It’s Just Physics: Math Teacher, Goalball Paralympian John Kusku Is Embarking On A New Journey Into Nordic Skiing

John Kusku’s interest in math and science goes way back, starting even before he attended a NASA space camp while in elementary school. These days, he applies that passion as a high school match teacher and, now, as a Para cross-country skier.

Since Kusku, 39, is visually impaired, he couldn’t watch other Nordic skiers make their way around the course when he started training in the sport two years ago. He had to learn how to cross-country ski and compete in the biathlon in other ways.

So he thought about skiing more scientifically, focusing on the physics that goes into pushing himself forward. It’s like a math equation to solve in the same way that goalball was a “game of angles” when he played it as a member of the U.S. national men’s goalball team for more than a decade.

“At this point, my vision is very, very bad. Basically, I can’t see anything, and so cross-country skiing is the first sport that I ever learned totally blind,” said Kusku, who lives in the Detroit area. “Every other sport I’ve ever learned, I was able to watch someone else do it first. I’ve never really been able to clearly see someone else cross-country ski, so every motion, every movement has to be directly instructed to me. I can’t watch someone else do it and then just do it.”

Kusku said he has approached Nordic skiing with an open mind. He capped his first season of racing at the 2023 U.S. Biathlon National Championships in Casper, Wyoming, and as part of his second season this past winter, he competed at the U.S. Cross Country Ski Nationals in Midway, Utah.

He already has plans to race next season at the legendary American Birkebeiner in Wisconsin, also known as the Birkie. It’s considered the largest cross-country race in North America.

“After two seasons and I see the speed with which guys like (Paralympians) Max (Nelson) and Jake (Adicoff), the other visually impaired skiers who’ve been on the national team, can move with, I can see, OK, this is something that’s going to take me some time,” Kusku said, laughing. “I’m not going to make the 2026 team. There’s no way for that, but maybe the 2030 team is a realistic goal.”

Kusku was born with a hereditary degenerative retinal disease, and he has less than one degree of vision in each eye.

“I was born legally blind,” Kusku said. “My mom, even when I was a little baby crawling around, she would point at something, and I wouldn’t be able to find it because I have such a small field of vision, no peripheral vision.”

Growing up in a suburb of Detroit, Kusku loved playing soccer and inline hockey with his friends in the neighborhood. His vision, however, got worse when he reached middle school, and he needed to find other sports to play.

Kusku was introduced to goalball, in which a team of visually impaired players tries to score by throwing a ball into an opponent’s net, but he admitted he found it boring at first. He was then invited to a sports education camp hosted by the Michigan Blind Athletic Association, which he’s still involved with as the nonprofit organization’s vice president.

“I went off to that camp in eighth grade, and that’s when I really fell in love with goalball because it was being played at a much more competitive level,” he said. “I got down on the floor, and the very first throw of the first game of the tournament, I got blasted in the face and got the only bloody nose I’ve ever had in my entire life. That kind of got me hooked.”

At the time, Kusku was in the eighth grade and didn’t know anything about the Paralympics. He joined the U.S. national goalball team in 2009, and he helped the Americans earn the silver medal at the Paralympic Games Rio 2016 and then finish fourth in Tokyo five years later.

Kusku soon started thinking more about trying Para Nordic skiing. He went downhill skiing every Sunday as a kid through a program that provided guides to blind skiers, but he wanted to attempt cross-country skiing.

He became even more convinced that he should take up skiing after watching every Nordic race during the Beijing Winter Olympics and Paralympics in 2022. The broadcast of the races included audio descriptions that made it so visually impaired viewers like himself could better follow along with what was happening during the races.

“That was the moment for me that I was like, ‘OK, I need to do this. I need to make this happen,’” Kusku said.

In early December of 2022, at age 37, Kusku tried Nordic skiing for the first time during a weekend at the Craftsbury Outdoor Center in northern Vermont. He was amazed that Clare Egan, a two-time Olympian in biathlon, served as his guide while skiing.

Kusku said his background as an endurance athlete has made his transition to Nordic skiing even easier. He has twice run both the Detroit Free Press Marathon and the Boston Marathon, and he has applied some of the skills he learned while playing goalball to skiing.

“The one thing from goalball that does transfer is that goalball is very sound dependent. Everything we do is listening and reacting,” Kusku said. “So, when I ski with my guide and my guide is in front of me, they’re calling out commands through a microphone and speaker that they’re wearing. Me being able to hear and follow that speaker, that definitely comes from goalball. I don’t think that most people could just follow a speaker through a white landscape that they can’t really see.”

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 USParaNordic.org on behalf of Red Line Editorial, Inc.