There are only 25 TetraSkis in the world and now there’s one in Vermont, thanks to years of fundraising led by Green Mountain Adaptive Sports and the Northeast Disabled Athletic Association.
A TetraSki is a sit-ski designed for athletes with complex disabilities. Skiers control their turns and speed with a joystick or a “sip and puff” mouthpiece. It’s a lot like steering a wheelchair down the mountain.
Vermont skier Chuck Petitpas recently raced at the international TetraSki championship in Utah. Before the competition, University of Vermont Community News Service reporter Henry Miller hit the slopes with Petitpas to see the TetraSki in action.
This story was produced for the ear. We highly recommend listening to the audio. We’ve also provided a transcript below.
Chuck Petitpas: Got snowy conditions. I think it's about 32 degrees. And havin’ a blast.
My name is Chuck Petitpas, and I’m here on a TetraSki on Stowe Mountain.
A friend of mine, Dave Whalen, found out about the TetraSki. I had no idea it even existed. But it’s exactly what I was hoping for.
I was like, “Man, if I could just get a joystick controlled thing that went down, I could ski.” And come to find out that that thing exists finally. Because I had tried skiing many years ago, and you're like just basically in a bucket, right? And you’re not really controlling the thing. They're just tethering you, and it's a glorified sled ride.
This, on the other hand, is you're steering the thing. You're skiing.
It's $40,000 for the ski. So we had to do a huge fundraiser to get it.
But it's here now, and people are in it. And it's people with a wide variety of disabilities. Like I have muscular dystrophy, a form of it, but there's people with stroke, who are recovering from stroke. Cerebral palsy. So very complex disabilities. None of us were able to ski before. And now we're skiing.
It’s been amazing, and I can’t wait to get out to Utah and compete. And do gates again.
And this thing's got a sip and puff on it too. So that's a little straw that will allow you to control it. I think Dave Whalen used it during the race. Which is amazing. This guy’s controlling this — I don’t know how much the thing weighs, it’s probably like 300 pounds. And you in it. It’s several hundred pounds coming down the mountain. And this guy’s controlling it with a straw. It’s amazing. And I think people are having a blast with it.
And it's, you know, all my friends and family are like, "I can't believe you go skiing now." And it's like, "Yeah, I go skiing now."
This story comes from a collaboration between Vermont Public and the Community News Service, a University of Vermont journalism internship. Production support by Kelsey Tolchin-Kupferer.
