Scaling a Different Summit: Emanuel Perathoner’s Paralympic Moment
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There were many headlines from this year’s Winter Paralympics in Milan-Cortina. Oksana Masters joined the twenty-medal club with a five-medal haul, the Aigner siblings delivered nine medals for Austria, and Russia’s return under its own flag drew much controversy. For the host nation, however, the defining story proved to be the exploits of Emanuel Perathoner.
A native of Bolzano, a city just a two-hour drive from Cortina, Perathoner completed the double in the men’s LL2 banked slalom and LL2 snowboard cross, becoming the first male snowboarder to win multiple gold medals at a single Games since the sport’s debut in 2014. If Federica Brignone was the poster figure of the Winter Games, with golds in the Super-G and giant slalom, then Perathoner was her Paralympic counterpart. It was no surprise, therefore, when he was chosen to be Italy’s flag bearer for the closing ceremony.
Like Brignone, whose participation at Milan-Cortina had been in doubt after tearing her ACL and suffering a fracture of her tibial plateau at the national championships in April last year, Perathoner had also seen his Olympic ambitions derailed by a crash. But whilst Brignone summoned a miraculous recovery in time to reach the summit of her sport at her home Games, Perathoner’s training accident in 2021 was severe enough to end any hope he harboured of competing at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.
Prior to his accident, Perathoner had represented Italy on the Olympic rather than the Paralympic stage and after competing at the Olympics in Pyeongchang in 2018, he went on to win world bronze in snowboard cross the following year.,But, the training accident where he suffered a fractured tibial plateau, like Brignone, ultimately led to a left knee replacement, and with it, his reinvention as a para athlete.
That said, thoughts of returning to the sport in this new capacity were initially far from his mind. First, he had to learn how to walk again; then came marriage to his partner Amelia, alongside uncertainty over whether a future in para sport was even feasible.
Only a few months after tying the knot in the Pyrenees, however, Perathoner made his bow in para competition in late 2022 and quickly established himself as the dominant force in the sport, racking up 15 World Cup wins and completing the double at the World Championships in the lead-up to his home Games.
Amid this pressure, the hometown hero delivered, winning double gold just five days apart. Competing as the second athlete in history to appear at both the Winter Olympics and Winter Paralympics, Perathoner’s triumph marked a full-circle moment in what had become a second life as an athlete — one made all the more meaningful by the journey that preceded it.
Whilst his story is unique in its construction, Perathoner himself was keen to highlight that resilience is the theme of para sport: “Paralympic athletes have way more stories behind them than maybe an able-bodied athlete”. This is a sentiment that Emanuel Perathoner fully encapsulated over the course of a few magical days in Cortina.