I can surf, it definitely means there’s a way for me to go skiing.”
“Kelsey, it’s July,” he told her. “Why are you talking about skiing?”
“I was like, ‘I just need to know that we can figure it out,’” she recalled. “He was like, ‘100%.’”
On Dec. 10—nine months and four days after breaking her back—O’Driscoll was back on skis. She said there was some trepidation—not fear of another accident, but of worry that she wouldn’t love skiing the way she always had.
After an unsatisfying first run—essentially being tugged down Gore’s bunny slope while holding a wooden rod—adaptive ski instructor Bruce Tubbs returned with a pair of outriggers, or forearm crutches with skis on the bottom. Tubbs told O’Driscoll to put them on before they went back to the top of the run.
“I made these big (S-turns) all the way down the bunny hill, and halfway down I was sobbing into my goggles—because it did feel the same,” she said. “I was falling in love with the sport I always loved. It was magic. Pure magic.”
O’Driscoll ended up as Gore’s first adaptive ski patrol member.
The move into ski racing
She first decided to give racing a try in 2023 at an adaptive ski camp in Vermont. When she navigated a slalom course for the first time, one of the coaches took a video that ended up in the hands of Erik Petersen, the director of Alpine skiing at the National Sports Center for the Disabled in Colorado. He quickly extended an invitation to O’Driscoll—who had never raced competitively—to train with his team and compete in four-track skiing at the U.S. national championships.
Her first race was in April 2024, and she did well enough to spend the following winter training in Colorado and earning a spot on the U.S. national team for the 2025 World Para Alpine Skiing Championships in Slovenia. She thrived, taking sixth in the slalom and eighth in the giant slalom.
This season, she’s been skiing on the World Cup circuit in Europe. A win in a super-G race earned her an automatic spot for the U.S. Paralympic team in Cortina d’Ampezzo.
“I started crying,” she said, “because I realized that meant I was definitely going to the games.”
After spending some time back home in Glens Falls, O’Driscoll headed to a U.S. team camp in Sun Valley, Idaho, in late February before departing for Italy on Feb. 28.
With the games beginning Friday—March 6, that fateful date—O’Driscoll can’t help but reflect on the journey.
“I’m just going to be thinking (that) five years ago today, I was laying facedown in the snow thinking I just ruined my life,” she said. “And in fact, what I thought was a massive loss turned out to be a massive gain.”
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