For Two-Sport Star Kendall Gretsch, A Much-Needed Break Precedes A Busy Push For Milano Cortina

Kendall Gretsch needed a break after wrapping up this past Para Nordic skiing season.

She had spent several months traveling across Europe, competing in one race after another as she prepared for next year’s Paralympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026. After being crowned the FIS women’s sit skiing world cup overall winner in March, she was ready for a rest.

As a two-sport Paralympic champ, Gretsch is accustomed to quickly transitioning from cross-country skiing in the winter to the triathlon in the summer. But she decided to change things up this spring and took three weeks off from training, which was an especially long break for the seven-time Paralympic medalist.

She spent it visiting her parents in Florida and relaxing in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

“For me, the bigger part is just the mental break. I think it can get really exhausting going from one season to the next,” said Gretsch, who celebrated her 33rd birthday on April 2. “So, just as important as the physical break I think is the mental break and just having that time to not think about training and not think about competing.”

Gretsch’s focus this year has been on getting ready for Milano Cortina, which would be her fifth consecutive Paralympics — counting both Summer and Winter Games. The native of Downers Grove, Illinois, is expected to compete for multiple medals in Italy.

In May, Gretsch was back on snow as she took part in an offseason training camp in Bend, Oregon. U.S. Paralympics Nordic Skiing holds the training camp in Bend every May, but she has never been able to attend it before this year because she’s typically competing in the triathlon by then.

“I’m going to do a couple of (triathlon) races this season, but it’s definitely not my focus for the year,” said Gretsch, who has won Paralympic gold medals in both Nordic skiing disciplines — biathlon and cross-country — as well as the triathlon.

With Para Nordic skiing as her top priority, Gretsch spent this past winter working on getting her body ready for the grind of competing in multiple cross-country skiing and biathlon events at the Winter Paralympics. She competed in world cup events throughout Europe and raced at all three world championships that were held for Para Nordic skiers this past season.

“I definitely feel more comfortable with the longer distance races, so this season I was really trying to focus on the shorter distances and just see, is there something that I can do in my warm-up to help prepare for those better or in training to do something differently there?” Gretsch said. “So, I would say that was definitely more of a focus was the shorter races.”

The highlight of Gretsch’s season came in early February at the IBU Para Biathlon World Championships in Pokljuka, Slovenia. She said she felt good heading into the first of the sport’s three world championships.

“We had been over in Europe for a little bit of time, so I was adjusted to the time zone, but it was still early enough into the racing that I wasn’t totally fatigued,” Gretsch said.

On Feb. 6, Gretsch opened the biathlon world championships by winning the gold medal in the 7.5-kilometer sprint competition with a time of 22 minutes, 30.1 seconds. Two days later, she earned her second gold when she won the sprint pursuit by more than one minute.

Gretsch was then flawless at the shooting range during her final race in Pokljuka on Feb. 9. She was the only female sit skier to hit all 20 of her shots in the 12.5K individual competition and crossed the finish line at 39:09 to win her third gold by two minutes.

“I definitely knew that that was a possibility to possibly win all three races, so it was definitely a goal for me,” Gretsch said. “I felt really good during those races, so I just kind of tried to take advantage of that and push myself as hard as I could.

“You always have it in the back of your mind that next year people could always get faster and improve on their shooting. And so (I was) trying to think about, ‘OK, well, is there anymore that I can get out of myself?’”

Gretsch is among an elite group of American athletes who has won a gold medal at both the Summer and Winter Paralympics. Oksana Masters, her U.S. Paralympics Nordic Skiing teammate and a 19-time medalist in Nordic skiing, cycling and rowing, is also in that group.

Gretsch won gold in the triathlon at the 2020 Tokyo Paralympics and then followed it up four years later by earning the silver in Paris. But she said she’s taking it easy when it comes to competing in the triathlon this summer.

It’s a strategy that she used leading up to her Paralympic debut at the 2018 Winter Games in PyeongChang, where she won her first two golds — one in the biathlon and the other in cross-country skiing.

“For the 2018 Games, I didn’t do triathlon at all that season,” Gretsch said. “I’ve always done some amount of cross-training for triathlon leading into the Games. I think it’s nice to only go to the (triathlon) races that I want to and really make Nordic the focus.”

At 33, Gretsch said she’s not necessarily thinking about how many more Paralympics will she compete in before retiring. That’s just not on her mind at the moment.

“I think you kind of have to take it one year at a time really and just see where you’re at and see is it something where you want to keep going for another year and or for another quad,” Gretsch said. “Thinking about four years at a time is really daunting, but if you just go one year at a time, I think that’s a better approach.”

Alex Abrams has written about Olympic and Paralympic sports for more than 15 years, including as a reporter for major newspapers in Florida, Arkansas and Oklahoma. He is a freelance contributor to USParaNordic.org on behalf of Red Line Editorial, Inc.