Suzanne Stewart
Staff Writer
Kinzie Dickman has always been an athlete. When she was growing up in a suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio, she was a gymnast. She learned how to ski and snowboard during family trips to Snowshoe Mountain Resort.
She’s always had the spirit of an athlete. In 2017, when she was in a single vehicle accident, that spirit was nearly taken away.
Nearly.
At the age of 23, Dickman was driving back to the local health department where she was a health inspector and emergency response coordinator. At some point during the drive, she lost consciousness and hit a telephone pole, hard.
“Ironically, I had just finished what we call incident command structure 300 with about half the firefighters that were there [at the accident] and they didn’t know it was me because I broke half of my face,” she said.
Dickman was taken to the hospital where she was scanned and evaluated. She had a broken eye socket, broken sinus cavity, partial right pneumothorax, a contusion on her left lung and lots of scratches and bruises.
“I was kept for observation overnight, but I wasn’t admitted,” she said.
When she left the hospital, Dickman walked out on her own. She went back to work two weeks later and thought, despite the aches and pains she was feeling, she was doing well. She felt lucky to have walked away from the accident.
At work, they said she needed a doctor’s note clearing her for work. Her primary care doctor did just that and things went back to normal.
A year and a half later, Dickman was wakesurfing with her husband, Ted, when she said she couldn’t feel her feet. She was unable to stand up on the board and realized something was wrong.
She contacted an orthopedic specialist from her time as a gymnast and explained to him that she had numbness in her hips that went all the way to her toes.
“I just figured maybe a pinched nerve; whatever,” she said. “I had fractured my back as a gymnast. I really didn’t think anything about it.”
Dickman had an MRI and, at her follow-up, learned it was more extensive than just a pinched nerve. She had a syrinx from her T5 to T12. A syrinx is a cyst inside the spinal cord that fills up with spinal fluid.
Prior to the diagnosis, Dickman wasn’t worried. She thought it would be something simple that could be fixed with physical therapy. She went to the follow-up appointment alone, thinking she would be okay.
“I was not scared and then [the orthopedic doctor] threw that word neurosurgeon out and I went, ‘what?’” she said. “I remember getting into my car and just crying.”
Dickman called her mom and husband, both of whom felt bad for not going to the appointment with her.
The next step was visiting a neurosurgeon who did scans of her head, neck, thoracic area with contrast, a spinal tap, lumbar and CT myelogram.
It was determined that Dickman may have suffered a brain bleed from her accident which caused the spinal fluid to leak into her spine and create the syrinx.
Since Dickman didn’t have any follow-ups after her accident, the brain bleed was not caught.
“They just did a follow-up on my face to see if I needed plastic surgery,” she said. “Again, I was twenty-three. I thought I was fine. I pretty much came out of this accident unscathed. Then a year and a half later to two years, all this stuff comes out and I start looking into what syringomyelia is, which is the actual diagnosis of a syrinx.
“It is a progressive filling of a pocket inside your spinal cord to develop a cyst,” she continued. “It got to the point where some of my nerves were affected by it and the signals that go from your brain down to your legs, where you have that crossover in the center of your spinal cord, they get messed up because it’s right in the center of your spinal cord.”
With her age in mind, Dickman thought surgery would be the answer and she could get back to her healthy, active life. Her doctor was not willing to take that risk, however.
“I’m very lucky that my neurosurgeon understands the quality of life versus doing bad back surgeries,” she said. “He said with the size that it is and the location that it’s at, ‘I make one wrong move and I’m paralyzing you more.’”
The doctor said he could put a shunt in to drain the fluid, but he would have to go in several times over the years if the shunt gets clogged, adding that there was too much risk to do a back surgery.
Instead, he said he would monitor the syrinx and keep Dickman on medication that helps with the pain and nerve issues.
“I’m beyond thankful for that,” she said. “At the time, I was angry because I thought there was hope that I could walk again,” she said. “I was like, ‘I just want that surgery. Fix me. Fix me.’ Now that I’ve matured – I’m thirty-one – I’ve lived with this long enough and I’ve had doors opened for me. I’m so thankful that I didn’t do the back surgery.”
Since surgery was off the table, it was time for Dickman to learn how to live life using a wheelchair. She went to in-patient therapy and had to find the strength to do everything in a wheelchair and she had to do it on her own.
This was during the COVID-19 pandemic, so her parents and husband were not allowed to come visit. Dickman spent 18 days at in-patient therapy and although it took a mental and physical toll on her, she came out of it stronger and ready to take on the world.
After she finished her therapy, the Dickmans moved to Snowshoe where they now live.
That athletic spirit inside her was reignited and Dickman set her sights on the Challenged Athletes of West Virginia program at Silver Creek.
Technically, her first sport back to it was the last one she tried – wake boarding. Her brother-in-law is part owner and manager of a wake boarding cable park in Rock Hill, South Carolina.
Through the help of a fundraiser, she bought a Tessier wake board frame and got back on the board.
“That sport was really easy for me to figure out,” she said. “I took off on that and that’s when I was like, ‘I want to learn how to adaptive ski.’”
While she waited for a ski frame to arrive from Austria, Dickman worked with CAWV and its executive director Carol Woody to get on a mono-ski. Woody set it up to have Dickman be the “guinea pig” for a refresher course for the volunteers and staff prior to the winter season opening.
Dickman worked with them all day and learned how to ski and how to get on and off the ski lift.
