Uphill Courage

Stephani Victor ‘91 doesn’t like airports. It’s not the hassle of getting through security that gets on her nerves, nor the challenge of maneuvering through the crowds and widespread layout in a wheelchair.

It’s the looks on people’s faces that sometimes overwhelm her in a way no massive, snow-covered mountain can. Some people see her missing legs and quickly look away. She notices. Others stare with a pity she doesn’t want. When she boards a plane, airline employees assume she can’t do anything for herself. She wishes she could hold up a mirror and say, “This is what I see when I look at you.”

“Not everyone who uses a wheelchair is a helpless, brainless invalid,” Victor says. “To see how I’m physically built, how I navigate around the world, there’s nothing disabled about me. I represent more ability because I do more with less.”

In the wheelchair sits a world-class athlete. Victor is a champion skier, winner of a Paralympic gold medal for the slalom in Torino, Italy, in 2006. She has her eyes set on returning to the Paralympics in Vancouver in 2010, when she will be 40 years old.

A fluke accident in December 1995 took Victor’s legs but not her spirit. She was changing a compact disc in the trunk of her then-boyfriend’s car, which was parked in a shallow driveway outside his Hermosa Beach apartment. A passing driver caught his tire in a groove that had been cut in the concrete by a construction crew, lost control of his car, jumped a curb and crashed head-on into Victor, pinning her between the two vehicles.

Her legs needed to be amputated above the knee. While lying in the hospital bed, Victor – a cinematic arts major at USC – had a dream that she would make a documentary about her recovery. Roger Christiansen, her favorite professor, helped get her started by bringing equipment to the hospital and filming her talks with doctors.

“I think the filming helped her make sense of it all,” says Christiansen, a director on the Hannah Montana show. “What she’s done in skiing is a testament to how positive she was and what resolve she had.”

Four years after her injury, following 11 reconstructive surgeries, Victor was in Park City, Utah, with friends to publicize their film – in which she had a small acting role – when she found out about the nearby National Ability Center, which offers ski lessons for people with disabilities. A decent skier growing up in Pennsylvania, Victor learned to ski all over again using a monoski – a single ski with a bucket seat designed for people with disabilities affecting their legs.

“You come out to ski and you can go on top of mountains,” says Marcel Kuonen, a former competitor on the Swiss National Ski Team who taught at the center. “You get to show an ability that somebody else doesn’t have. She was determined to get there.”

Victor saw a gold medal at the Paralympics as the perfect ending to her documentary. Kuonen gave her a three-year crash course on skiing, and Victor took bronze in the downhill at Salt Lake City in 2002. She got her gold in 2006, the same year she married Kuonen. They live in Park City.

The documentary has been put on hold until after her career as a skier and motivational speaker slows down. Her freshman year studying theatre at USC helps when sharing her story with businessmen, the military and students.

“I’ve always loved acting and telling a meaningful story,” Victor says. “My life story has turned into that. I go in and inspire people.”

 – Matthew Kredell