Spencer Wood started skiing at age 2 and racing at 5. By the time he was 8, he’d added club soccer, baseball and swim team to his schedule. It wasn’t until the Pittsfield native was 10 that his parents told him that he had a physical disability. After a tough day on the Mighty Mites pitching mound, they explained in simple terms what doctors had told them when he was a baby: A stroke in utero had caused partial paralysis on the right side of Wood’s body. He has tight hips, limited mobility of his right ankle, a foot drop and some spasticity in his right arm. As his dad told him: “It’s harder for you to be just like your friends.” For the next eight years, Wood resolved to try. He even started playing lacrosse. “I was like, I can do everything everyone else can, and I’m not going to change how I do anything,” Wood said in a phone call from Italy on Tuesday. But at age 18, after five frustrating years competing for Killington Mountain School, he reluctantly tried paraskiing at the suggestion of his late mother. It was life-changing advice. Now 29, Wood will compete in every Alpine paraskiing event at the Milan Cortina 2026 Paralympic Winter Games, which open this Friday, March 6. The only known Vermonter to compete, Wood is making his third Paralympic appearance and feeling “super good,” he said. He achieved a personal best in his last pre-Paralympic World Cup race, placing 10th in the giant slalom in Méribel, France, in late January. He hopes to top his best Paralympic finish — 12th place in the Super-G at the 2022 games in Beijing — as he aims for a gold medal and to “leave with a sense of satisfaction and knowing I left it all out there.” Wood doesn’t remember learning to ski. His parents, Randy and Barb Wood, were ski instructors at Killington Resort who snapped him into bindings “as soon as I could stand,” he said. Before long, he was whizzing down the mountain as fast as he could. All through school, he raced with nondisabled kids. At Killington Mountain School, he could lift weights as well as anyone but struggled with dry-land training, such as road biking. When he got on the ski hill — “what we’re there to do,” he noted — “I was just fighting for scraps at the back.” Bringing up the rear “taught me from a young age how to be a gracious loser,” he said, but it also eroded his self-confidence. By his junior year he wanted to quit racing. That’s when his mother suggested paraskiing. “And I was like, ‘Nah, I don’t want to beat all these disabled guys,’” Wood recalled. “And I showed up to this event, and I was middle of the pack with all those disabled guys.” Paraskiing taught him that to ski like everyone else, he needed to train differently. Two years later, as a 20-year-old student at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Wood joined the national ski team. He has been skiing professionally ever since. Wood lives in his childhood home when he’s not away skiing. His fiancée, Rachel Frisch, and his dad are among five family members traveling to Italy to cheer him on. The Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Paralympic Games run Friday, March 6, to Sunday, March 15. They will be broadcast on NBC, CNBC and USA Network and can be streamed on Peacock. The post Pittsfield’s Spencer Wood to Ski in His Third Paralympics appeared first on Seven Days. ...read more read less