Saylor O'Brien

Quick Facts

• Specialty: Para Alpine Skiing (Sitting) — LW12-1 Classification
• Born with Spina Bifida; began training with the National Ability Center High Performance Alpine Team in Park City, Utah at age 13 in 2017
• U.S. Ski & Snowboard Adaptive Athlete of the Year, 2024–25 season
• Sisters in Sports athlete
• Hobbies include acrylic painting, rock climbing, sled hockey and connecting with the broader adaptive sports community

Biographical Information

Saylor O'Brien's relationship with skiing began at age four, growing up in Woodland, Utah, with the Wasatch Range as her backyard. Born with Spina Bifida — a congenital neural tube defect in which the spinal cord does not fully develop, resulting in varying degrees of paralysis and loss of sensation below the affected vertebrae — she has navigated the world from a sit-ski since childhood. The sport arrived early, the commitment arrived later, and the crystallizing moment came when she was 10 years old: watching Paralympic ski racing for the first time and recognizing, with the clarity that sometimes only a child has, that this was exactly what she was meant to do.

In 2017, at age 13, O'Brien began training with the National Ability Center's High Performance Alpine Team in Park City, Utah — one of the most rigorous adaptive ski development programs in the country. She also attended the Picabo Street Academy, a ski-focused school in Park City named for Olympic gold medalist Picabo Street, and graduated in 2020. The environment placed her within a community of elite competitive skiers from an early age, and her technical development reflected it.

She joined the U.S. Para Alpine Ski Team in 2022. The following year, at the 2023 FIS Alpine Skiing World Championships in Veysonnaz, Switzerland, O'Brien earned silver and bronze medals in slalom and giant slalom d in the LW12-1 women's sitting division — two podium finishes at her first world championships, announcing her arrival on the international stage with unmistakable force. She has continued to build, claiming more world cup podiums and U.S. national championship titles across her career and winning the U.S. Ski & Snowboard Adaptive Athlete of the Year award for the 2024–25 season. The 2024–25 season also brought a first world cup victory, in downhill, along with three additional international podiums.

Away from racing, O'Brien serves as a Sisters in Sports athlete — a program that connects women athletes with disabilities to one another, to resources and to the confidence that sustained athletic engagement builds. She is deliberate about using her platform to challenge the assumptions made about what people with disabilities can achieve and to demonstrate through action, not argument, that those assumptions are wrong.

World Championships Experience

• Most recent: 2023
• Years of Participation: 2023
• Medals: 2 (bronze)
• Bronze - 2023 (super-G, alpine combined)