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EMMA ARCHIBALD
Sport: Para Cross-Country Skiing
Event Category: Women’s Standing
Age: 22
Hometown: Fall River, NS
Residence: Ottawa
Local Club: University of Ottawa Gee-Gees
Disability: Amniotic Band Syndrome (missing fingers & toes)
First Paralympics
Instagram: @emmaarchie_
By Keiran Gorsky
Cruising on fresh-fallen snow, Emma Archibald and the Canadian para-nordic team could hardly have asked for a more serene setting before the main event. Skiers were greeted with clear skies and a pleasant dearth of distractions in the tiny Austrian village of Obertilliach for their pre-Paralympic training camp.
Of course, not all diversions are so unwelcome. Nestled between the Gailtal and Carnic Alps, Archibald was hoping to stumble across a herd of shaggy highland cattle. On one particularly long training day, she got her wish.
“I’ve been looking for those guys since we got here, and I finally found them,” laughed the 22-year-old University of Ottawa Gee-Gee. “We were able to ski right up to them, so that was pretty cute. I might have given a little pet too.”
It’s been a long journey here for the only Nova Scotian competing at these Paralympics. For the ultra-athletic Archibald, it was an unexpected challenge to pin down a sport that would accommodate her. The Fall River, NS native was born with Amniotic Band Syndrome, leaving her with missing digits on both hands and her right foot.
That didn’t stop her competing and succeeding against able-bodied competition all throughout her childhood. Archibald enjoyed soccer, basketball, flag football and track and field growing up.
She even insisted on playing the piano when she was little.
“Emma, really? You’re missing fingers. Is there not another musical instrument you want to play?” her father Stephen Archibald remembered thinking. “That’s just who she is, you know, there’s nothing [she wouldn’t do].”
Archibald will attest to having grown up in an intensely supportive environment. Looking back on her childhood, though, she wonders if she was a little too intent on tailoring herself to her circumstances.
Before embarking on that long road to the Paralympics – before she even learned to cross-country ski – Archibald remembers a trip to Ecuador she made with a contingent from her church where she volunteered at a children’s camp.
When the kids saw Emma, with her missing fingers and toes, they greeted her with the utmost warmth and kindness.
“‘Oh my gosh, that’s so cool,’” Archibald recalled them saying. “Seeing their reactions kind of made me question why I wasn’t celebrating the disability itself.”
Very suddenly, it occurred to Archibald that “fitting in” didn’t have to be the be-all and end-all. Archibald still speaks of that trip in glowing terms – she may yet return there as a volunteer when she completes her nursing degree in the spring. When she got back home close to six-and-a-half years ago, she did so with a changed self-image.
It was the perfect time in her life for her mother, Julie Archibald, to spot a bulletin board post advertising a Paralympic Search event at the Canada Games Centre in Halifax. Roughly equivalent to an RBC Training Ground event, Emma completed a series of isolated fitness tests in hopes of classifying for a late-entry sport. As it turned out, she was identified for seven.
Skiing was not, in fact, her first choice. For all her girlhood success in summer sports, keeping herself balanced in skates and ski boots was another thing entirely. Her preference was her long-held love – track-and-field.
Archibald had to go to Montreal to get classified. She was optimistic going in – officials at the Para Search made it sound like a done deal. But after a long day of muscular, range-of-motion and movement tests, they informed her that she wouldn’t be able to classify.
“I wasn’t missing enough of my feet,” Archibald explained.
Stephen remembers the beginnings of tears in her eyes, just from the suddenness of it all. It seemed to Archibald a bitter confirmation she wasn’t “disabled enough” for para sport. It all came as quite a shock.
But she wasn’t giving up that easily. Cross-country skiing was her next pick, even though Archibald had never done it before. She prepared for a development camp in Canmore with tempered expectations, knowing another classification test could sink her.
Things were different this time. Being unable to push off with her ski poles, Archibald was able to classify in the LW5/7 standing category. It didn’t come so naturally to her as the summer sports she excelled at as a child.
“They’re kind of like sneakers,” she described cross-country ski boots.
That is, they don’t hug your feet like downhill skis. Cross-country skis are long, straight and narrow. When she put them on, she struggled mightily to keep her balance. Any movement threatened to plunge her into the snow.
“I think I had grown up being so natural at so many different sports, so then this wasn’t what I found myself. I found myself very frustrated because I was like, ‘What?’” she said.
Luckily, she wasn’t the only late starter in her early career. When she enrolled at the University of Ottawa, a decision partly informed by their active nordic ski team, Archibald found herself surrounded by teammates of varying abilities. Some had been skiing all their lives and some had only just begun.
It was the ideal environment in which to hone her craft. Instead of discouraging her, the challenge emboldened Archibald to blaze new trails. Each incremental improvement strengthened her resolve to keep going.
Archibald got another boost in her development when she and Gee-Gees coach Sheila Kealey received a Petro-Canada Fuelling Athlete and Coaching Excellence grant.
Read More: No poles, no problem for para-nordic skier Emma Archibald
On top of ironing out her technique, part of the process in pushing for the top was learning to dial it back. In Archibald’s first year, far too frequently, she would insist on pushing through sickness or intense discomfort even if it made her training utterly ineffective. Gradually, she learned to recognize when she wasn’t feeling 100%.
“If either the determination or joy wasn’t there, I would have stopped,” she underlined. “But I just kept growing and growing.”
Archibald went on to get her international classification after her second Paralympic trial. Her two gold medals at the 2023 Canada Games showed just how far she had come in such a short period of time. She went on to make her World Cup debut in January of 2024 – coincidentally, in Italy.
Having narrowly avoided her roommate’s cold before escaping to Austria, Archibald has had the freedom to settle down in tiny Obertilliach, where hardy highland cattle hardly seem to notice the seasons passing by, let alone the imminent arrival of the Milano Cortina 2026 Paralympic Winter Games. When Archibald actually reflects on the fact it’s been nearly seven years since that Search event in Halifax, she can barely believe it.
“That’s crazy,” she laughed on the eve of her Paralympic debut in Val di Fiemme.
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