When Kiana Clay rides a chairlift, she always sits on the
left side of the seat so she can use her one functioning arm to push off at the
top. Once there, she steps onto her snowboard, points down the mountain and
picks up speed.
اضافة اعلان
A lot of it.
She has racked up several top finishes as she aims to compete
in the 2022 Paralympics in Beijing and recently became the first
parasnowboarder to be signed by the Burton Team, one of the best known in
snowboarding and whose members have included Olympians like Kelly Clark, Chloe
Kim and Shaun White.
“What struck me with Kiana right away is that she saw how
her work might benefit others,” said Donna Carpenter, owner of the Burton
snowboarding company, which sponsors the team. “She’s got that single-minded
determination, the eye of the tiger that you can recognize in a good athlete.’’
Carpenter first learned of Clay when she spoke at a national
sportswomen conference a few years ago and was captivated.
“Her speech was so powerful coming out of this little
package,” Carpenter said. “When she talked about refinding her purpose with
snowboarding and the sense of freedom it brought her, I was like, we have to
connect.”
Clay being in the next Paralympics is far from a certainty
but not because of her performance. Her class, female snowboarders with upper
limb disabilities, is not scheduled to appear in the Paralympics until the 2026
Games in northern Italy, because of an insufficient pool of competitors. But
Clay, 26, is leading a petition to add the division to the 2022 Beijing Games.
“We really need that class in the next games,” she said. “If
there’s a little girl without an upper limb who thinks she’s less than, or not
capable of doing something, it’s about encouraging the next generation, making
that future possibility.”
Contests run by World Para Snowboarding, the international
governing body for the sport, include this category for women, and Clay is one
of just a handful of American female athletes competing in the category on the
international level. Numerous other nations, including China, have several
female snowboarders in the upper limb class.
“It’s the largest class on the men’s side of the sport, and
it’s growing on the women’s side,” said Daniel Gale, executive director of
Adaptive Action Sports, a Colorado-based organization that steers people with
disabilities to action sports and helped get snowboarding into the 2014
Paralympics in Russia. “Had it not been for COVID interrupting our season last
year, we would have had the opportunity for those women to show that the
numbers are there.”
At end of 2020, Clay ranked ninth in the world in her
category and was the top American, although she is new to the sport and only
has a handful of competitions under her belt. She narrowly missed the podium,
placing fourth, in her most recent World Cup event last year.
Growing up in San Diego, she found speed by whatever means
possible — cycling, skateboarding, in-line skating. She got her first
motorcycle at age 7 and was racing motocross as she neared her teens. It was an
era when women’s motocross was at its peak, and she was racing around the
nation, finishing in the top three among girls and boys in her class.
Then, at age 12, competing on a rainy day in Texas, she
crashed when her bike slid out over a jump. Another racer’s front wheel landed
on her neck. Clay awoke on a stretcher to discover she had no use of her right,
dominant arm.
She had suffered a neck injury involving the brachial
plexus. A few weeks later, Clay and her father were hit by a drunken driver,
and their truck flipped. Any hope to recover some use of her arm vanished, even
after a 14-hour nerve graft procedure.
She learned to write with her left hand, play video games
with her feet and how to make a ponytail with the help of a doorknob. She spent
all of junior high and high school trying every type of sport and activity —
track, art, choir, cheerleading — straining to redefine herself and to envision
a future other than the one she had pictured as a professional motocross racer.
Nothing made her heart sing.
It wasn’t until college at Dallas Baptist University that
Clay got back on a motorcycle.
“I found myself constantly going back to the dirt track,”
she said. “One of my friends said, ‘Why don’t we rig up a pit bike that you can
ride with one hand?’ That bike didn’t stop for eight or nine hours. I went
through three cans of gas. I still had that feeling on the track, this crazy
sense of peace. I call it my throttle therapy. If I hadn’t gotten back on the
bike, I wouldn’t have gotten into snowboarding.”
Word spread about the 1.5m, one-armed woman racing dirt
bikes.
Adaptive Action Sports invited Clay to Colorado to try
snowboarding. It was the first time she had been on a board since she was a
small child.
Using her input, designers have created custom boots that
Clay can tighten without a drawstring and jackets with diagonal zippers that
can be easily managed with one hand and featuring a single left sleeve, since
Clay rides with her right arm strapped tightly to her body under the jacket.
Unless her arm is pinned down, it “would flap around like a
flag,” Clay said, hindering her balance while riding and racing. The inactive
arm presents other dangers, too. After a recent dirt bike crash in which she
went over the handlebars, Clay noticed her right hand turning black and blue a
couple days later. When she went to the doctor, she discovered her wrist was
broken.
She is hoping to have the arm amputated below the elbow this
year.
“The mark I’d like to leave is not only for disabled people,
but for every human to understand that the only limitation they have is
themselves,” she said. “I want to help people see beyond themselves, what their
potential is and what they’re capable of if they’re willing to put in the
work.”