She was hooked, until the second lesson that included turns.
“I hated it,” she said, laughing. “I cried. I looked at my husband and I said, ‘I think you just spent thousands of dollars on a frame, and I don’t want to do this sport.’”
Her husband told her to give it some time, and she continued working with CAWV with instructor Nathan Magnuson whose background is in snowboarding. Since Dickman was herself a snowboarder and knew the terminology of the sport, Magnusson switched tactics and taught her as if she was snowboarding.
“It got a lot better,” Dickman said.
In her first season of skiing on a mono-ski, Dickman put in more than 20 days on the slopes. In one weekend, she progressed from the easiest trails to the terrain park. She told Woody she wanted to participate in the Cupp Run Challenge and said there should be a category for adaptive athletes.
In February 2022, she was the first adaptive athlete to run the Cupp Run course. She took second place in the actual challenge, behind Scott Mills, a seasoned mono-skier.
That December, Dickman attended the Breckenridge Resort Ski Spectacular in Breckenridge, Colorado.
“We had seven hundred plus adaptive athletes come to that camp that are cognitive, visually impaired and physical challenged athletes,” she said.
Dickman and her coach, Erwin Berry, joined Woody for the ski spec and had a blast. In fact, it was there that she met Chris Young, who helped her learn more about her mono-ski frame. Unbeknownst to her, she had blown out the shock and was, as he put it, riding a brick down the mountain.
She got it fixed at Sturdivan Powersports in Elkins and was ready for the next season.
In April 2023, she went to Winter Park, Colorado, and met Erik Petersen at the National Sports Center for the Disabled.
Although she only attended camps out west to become a better skier, she was told she should race. She thought it over and started training with Petersen who loaned her a Tessier Scraver frame that is a better racing frame than what she had.
“I’m doing what I can in the gates, and I do five days of training with their athletes that are there doing the leftover spring training,” Dickman said. “At the end of the week, Erik calls me into his office, and he goes, ‘come back in November, we’ll start your race career.’”
She talked it over with her husband, who was on board with her going to Colorado for the winter to become a professional athlete. She bought the equipment needed and a 1998 Econline van which she lived in that season.
That winter was emotionally and physically draining. Dickman was on her own again, without her family, living in a van, and training in a sport she wasn’t too familiar with. She committed to competing but was only part-time that first season.
She came back to West Virginia to live and flew out west for the events.
“I would go out a little bit early and get some training with my coach and then I went to the races,” she said. “I went out January and did a race and I medaled my first Super G. That was really cool. I was like, ‘alright maybe I can do this.’”
She finished that first season with three medals – one silver and two bronze.
The next year, 2024, she went in whole hog. She moved into the van and lived in parking lots while she trained and competed. She worked part-time at the Winter Park tubing hill concessions and part-time as a mono-ski instructor.
She kept busy and that helped her survive being on her own, living in a van with temperatures getting to below 44 degrees Fahrenheit on some nights.
“It’s not a glamorous lifestyle,” she said. “A lot of people think if you’re a professional ski racer or a professional in some sport, you must have a rich luxury lifestyle. Absolutely not. You are traveling a lot. Yes, I do have sponsors; I have amazing people backing me up, but all the money that I get goes straight back into ski racing. It doesn’t fill my wallet at all.”
At the end of the 2024-2025 season, Dickman came home with four medals.
“I came home as the second place U.S. para-national champion for Super G,” she said. “I was right behind Japan. It was an amazing race.”
Although she had been racing for two years at this time, Dickman said she would struggle with thoughts that she wasn’t good enough to be a competitor. She even did a race, crying throughout – from the start gate, down the slope, to on the car ride back home.
With the help of her coach and a sports therapist, she has been able to work through those issues and has come out more confident in her skills and with the coping skills to get herself back on track.
“I’m so thankful for my coach,” Dickman said. “He is so good at unscrewing my head and then screwing it back on straight. After that race in March, he got my head back on straight. We got to training again to the point where it really unlocked something in me.
“It lit a little bit of a fire under me, and I started skiing the best I had skied all season,” she continued. “That’s the power of a good coach.”
That summer, Dickman continued training at an indoor park called Big Snow the American Dream in New Jersey. She also joined the Sisters in Sports Foundation which is like a big support system of female adaptive athletes who meet online once a month to talk.
This year, Dickman has her sights set on Italy. The Paralympic Games 2026 in Milano Cortina.
Although she’s not on the U.S. core national team, if she can get her scores up to a certain number, she can be in the running to represent the United States as a mono-skier.
First, she is going to spend three weeks in Chile for a speed and giant slalom camp. After that, she will return to Colorado for the 2025-2026 winter season and compete once again.
“It’s an exciting year,” she said.
It will be a little easier this year, too, thanks in part to the Pocahontas County Convention and Visitors Bureau. She reached out to the organization, shared her story and her dreams and the board decided to sponsor her lodging in Colorado this year. No more van life for this athlete.
“I don’t have to live in my van this season – which is huge,” she said. “I will be in employee housing.”
Now, with the eight-year anniversary of her car accident coming up later this month, Dickman reflects on how her life has changed.
“From being in a single car motor vehicle accident and thinking that the world was ending and my life was never going to be the same to ‘you know what, this is how it is,’” she said. “Doors open and you just have to be willing to let other doors shut to allow other doors to open.”
With the drive and strength that Dickman has, next door to open will be the one leading to the Paralympics in Italy.
