It’s 2016 and Alana Nichols is bobbing in the swell off the coast of Oceanside, California. She sits atop her waveski — a seat attached to a surfboard that you power with a kayak-style paddle — waiting for her heat to start in the U.S. Open Adaptive Surfing Championship.

There are no women in her category this year, and her all-male competition includes arguably the best waveskier the U.S. has ever seen, Jeff Munson, who Nichols describes as being able “to read waves in binary code.”

The waves at Oceanside are big that day. Heats start with surfers watching the swells come in and making split-second calculations about which ones will turn into a wave they can ride. Nichols starts paddling into her first wave, anticipating a central break that she could surf to the right, her strong side.

She drops in, picking up speed to outrun the break, cutting at the bottom and back up again, carving the face of the wave, making a couple more moves and finally getting spit out in the perfect spot to paddle back into the lineup to search for her next wave. For the whole 20 minutes, Nichols says, “I was in a flow state unlike any other. Every moment, I was actively making the right decisions.”

She nails one of her best surfing sessions, and in doing so, outscores Munson and the rest of the men to win the national championship. “I beat all the boys. It was like a dream come true,” she says.

Finding Community

For anyone else, the day would have been the high point of their athletic career, but Nichols didn’t even mention it in our first interview together. We talked about her Paralympic career, winning gold in both wheelchair basketball and alpine skiing. We talked about her sponsorships and advertising campaigns with major corporations like Toyota, Nike and Visa, and her work as a broadcaster for NBC’s Tokyo Paralympic coverage. We talked about her husband — Roy Tuscany, who runs the adaptive mountain sports nonprofit High Fives Foundation — and about mom life. When the conversation turned to surfing, it was mostly centered on her young son, Gunnar.

Photo by Kelllie Coughlin

Patty Cisneros Prevo, left, and Nichols celebrate the NWBA national championship in 2011. “She just has this skill that you can’t teach,” says Cisneros Prevo.

It wasn’t until I talked to Tuscany that I heard about the surfing national championship, but it’s not because Nichols doesn’t care about that day. You can still hear the joy and excitement in her voice when she talks about it. It’s just that her resume, sporting and otherwise, is extraordinary — there’s a lot to get into.

So, let’s start by saying Nichols is like that kid in middle school who could run faster and hit a baseball farther than everybody else, and do all the pullups in the presidential fitness test without even looking tired. In Nichols’ case, instead of becoming an assistant manager at Quiznos, that kid went pro in basketball, ski racing, surfing, and … sprint kayaking. “She is just so freakishly athletic,” says Patty Cisneros Prevo, a longtime friend and mentor of Nichols who competed with her on USA Wheelchair Basketball. “She just has this skill that you can’t teach.”

For Nichols, though, sports have always been about more than just skill and athleticism. They’ve been the backbone of her identity for her whole life. Nichols grew up in a nontraditional household. Her father was killed by a drunken driver when she was a baby, and she was raised by her grandparents in Farmington, New Mexico. “I know there was a kind of trauma involved in that, but I didn’t really acknowledge that until much later in life,” she says. “Sports came into my life to give me what I was missing at that time. Sports really were a safe place and a family of people that made me feel welcome and gave me a sense of belonging.”

In high school, Nichols was a two-sport athlete planning to play collegiate softball. “It was my ticket out of my small town,” she says. Then in 2000, at the age of 17, she broke her back while skiing in Colorado. Living in a small town in New Mexico, it took Nichols two years to find adaptive sports, a time she calls the lowest in her life.

The first sport she found was wheelchair basketball, and she threw herself in immediately. Nichols had been going to college in New Mexico, but quickly transferred to the University of Arizona so she could join their wheelchair basketball team. A year after she’d started playing, Nichols was already attending camps for the U.S. national team, and in 2004 she was selected as an alternate for the Athens Paralympic team.

It was in these early years that she first met Cisneros Prevo, who had been playing on the U.S. team since 1999. The two initially bonded over their shared love of jam bands, and in Cisneros Prevo, Nichols saw a role model. “[Cisneros Prevo was] actually doing the things that she loved, which included at the time, going to bars and flirting with guys. I needed to see that to believe that I could also be a whatever-you-want-to-call-normal 18-year-old girl in college. When I saw her be her best self, it was life-changing for me.”

Striking Gold

Nichols made her Paralympic debut in 2008 and took home a gold medal alongside Cisneros Prevo and the rest of USA women’s wheelchair basketball. Within months of returning from the Paralympics, she moved to Colorado so she could start training in Alpine skiing. Two years later, she competed at the Vancouver Winter Paralympics, winning golds in the downhill and giant slalom, a silver in the super-G and a bronze in the combined. She was the most decorated athlete at the 2010 Paralympics and became the first American woman to sit atop the podium in both the Summer and Winter games.

Her sudden, overwhelming success brought attention and opportunity. Nike reached out with a contract offer. “It was a no-brainer,” she says. Then, at a U.S. Ski Team fundraiser after the 2010 Paralympics, Nichols met a representative from Visa, the credit card giant, and they brought her on as a sponsored athlete. In the lead-up to Vancouver, Nichols had to throw hometown fundraisers to be able to afford training and travel to get to the games. Now, major corporations were asking her to be the face of their brands.

