the Children’s Miracle Network, he met a boy with cancer.
“He was a very happy young man,” Kurka recalls. “He
didn’t have an issue trying to put himself out there. He
knew he had limited time. That made me realize: What
am I doing with my life? I don’t have terminal cancer. My
legs just don’t work. What am I doing being such a wuss?
“I found my new identity. It was very similar to my old
one. It was just a newer version. When I realized I could
do anything I could do before, I just had to do it differ-
ently; that is when I could feel alive again.”
Despite having never attempted the sport before, Kurka
applied this new attitude to skiing, careening down moun-
tains with his body strapped into a seat atop a single ski
and outrigger skis in his hands to help guide him. The
results were magnificent and calamitous, often both in
the same week. Early in his career he broke his back, both
of his ankles and wrists, and his right ulna. He snapped
his right femur and had a rod put through it. During a
slalom race in Slovenia, in January 2017, he hit a gate at
a less-than-ideal angle, breaking his ribs. He says, “Ribs
are a hard thing to fix. You know what I’m saying?” He
just kept racing. The next week, he won his first world
championship, in the downhill in Tarvisio, Italy.
“Never had them reset,” Kurka says. “I have protruding
ribs on my left side. You can feel them. You can see them.”
Skiing through injuries helped prepare him for the next
ones. He did not need to feel great to ski at an elite level. Butover time, Kurka realized that this reckless approach was
not sustainable. He has learned to win races with savvy
more than courage.
“My body definitely can’t handle the injuries it did at
one point,” Kurka says. “But my experience is so much
greater that I don’t have to worry about getting injured
as much....I was basically fearless from the start. But
I definitely had a sense of nervousness that I had to get
under control. [So] I whistle, I stay calm, I focus on the
important things that are needed in every single run that
I do. Instead of trying to do everything perfectly, I’m able
to pinpoint what the best decisions are.”
Kurka is a man of varied passions. He has worked as a
radio DJ. He built a bed-and-breakfast in Palmer, and we
do mean built. He says he did “99%” of the work himself:THERE IS AN excellent chance that, in Beijing, one of
the best skiers in the world will use the moments before
some of the biggest races of his career to crack a joke.
Andrew Kurka does this by design. Sometimes he chats
about the course with the folks working at the start. What
he says doesn’t really matter as much as how he says it.
He keeps it light, and though he is talking to others, he
is really speaking to himself.
“My career has been so serious for
so long,” says Kurka, who will turn 30
just before the Games. “When I started
getting better is when I started staying
calm. It’s a big confidence booster to
stay relaxed.”
Success in adrenaline sports can
hinge, in large part, on managing fear.
Kurka has a different challenge. He has
to manage fearlessness.
Kurka grew up in Palmer, Alaska,
where he was a freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestling
phenom, winning four state championships by middle
school, driven by one thought: Pin him. He did not just
want to win. He wanted to dominate immediately.
“That was just my mentality,” Kurka says. “Everything
about me was: Outpace the opponent. Be faster, be
stronger, [go] harder 100% of the time and eventually
they won’t keep up. That was just the way I learned
to wrestle.”
When Kurka was 13, he got in an all-terrain vehicle acci-
dent and severely damaged three of his middle vertebrae,
leaving him partially paralyzed from the waist down. He
was able to keep wrestling—eventually winning two state
championships in high school—but his Olympic dreams no
longer had an outlet. Two years after the injury, through
F 4“Everything about me was: Outpace the
opponent. BE FASTER, BE STRONGER, [GO]
HARDER^100 % of the time^ and eventually^
they won’t keep up,” Kurka says.MEET TEAM USA