Benvenuto Team USA: U.S. Para Nordic Team Heads To Italy For World Cups, Training

Oksana Masters and Aaron Pike are avid coffee drinkers, and the couple shouldn’t have any trouble finding a good cappuccino over the next few weeks.

Masters and Pike, both six-time Paralympians, are among a group of seven American Para Nordic skiers who’ll open the world cup season this week in Italy — a country known for its coffee and world-class skiing.

U.S. Paralympics Nordic Skiing typically competes in its first world cup event of the season in December. However, because of the way the schedule is set up this winter, the Americans have had to wait longer than usual for their season opener.

They’ll race at a world cup event in Toblach in northern Italy from Wednesday to Sunday. As soon as it ends, they’ll head less than three hours away to Martell, Italy, to compete in a second world cup event from Jan. 31 to Feb. 1.

The back-to-back events, followed by a short training camp in Val di Fiemme, will help the American athletes get acclimated to Italy two years before the country hosts the Paralympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026.

“We have a really packed race schedule, so (we) rarely have time for much sightseeing when we travel. But we always find our small ways to explore the area we are in,” said Eileen Carey, director of U.S. Paralympics Nordic Skiing. “We are excited to lean into the Italian culture in our lead up to the 2026 Paralympic Games in Milan Cortina, and I am sure we will at least find some good pizza and a favorite coffee shop to help us with that.”

The group of seven American athletes who traveled to Italy includes five sit skiers in Masters, Pike, four-time Paralympic gold medalist Kendall Gretsch, 2022 Paralympian Erin Martin and teenager Michael Kneeland.

Four-time Paralympic medalist Jake Adicoff is the only visually impaired skier in the group, and two-time Paralympian Dani Aravich is the lone standing skier.

“Typically, world cups in central Europe have the largest fields, so we expect to see strong fields in both Toblach and Martell,” Carey said.

The trip will be the next step in Masters’ return from a left hand injury that forced her to miss last season.

Masters, the most decorated U.S. Winter Paralympian of all time, showed she had regained her dominant form earlier this month when she won all three races she competed in at the U.S. Cross Country Ski Championships in Midway, Utah.

Adicoff, meanwhile, cruised to wins in his three races in the visually impaired category — the 10-kilometer classic race, the skate sprint and the classic sprint.

On the flip side, Kneeland is the newcomer of the group.

The teenager from Bozeman, Montana, competed in his first U.S. Paralympics Nordic Skiing Sit Ski Nationals last January, and he has spent the past year training and seeking advice from more experienced skiers.

In November, Kneeland was among a group of development athletes who took part in a training camp that U.S. Paralympics Nordic Skiing hosted in Canmore, Alberta. While there, he spoke to three-time Olympian Susan Dunklee, who served as a coach, in the hopes of learning more about the sport.

Kneeland will now get to compete in his first world cups events in Italy.

“He’ll have some of the best in the world to learn from on this trip, so that is exciting,” Carey said.

Carey said the group of American athletes got in good preparation for the start of the world cup season with the training camp in Canmore, followed by the U.S. Cross Country Ski Championships. It allowed them to get back into race shape and spend time bonding as a team before they travelled overseas for the first two world cup events of 2024.

“We typically have a world cup in December, so this is a very late start for us, and we are ready to take this show on the road,” Carey said. “We took advantage of the late start to the international season to focus on high-quality preparations in the U.S.

“Even though we haven’t had world cups, we have had high-quality competitions in Continental Cup racing in Canmore and Utah. We have many of the strongest sit skiers in the world in North America, and those races were excellent preparations for a world cup field. Standing and visually impaired athletes were similarly challenged with strong fields at U.S. championships.”

Before returning home to the U.S., the Americans will take part in a training camp in Val di Fiemme from Feb. 4-7. They’ll get to train at the venue where Nordic skiers will compete during the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Paralympics.

Alex Abrams has written about Olympic and Paralympic sports for more than 15 years, including as a reporter for major newspapers in Florida, Arkansas and Oklahoma. He is a freelance contributor to USParaNordicSkiing.org on behalf of Red Line Editorial, Inc.