Paralympian Brenna Huckaby launches 'Culxtured' to empower athletes to share their personal narratives

Paralympian snowboarder Brenna Huckaby is looking to shred on the mountain while shedding light on the Paralympic Games off the mountain. Huckaby has taken a huge step forward in the mission to create more awareness surrounding both her sport of Para Snowboarding and the Paralympics as a whole.

Despite the ongoing growth of the Games over the last few years, there are many people who either don't know that the Paralympic Games follow the Olympics every four years or are not interested for whatever reason. Huckaby is making it a mission of sorts to get new eyes watching and also highlight the talent and athleticism of these athletes.

Huckaby was raised in Louisiana where she excelled at gymnastics. At 13 years old she was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, a form of bone cancer, leading to an amputation and chemotherapy. Her life took an unexpected turn when she discovered snowboarding during a rehabilitation ski trip in Utah. Inspired by her newfound passion, Huckaby and her mother relocated to Utah, where she joined the U.S. National Snowboarding Team, forgoing her initial plans for a college scholarship. Her decision paid off, as Huckaby went on to become a dominant force in Paralympic snowboarding, winning multiple gold medals.

"I fell in love with snowboarding right then and there," she said in an exclusive interview. "It gave me the excitement that gymnastics gave me, and I hadn't found that in that year after my amputation, I tried running and swimming and just the traditional amputee sports, and none of them really did anything for me until I found snowboarding. So after that trip, I felt like my old self again. I had this excitement and this new possibility of where life could go."

Huckaby got her first glimpse of the Paralympic Games back in 2012 when she visited the London Olympic Games as a part of a Make-A-Wish trip. She remembers asking about the Paralympics and whether or not people were interested. She got the token line from staff and journalists there that everyone was just as excited about as the Olympic Games, but even as a child Huckaby could see the difference in coverage, and spectacle between the Olympic Games and the Paralympic Games.

"If I say, it feels embarrassing to say that I want to be a Paralympian because it feels like nobody cares," she remembers from that time. "Everybody cares'. I'm like, yeah, but I've never seen it. I don't see athletes. I don't see sports. So what? It's not making sense, that people care about it when there's no hype around it. So going from that mindset in 2012 which was also one of the bigger pivotal moments in Paralympic history, really shaped the landscape for growth in both television, but also just making the Paralympics something cool. So going from that to what we just saw in Paris, it feels like night and day. Obviously, there's still growth to be had. The hype is not where it should be or could be, but it still has grown leaps and bounds, which I think is really, really cool. Yeah, I think 15 million people watched the Paralympics this games, which is just amazing."

Huckaby and a few of her fellow Paralympians are working to ensure that Paralympic athletes get the coverage in the media that they deserve. She, along with Dani Aravich, Chuck Aoki, and Ryan Neiswender, have created Culxtured.com as a way to let athletes tell their own stories. Huckaby feels that many times the stories of these athletes are focused on the disabilities and not the athleticism or other stories surrounding their sport.

"It would be really cool to see more media coverage over the athleticism of the athletes, and less about the disability is another thing I say a lot," she said. "Obviously, we have some kind of difficult story. We're disabled, even if you were born with it, of course, you overcame something, duh, move on. There are so many more stories within each athlete that maybe they want to tell, maybe they don't, but just having the opportunity to tell those stories could go so much further in the growth of Paralympians. So that's my hope, is that we see more stories that the athletes want to tell, not the stories that these news outlets think other people want to hear."

The goals of this site are to allow fans to be able to find event schedules, find athletes to watch, and allow athletes to tell their personal stories. Huckaby wants athletes to have agency over their stories. The site just began in October but already they are covering a big majority of para-sports. Huckaby is urging fans to head to the Culxtured Instagram page to stay up to date on all the happenings in para-sports around the world.

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