For two weeks at the Paralympic village, I saw a blueprint for what it looks like when accessibility is the starting point.
Arriving at the Paralympic Village in Milan was a sigh of relief. I spent a week in the city prior to the Milano Cortina 2026 Paralympic Winter Games, speeding across town, checking out venues in advance, planning which athletes I wanted to interview, and eating a lot of gelato.
As a wheelchair user, my week was also spent navigating unfamiliar surfaces and bumpy cobblestone streets that had me awkwardly smiling at strangers as my body bounced up and down. When I got to the village, seeing its long, smooth ramps, I exhaled. What awaited me inside was so much bigger than my ramp-shaped heart could have ever imagined. The Milano Cortina 2026 Paralympic Winter Games span three villages across northern Italy: Milan, Cortina d’Ampezzo, and Predazzo, each serving as home base for the hundreds of athletes who travel from across the world to compete. For the duration of the Games, the village is where they sleep, eat, recover, and prepare. It is, in many ways, a city within a city — self-contained, temporary, and built entirely around the needs of its residents. Upon showing my press credential, my tour guide met me and showed me around the complex, which houses around 1,500 athletes. We moved through the common area, partner activations, the dining hall, and the fitness center. As she guided me, I couldn't help but notice the absence of small steps, a huge change from navigating curb cuts, and little to no slope between surfaces. Laughter rose from a group of athletes having lunch outside, where a wheelchair-using Paralympian had pulled directly underneath the picnic table, something most picnic tables make impossible with their fixed benches and closed ends. Inside, a sensory-free room offered dim lighting and quiet for anyone who needed it. And to top it all off, there was Ottobock, a cost-free center open twelve hours a day where anyone with a Paralympic credential could get their prosthetic or wheelchair repaired on the spot. A relieving, almost dream-like detail for anyone who knows that back home in the U.S., wheelchair repairs can cost tens of thousands of dollars and take months. Sitting in front of the Paralympic agitos at the center of the Village, surrounded by so many disabled people, it quickly became clear that I had stepped into something rare. This wasn't just a real-life community — it was a working prototype of an accessibility utopia. I mean, my tour guide even enthusiastically showed me where the condoms for the athletes were stocked. I wasn’t the only one who noticed this life in the Village. For Nordic skier Erin Martin, a full-time wheelchair user who stayed in the Predazzo village, it was rare to enter spaces without feeling like an outlier. Instead, she felt like the norm. “This may seem small, but often shared laundry facilities have tall, stacked, front-loading machines or big, top-loading machines. At the Village, the athlete laundry machines were front-loading, not stacked, and sitting directly on the ground,” she said. “During peak laundry hours, it was so nice to know that whatever machine opened up, I'd be able to use it on my own.” It’s in the small details where access and freedom live. Martin described how upon entering most spaces back home, she “almost always” enters them with a lot of uncertainty and questions. “Will I be able to get inside? Is there a bathroom that I can use? Can I go everywhere I need to once I'm inside? That moment of worry that I usually have wasn't there when I entered the Paralympic Village,” she said. That feeling didn’t happen by accident. Federica Sechi, one of the village’s designers and organizers, said that accessibility wasn’t an afterthought when designing – it was the starting point. From the beginning, Sechi says that the village design ensured to follow Italian accessibility standards. This early commitment meant that even during the Olympics, accessibility was present. As a result, “only minimal adjustments were required in the transition between the Olympic and Paralympic Games, since accessibility had been integrated from the very beginning,” she said. But integration from the outset was only part of it. An internal accessibility team with disabled athletes and consultants oversaw every project and key decision from day one. “They were also involved in testing all areas once completed, with the support of dedicated Paralympic experts, to ensure that even the smallest details met the required standards,” she said. What Sechi is describing is not just a small operational difference, but it is a fundamentally different act of imagination. In common architecture, the baseline assumption is a nondisabled body, and everything else is retrofitted around that. A ramp gets added at the end, doorways are widened, and a bathroom is made accessible. At the Village, this gets flipped on its head. It starts with the question: who is going to be here, and what do all of their bodies need? This requires you to first be able to picture disabled people as the default user living in a space, not the exception. And that's rare enough that when Martin experienced it, she noticed it in the laundry machines. Though not every detail was perfect, other athletes shared varying experiences of accessibility at the other villages located in the Italian Alps. But, even its limits proved the larger point. If even a space designed from the ground up for disabled people still had room to grow, the gap between the village and the world outside its gates becomes impossible to ignore. The village is proof that this is possible — that when disabled people are centered from the very beginning, something extraordinary gets built. Yet, it exists within a perimeter fence. And most of the world doesn't. For Brenna Huckaby, a Paralympic snowboarder competing in Cortina, and co-founder of Culxtured, a media collective aimed at changing how the world views para sport, the answer is clear. “The Paralympics are unique. We are a group of disabled people who push the limits of the human body not just because of who we are individually but because we have access to equipment to allow us to push our limits,” she said. “I can walk the distances I can walk because I have top-of-the-line prosthetics. I can snowboard as well as I can because I have access to top-of-the-line prosthetics. This isn’t to say ‘oh, they can only do it because they have xyz.’ It’s to say ‘everyone should have access to xyz because this is what they have the ability to access with xyz.’” The village ended up being that access made real. A working model of what becomes possible when the right equipment, the right infrastructure, and the right imagination are all in the same place at the same time. It existed for two weeks. And as a blueprint for what an accessible future could look like, it can be permanent anywhere. “We should be highlighting our stories because we are a reflection of what’s possible with disability accommodations and how everyone benefits from them,” Huckaby said.
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