Spencer Wood still remembers how he felt when his parents sat him down in fourth grade and revealed he had a stroke in the womb.
“It was emotional, but it wasn’t a ‘Why Me?’ kind of attitude,” the now 25-year-old Vermonter said. “It was, ‘Wow, it just helps explain a lot.’”
Growing up in Pittsfield, Wood considered himself to be no different from any other boy. But by the time he was a catcher for a Mighty Mites baseball team, he inexplicably flailed his hand every time a pitch sped his way.
“It felt good to have an answer,” Wood said of learning about the stroke that impaired the muscles and movement on the right side of his body. “But even when I did know, I never once used it as an excuse to not do something. I still tried everything.”
That’s why, after sampling baseball, soccer and lacrosse, Wood turned to skiing and became so talented, he’s now in Beijing, China, as the sole Vermont athlete at the 2022 Paralympics.
Wood was born Jan. 17, 1997 — the same month and day as his famed direct ancestor Benjamin Franklin — to parents who worked as ski instructors at the Killington resort.
“I’m so fortunate to never remember learning how to ski — I’ve just remembered always skiing and ripping and going as fast as I can,” he said.
Wood’s stroke tightened his Achilles tendon, which he stretched with help from a brace he realized was similar to a ski boot. But for all his early familiarity with the sport, he did not understand how one competed in it when his older sister talked about speeding down a course while weaving around poles.
“What the heck are gates?” he wondered at the time. “I thought they were like fence posts, and that didn’t seem very fun.”
Then Wood tried it himself. Racing by age 5, Wood skied weekends as his parents worked, then added Friday runs in eighth grade before enrolling at the Killington Mountain School the following winter and eventually landing at the 2018 Winter Games in PyeongChang, South Korea.
“I couldn’t relax because I was thrilled to be there,” he said of the latter event, “so I got two or three hours of sleep every night and couldn’t execute at my highest performance.”
But that was then. Wood has since graduated from the University of Colorado, prepared at that state’s U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Training Center and National Sports Center for the Disabled, and worked with a sports psychologist who suggested he try something new every day.
“Like water droplets at the end of the month, end of the year, you’ve got a huge bucket full of water,” the Vermonter said in a recent TeamUSA.org profile. “It’s called plus one. What’s the plus one that you’re working on that nobody else is?”
Now finishing on the winners’ podium at Para Alpine Skiing World Cup events, Wood has arrived at the Beijing Paralympics brimming with confidence.
“It’s uncanny how calm and collected I am,” he said in a phone interview.
Wood credits that, in part, to advice he received from three-time Olympian Andrew Weibrecht as the two eyed a wavy Killington World Cup racecourse.
“It’s just lefts and rights, that’s all,” Wood recalled Weibrecht saying. “Everything else changes, but that doesn’t.”
And so Wood is filtering out all extraneous thoughts of NBC’s Paralympic coverage and a family watch party set for Friday night when he competes in the downhill before moving on to the super-G, super combined and slalom.
“I only care about one thing, and that’s getting to the bottom faster than anybody else.”
Then again, Wood also wants to stop and seize the moment.
“Today kicked off a journey a lifetime in the making,” he posted on Instagram. “I’m blessed to continue finding love for this sport and the people I share it with. The skis flat on the snow, the wind in my face and the feeling in my gut that my time is now.”
Wood once considered the word “stroke” as something that happened to him. Today he takes hold and embraces it every time he hits the slope.
“You have this white canvas that you can paint a stroke wherever you want,” he said. “It’s all you, your own power. You pull all those forces and all that energy out of the skiing. I’ve never done another activity that, with each stroke you make, your grin gets bigger and bigger and bigger.”
