Brittani Coury, Paralympic snowboarder, is not the same athlete she was at the 2018 Paralympic Games in PyeongChang, where she won silver. Two years into a global pandemic, she’s not the same person either. Her perspective—as it has for all of us—has shifted.
When the world ground to a halt in early 2020, the athlete was in the midst of her season. She was competing in Norway when sporting events were canceled en masse. While most professional athletes hunkered down in hodgepodge home gyms, training any way they could to sustain their livelihoods, Coury returned home to a very different challenge. In addition to being a Paralympic snowboarder, she’s a nurse. So she went where she was needed most. “It was like, I kind of have a responsibility to be a human more than I have a responsibility to be an athlete,” she says.
By now we’ve heard countless stories from hospital workers who’ve risked their life, weathering staff shortages and extreme burnout, to take care of the sickest during the worst moments of the pandemic. Coury has plenty of her own, working in a COVID tent in “a 100-degree weather with full PPE on,” but, like many pro athletes, she knows the power of focusing on the wins. “Part of the reason I jumped in the COVID tent was because there was an email that went out, saying that [nurses] were tired,” she says. “It was an opportunity for me to give them rest.”
When she started working, “I brought a speaker and I put my 1990s jams on and just tried to kind of lighten the mood a little bit. We can’t exactly have fun, but we can still be human taking care of other humans.”
Coury’s journey as an athlete is a master class in the kind of mental toughness that got her through the worst days of the pandemic. “In snowboarding, we’re making split-second decisions, especially in snowboard cross”—which entails four to six riders racing down a narrow course at top speed while trying to avoid crashing into one another. “You know, you have a line that you want to take, but if somebody's in that line, you have to make a split-second decision on what you're going to do,” Coury says. “It's hard to stay focused on your run and not be worried about the person right next to you.”
Coury was born in New Mexico, near the Colorado border. “I guess I would consider myself an at-risk youth,” she says. “I didn't have a very good childhood.” She was raised in what she describes as an “antifemale” environment. “I never felt like I was worth as much as a boy.” But snowboarding changed that. “I remember as a teenager going up to the mountains and strapping a snowboard on my feet and the feeling of freedom, the feeling of not having to think about all of my inadequacies,” Courty says. “It was addictive to me.”
Snowboarding also gave her a sense of identity—one that for the first time wasn’t defined by her gender. “I remember in high school a girl was like, ‘Oh, you're that girl that snowboards with all the guys,’” she recalls. “And finally I had something positive to think about myself. I was good enough to be in the ‘crew’ at my high school, which was predominantly men.”
Excelling in a male-dominated space quickly became more than an escape for Coury; it became her battle cry. “For me, it's like proving people wrong,” she says. “I was told ‘girls don’t’ a lot—girls don't go to college, girls don't travel, girls don't work. I was constantly told that my worth as a woman was that I don't.” But Coury is more of a can-do kind of woman: “I set my own limitations. I don't allow people to tell me what I'm able to do and what I'm not able to do because, at the end of the day, that's our own choice.”
Coury wouldn’t still be in the sport if she didn’t believe that in her bones. At 17, she had a serious crash. One of the few girls on the slopes, Coury was riding full out, keeping up with the guys, when she hit a patch of ice. “I did what’s called a tomahawker—feet over head down the hill,” she says.
Recounting the accident now, Coury seems relatively unfazed by that part. It was the pair of too big snowboard boots she was wearing while tomahawking down the mountain that set her life on a different path. The force of the fall pulled her right foot halfway out of the boot. “As I was tumbling, there was the force of the boot trying to hold my foot in, and the force of me being tossed around trying to pull my foot out,” she recalls. “I heard it pop and I knew something was wrong because I have a super-high pain tolerance and I could feel it.” She had an X-ray and got instructions to follow up with an orthopedic specialist. But she never did. “I just counted down on a calendar to when I could start snowboarding again,” she says.
Her ankle never properly healed, but Coury kept snowboarding. “I turned 18 and moved to the mountains,” she says. “I was on a hill over 100 days a year with an ankle that was pretty mangled. By the time I was 21, my foot was so swollen I could no longer physically get it in my snowboard boot.” She saw a doctor and had one initial surgery, before they recommended fusing her ankle—a surgery that binds two or more bones together with plates and/or screws to reduce pain and swelling in the joint. But it can also make high-impact activities like snowboarding impossible. “I was like, No way,” Coury says. “That's a death sentence.”
Coury kept riding through the pain. She eventually had to have a boot fitter cut the lining out of her boot so that she could get her enlarged foot into it. “I got 110 days on snow that season, I taught myself to get out of the halfpipe, I was hitting 40 to 60 foot jumps every single day,” she says. But it cost her. By this point, she was 22, her ankle was the size of a softball, her cartilage destroyed, and she had bone fragments in her joint. Fusion was still off the table in Coury’s mind. Instead, she had eight ankle surgeries over the next three years in an attempt to get back out on snow. It didn’t work.
“I had spent the last three years of my life on crutches, and I just wanted to be back out in the world, jumping off stuff,” Coury says. Desperate, she did more research on ankle fusion and learned the procedure, which would likely create reduced mobility in her ankle, would mean giving up her active lifestyle. Hitting a 40-foot jump would be a recipe for blowing out her knee, or her hip, or her back. “People have blown out their knees jumping off of curbs,” she says. “I wasn’t ready to be done being active.”
So she started researching an alternative: below-the-knee amputation. “I saw a guy on a downhill mountain bike with a prosthetic,” Coury says. “I was like, That's what I want to do. I want to be active.” People had a hard time understanding her decision, she says: “They made me feel like I was going to be less of a person because I was missing a part of me.”
Coury was not about to accept that. She had the surgery and has never looked back.
“After amputation, I don't consider myself disabled—I consider myself re-abled,” she says. “I was disabled when I was on crutches for three years. I was disabled having surgery every three months trying to fix my foot. Now I'm re-able to do anything I want to do, whether that's 12 and a half hours on the nursing floor, or racing snowboard cross.”
For someone who hates limitations as much as Coury, the idea of pushing yourself to train for the Paralympics takes on a whole new extreme. On the nursing floor, Coury averaged about seven miles of walking per day over the summer—which was often just a warm-up for the two-hour-long mountain bike rides she’d do at cross training. “There were days when I was just so exhausted I couldn't finish the ride,” she says. “One day I almost heat-stroked on the mountain. Finally my coach was like, ‘Hey, when you come to ride, you have to not work.’ He could see how exhausted I was. But I'm the type of person that wants to do everything.”
Leading up to Beijing, Coury trained with an able-bodied team. “They're pushing me to ride harder and faster and hit bigger jumps,” she says. She happily takes anything her coach throws at her. “I'm like a crash dummy,” she says with a laugh. Whatever she does on the slopes, it’s on her terms. “I'm the only one that knows what a below-the-knee female is capable of doing on a snowboard,” she says. “Nobody else is able to define that for me.”
Coury is one of three female para-snowboarders who will be representing the U.S. in Beijing beginning March 4, 2022. Find out more about the Paralympics and where to watch here.