A CT native had a stroke at age 8 that brought paralysis. Now she’s going to ski in the Paralympics.

When Nicole Zaino was 8 years old, she had a stroke and the left side of her body was paralyzed.

Growing up in Brookfield, Zaino had never heard of the Paralympics and even after she did, she didn’t think that someone like her would be able to compete.

“Back then the Paralympics weren’t advertised that well,” Zaino said recently.

“Maybe around middle school, I saw they existed, but I saw people with prosthetics and I saw people who use wheelchairs and I was like, ‘I don’t use a wheelchair all the time and I have all of my limbs,” she said “They don’t work great but I have all of them.’ I just didn’t even think I was eligible to get into adaptive sports.”

On her honeymoon in Whistler in Canada in 2022, she tried sit-down Nordic skiing, in which skiers sit in a bucket seat mounted on two skis and propel themselves with poles.

Four years after trying the sport for the first time, Zaino, 29, will be competing in Nordic skiing in the Paralympics, which begin with Opening Ceremonies Friday in Italy.

The stroke caused her left side to become partially paralyzed; her arm function isn’t impacted as much as the rest of her body.

“The farther you go down the worse it is,” she said. “My core is impacted a bit; my leg is very impacted.”

Zaino’s unlikely Paralympic journey started after she finished her undergraduate degree at Clarkson University in New York and moved to Seattle and the University of Washington, where she earned a doctorate in mechanical engineering. To relieve stress, she looked for an adaptive sport nearby and found sled hockey and played for the Seattle Kraken team. But she didn’t love being indoors, and as a 5-foot-4 woman, she got a little tired of getting checked by bigger men in the co-ed sport.

At Whistler, she found they offered Nordic sit ski lessons.

“There weren’t many places near Seattle that had Nordic sit skiing,” she said. “I asked my husband, ‘I know we’re on our honeymoon, but can I take a lesson?’ I tried it in a sit ski and I fell in love with it. It’s a very similar movement to sled hockey, all the muscles, and all the things I had learned had carried over. The pulling is very similar.

“I was watching the Paralympics around the same time when I was trying it for the first time then it escalated from there. I was like, ‘Wow, I really like this.’ The next season I was able to go to training camp for racing and I did my first races. At the end of that, I said, ‘I think I can do this for real.’”

Zaino hadn’t played a lot of sports growing up, except for youth soccer. After the stroke, she continued to dance and play the piano and clarinet. She did try downhill skiing with the adaptive sports programs at Mount Southington and Ski Sundown.

“I’m a little unique in that there’s not a lot of people who have one-sided paralysis who do sit skiing,” she said. “There’s a lot of (people with) spinal cord injuries or spina bifida, amputees, so figuring out what worked for me was the most important part. I used models of what I had seen in World Cups and talked to a lot of people.”

After she finished her dissertation – in which she researched how people use mobility aids – she moved to Bozeman, Montana, where the Paralympic Nordic ski team trains and devoted herself to the sport. Her rise was quick; she competed in her first World Cup in 2024 and her first world championship in 2025.

“I think what’s also helped me learn how to sit ski so quickly is it’s all just a physics problem,” she said. “If I need to turn more, I need to shift my weight this way. Same with climbing. It’s all just physics, but it’s more fun because you’re outside and skiing.”

Zaino will also compete in the biathlon (skiing and shooting).

“Every now and then I have to zoom out and say, ‘OK, I tried this sport four years ago. I said I want to do it for real three years ago. And now I’m going to the Paralympics,’” she said. “I’m really proud of how quick I’ve been able to do this; I’m really excited. This season I kind of knew it was coming because of my performances at the World Cups last year and my ranking.

“I keep trying to pinch myself and zoom out. It takes up a lot of my life right now, so it feels like I’ve been doing it forever. But I haven’t.”

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