Paralympic Skier Danelle Umstead Is Blind and Has MS. She’s Won 3 Olympic Medals: ‘I Know What I’m Capable Of’ (Exclusive)

It was late October in 2010 when blind Paralympic skier Danelle Umstead first noticed something was wrong. She’d just finished an intense day of training and skiing, but her right foot was tingling, and she was having trouble taking off her ski boot.

“I thought I’d gotten a little frostbite,” she says. “But I was crying because it really hurt.” Her husband and ski guide, Rob Umstead, chalked it up to fatigue. But the tingling sensation persisted — and the next day, when she woke up, her right side was completely paralyzed. “From my rib cage all the way down to my toes on my right side — I couldn’t move,” recalls Umstead. “I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t sit up. I screamed to Rob, and he picked me up and took me to the emergency room. I thought I’d had a stroke.”

Over the next few months doctors searched for answers, at first telling Umstead she had transverse myelitis, a rare neurological condition in which the spine is inflamed. They prescribed steroids and physical therapy, but after several more episodes of numbness, Umstead was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. “It was a very hard journey,” recalls the now 54-year-old. “I had to learn how to walk again, how to run again — and I had to learn to ski again. And that’s when it really sunk in how MS had control over my body.”

Umstead is one of an estimated 1 million Americans suffering from multiple sclerosis, a chronic autoimmune disease that attacks the central nervous system, causing lesions on the brain and spinal cord — and leading to a wide range of symptoms, including dizziness, tingling, numbness, vision problems and fatigue, among others.

While there’s no cure for MS, there are currently more than 20 treatments available to help patients live longer, fuller lives.

“I’ve been practicing for over 25 years,” says Dr. Tanuja Chitnis, a neurologist at Mass General Brigham in Boston, “and in the early days, we had one or two treatments with efficacy rates in the 30 percent range. Now we can get up to 70% efficacy. Thankfully, it’s a very different state for patients. Doctors are getting better at using the high-efficacy treatments early on, and this is very important.”

For Umstead, life with MS has had its challenges, but she’s learned to adapt to her limitations and make the most of her opportunities. She and Rob went on to compete in three more Paralympics, capturing a career total of three bronze medals in the downhill and super combined.

“He’s my best friend,” says Umstead from the Park City, Utah, home she shares with Rob and their 18-year-old son Brocton, a high school senior. “Rob sometimes believes in me more than I believe in myself,” adds the Texas native, who competed on Dancing With the Stars in 2018 and later founded a nonprofit called Sisters in Sports Foundation for disabled female athletes.

“MS has taught me to redefine my strength,” says Umstead, who’s also built a thriving career as a motivational speaker. “I’ve learned to listen to my body, slow down, adjust and not fight.”

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The youngest of three daughters to­ Connie, a telemarketer, and Peter D’Aquanni, 80, president of an airline food distributor, Umstead grew up in Plano, Texas. When she was 5, her parents divorced, and she and her sisters lived with their mother.

“I learned at a very young age that I was going to go blind,” she says. “From the age of 2, I had these very thick Coke bottle glasses. I was running into things, falling off curbs, running into parked cars. I grew up feeling ashamed of my disease.”

At age 13, she was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa (RP) — a rare genetic condition that often starts in childhood, causing gradual deterioration of the retina and progressive vision loss. “I remember being in the doctor’s office and hearing this disease is incurable,” she says. “The only thing in my mind was, ‘You’re going to go blind.’ I felt like I was drowning.”

Umstead’s shame and grief over her disability haunted her for more than a decade. “It sealed the deal that I would never fit in,” she says. With no central vision in her right eye and correctable vision in her left eye, she struggled at school. “It was awful,” she says. She graduated in 1990 and found a job as a professional debt collector, eventually working her way up to manager. “They valued me as an employee, even as my eyes were deteriorating,” she says. “I thought life was handing me something wonderful for the first time.”

Sadly that all came to a sudden halt in 1996, when her mother was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer. “I would drive her to her chemo appointments,” recalls Umstead, “which I shouldn’t have been doing — and she would put a towel over her head and say, ‘Let me know when we get there.’ We lived in laughter and love and comedy. She was amazing.”

Connie died in 1999, and within a year, at age 28, Umstead had lost all of her vision. “I felt like losing my mom caused the deterioration of my vision at a rapid pace,” she says. “I was unable to drive. I lost my license, I lost my job — and my will to live. It all came crashing down.”

Hope — and the chance for a new life chapter — came a year later, in a way that she never could have imagined. Her father, whom she wasn’t especially close with (“He definitely isn’t warm and fuzzy”), invited her to go skiing with him in Taos, N.Mex.

“I was terrified,” says Umstead, recalling how her father skied down in front of her, shouting commands to “turn right!” or “turn left!” and to “get up! get up!” every time she fell. “It was the first time since I’d lost my mom and my vision that I felt pure joy,” she says. “I truly believe my father gave me life twice. That man led me to my husband, he led me to the Paralympics — and led me to who and where I am today.”

Less than a year later Umstead left the flats of Plano for the mountains of Taos, where, in February 2005, she met Rob, a former college ski racer and ski coach from Massachusetts, at a local bar after a day on the slopes.

They were wed three years later, on April 18, 2008, “at the top of the mountain in Snowbird, Utah,” says Umstead. “And literally from that day forward, he’s guided me in life and on the slopes. We started a career together from the day we married. We’ve learned so much about each other through our sport; I couldn’t imagine my life without him.”

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Two years later, they competed as a couple in the 2010 Paralympic Games in Vancouver — with Rob skiing ahead, calling out commands to Umstead through headsets in their helmets. “Everyone told me it was impossible,” she says. “I had just learned how to ski and race as an adult, and I was at the age where elite athletes retire.”

Incredibly they won two bronze medals in the downhill and super combined — and set their sights on gold in Sochi in 2014. Six months later, while they were training in Copper Mountain, Colo., Umstead experienced the tingling and paralysis on her right side that would lead to her MS diagnosis. “I was very, very scared of what was happening to me,” she recalls. “My body was something I’d always had control of.”

Following her diagnosis, she began taking medication — and in the years after that, she did her best to manage her symptoms and keep her athletic career on track. During the offseason away from the slopes, she would walk and run and work out in the gym regularly.

But when it came to the start of the ski season, “I had to relearn the skiing on my right side all over again because I wasn’t doing it every day, like walking and running,” says Umstead, who competed in three more Paralympic Games before retiring in 2024. “People didn’t see that part, what it took for me to get into that starting gate after MS. Each and every time.”

Over the past 10 years, she’s been on three different medications — until she stopped altogether during COVID because the treatments suppressed her immune system. She admits she’s “at a horrible crossroads” now because her insurance has changed, and her doctor isn’t on the new policy.

She’s had three significant flare-ups in the past five years (all treated with steroids) and says, “I’m just fatigued a lot more often than I have been in a long time. And my speech is starting to slow down a little bit.” But none of that has kept her from living the life she loves: maintaining her daily workouts — including stretching, walking and weight training — skiing with son Brocton, who’s headed for college in the fall, and traveling regularly for her motivational speaking engagements.

“Sometimes resilience means resting. Sometimes it means asking for help,” she says. “I’ve learned a lot from my MS — to step back and give myself time and permission to adapt.”