Dear Future Generations,

My name is Dani Aravich, and I love the Paralympics.

I love competing in them. I love talking about them. I love marketing them. And, perhaps most importantly, I love advocating for them.

I am a three-time Paralympian, having competed in both the Summer and Winter Games. I was born missing my left hand and forearm, and I grew up playing every sport I could get my hands on, soccer, basketball, softball, and eventually running.

I am eternally grateful that my parents put me in sports.

Because sports were where I felt most like myself.

In everyday life, I was incredibly self-conscious about my missing hand. I didn’t really identify with the word “disability.” I just knew that sometimes I felt different.

But when I was playing sports, I could forget about all of that. I was just an athlete.

For most of my childhood, I competed alongside non-disabled athletes. I didn’t think much about what that meant. I just knew that if I wanted to compete, I had to figure out how to keep up.

Then, during my junior year of high school, I discovered cross-country running.

That was the magic.

Running challenged me in completely new ways, and for the first time, the playing field felt a little more fair. I was recruited to run in college, and I thought I had found the sport I would pursue for the rest of my life.

Eventually, though, I left my college team and shifted my focus toward a career working in professional sports.

Little did I know that moving to Salt Lake City—home of the 2002 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games—would completely change the trajectory of my life.

Some of my colleagues started telling me more about the Paralympic movement.

The Paralympics?

In my mind, that was for people with visual impairments or people who used wheelchairs.

Then I learned something that changed everything:

A girl missing her hand was Paralympic eligible.

For the first time, I had the opportunity to compete against people who were like me.

I didn't have to constantly compete up.

I dove straight in.

But I didn’t just want to compete. I wanted to learn.

I volunteered with Para sport organizations. I had conversations with athletes. I watched documentaries. I sought out stories. I immersed myself in a community I had spent most of my life not realizing I was part of.

And somewhere along the way, something shifted.

I wanted to understand disability.

I wanted to understand my own disability.

I wanted to represent this community well.

And I began to see the Paralympics as something much bigger than sport.

The Paralympic movement represents the world’s largest marginalized community: the disability community. It is also a community that any one of us can join at any point in our lives.

Disability will touch every person's life in some way—whether through our own experience, a family member, a friend, a colleague, or simply through aging.

Sport has an incredible ability to bring people together. It gives us a common language. It creates opportunities to challenge assumptions. And the Paralympics give us a powerful platform to have conversations about disability that might otherwise never happen.

When I went to my first Paralympic Games in Tokyo in 2021, I saw firsthand just how little coverage and fandom Paralympic sport received compared with the Olympics.

But I also witnessed some of the most incredible athletic performances I had ever seen.

And I kept asking myself:

Why doesn't the world care about this?

The more I learned, the more I realized that the answer was bigger than a lack of exposure.

It was rooted in ableism.

Too often, people viewed disability—and therefore disabled athletes and disabled sport—as “less than,” rather than seeing what was actually in front of them:

Great athletes. Great competition. Great sport.

I never had one defining moment where I decided, I'm going to own this space.

It happened gradually.

I volunteered with more organizations.

I pursued a graduate certificate in disability inclusion and accessible design.

I started talking about the Paralympics on social media.

I began bringing these conversations into boardrooms, companies, sports organizations, and conversations with my peers.

And suddenly, I realized that I wasn't just participating in the Paralympic movement.

I was advocating for it.

That is my love story with the Paralympics.

And my hope is that it doesn't end with me.

I hope a young girl reads this someday and sees herself in these words.

Maybe she has a disability. Maybe she doesn't.

Maybe she has never watched a Paralympic event.

Maybe she has a classmate with a disability and doesn't know how to understand the differences she sees.

Maybe she is an athlete who has always felt like she doesn't quite belong.

I hope she watches the Paralympics.

I hope she sees incredible athletes competing at the highest level.

I hope she questions the assumptions she has been taught about disability.

And I hope she understands that the Paralympics aren't something happening alongside sport.

They are sport.

I love the Paralympics.

I love competing in them.

I love talking about them.

I love marketing them.

And I love fighting for a future where they are seen, celebrated, and understood for what they truly are.

Great sport.
Powerful stories.
And a movement worth loving.

With love,

Dani Aravich