When I ask how she was able to draw the kind of A-list companies that, to that point, had rarely touched Paralympic athletes in their advertising and sponsorship deals, Nichols focuses on external factors. She credits the medals she won, and the fact that she competed in both winter and summer sports, for making her an easier sell for sponsors. Companies could consistently work with a single athlete like her, instead of having to wait for the once-every-four-year exposure window of a typical Olympic/Paralympic cycle.

But if you talk to anyone who’s close with Nichols, external factors are only part of the story. “Once you meet Alana, you’re just drawn to her,” says Cisneros Prevo. “I don’t know anyone who hasn’t been drawn to Alana and the energy she carries around for herself but also for other people.”

Russ Koble, who has worked with Nichols since 2017 as the senior manager for sports sponsorships at Toyota Motor Corporation, says Nichols makes the sponsor/athlete relationship easy for them. “She’s available. She’s a ball of energy. She is very authentic and genuine in who she is as a person, and she has passion that comes through in everything that she does,” he says.

Alana’s Gear Picks

Sunglasses: Smith Bobcat ($219)
Nichols is sponsored by Smith Optics and one of her favorite models is the Bobcat — made for mountain biking and snow sports — because they’re light and stay on your face no matter how fast you’re going. Plus, they’ve got style for everyday wear. Huge lenses give you goggle-like protection, and Smith’s Chromapop coating “just makes everything look fun,” she says.

Everyday Wheelchair: Hands On Concepts Rigid Series
($5,500-$6,500, depending on options)
This small, San Diego-based manufacturer makes custom titanium wheelchairs. Measuring, building and fitting is all done in collaboration with the chair builders. Everything is fixed, so you need to be sure you get your geometry right. But the lack of adjustability makes for a frame that’s superlight and durable. Nichols has had her latest frame for more than four years and says the only maintenance she’s had to do was removing hair from casters and replacing caster wheels and bearings.

Tires: Schwalbe RightRun ($22.50)
Lightweight, reasonably durable, high-pressure and affordable, Schwalbe’s entry-level court tires tick all the boxes for an everyday chair tire as well. Nichols says her favorite part is that the tires don’t mark up her hands or floors as much as other wheelchair tires. Available in 20- to 26-inch sizes.

Power Assist: Firefly 2.5 Electric Scooter Attachment ($2,649)
The Firefly is an attachable, trike-style power assist. Nichols got one recently and has been loving it. Situations that were a pain before in her manual chair — like navigating an outdoor food festival with her son on her lap and a drink in hand — are much more enjoyable with one-handed power and a big wheel up front to smooth out those dreaded extension cord covers.

Ski: Nissin Monoski
This monoski from Japanese manufacturer Nissin works for everyone from a world-class racer to a weekend warrior. Nichols likes it because it’s strong, responsive and offers a ton of adjustability, which is helpful whether you’re trying to optimize your performance or you’re a newbie still figuring out what positioning works best for you. Nichols often swaps out her skis, but one of her favorites is Head’s Joy, a women-specific all-mountain ski that’s extremely lightweight and nimble to turn.

Surfboard: Macski Waveski
Nichols rides a board custom-made by world-champion waveskier Ian Macleod. Fun sidenote: Waveskiing was started by nondisabled surfers who needed a way to keep their limbs out of the water while paddling into the shark-infested waters of South Africa. Nichols says her boards have progressively gotten more aggressive over the years, less stable but more agile. She named her current board the “party board” on account of its neon color scheme and pink flamingos decorating the base.

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The Polymath

In 2012, Nichols again competed in wheelchair basketball at the London Paralympics, where the USA women’s team took home a disappointing fourth place following a heartbreaking, controversial finish in the semifinal game.

After London, Nichols returned to skiing. During training for the 2014 Sochi Paralympics, she had a nasty crash on the slopes of Mt. Hood that left one arm in a sling for months. She recovered in time for Sochi, competed and took another hard fall in the high-speed super-G event. She was able to continue and won a silver medal in the downhill, but the crashes made her reassess her commitment to ski racing. “It just started to get really wearing — the crashes, the injuries and the surgeries,” she says. “It felt like, naturally, now it’s time to turn the page. What’s next?”

It didn’t take long for Nichols to find next. She traveled to Hawaii after the Sochi Games and went surfing for the first time with a local nonprofit called AccesSurf. Like with wheelchair basketball, she was hooked immediately and went all in on surfing. “I was like, great, now I gotta move to California,” she says. But as a brand ambassador for big-name companies, much of the value of her sponsorships was tied to the media frenzy that surrounds the Olympic/Paralympic games, and adaptive surfing wasn’t a Paralympic sport. So, she also had to figure out how to stay a Paralympic athlete.

At the same time Nichols started surfing, she had also met a sprint kayaking coach. Sprint kayaking, or paracanoe, happens to be a Paralympic event. Problem solved. Nichols threw herself into two brand-new sports at the same time. “I might have a splash of ADHD, like lack of focus,” she says. “But I also love a good challenge. … I wouldn’t say I mastered basketball. I wouldn’t say that I mastered skiing. I certainly wouldn’t say that I mastered sprint kayaking. But it was all about the chase of that [mastery]. I really wanted to get there.”

Trying new sports has always felt natural for Nichols — she describes it as being open to the flow of what life is throwing at her. “Her big thing is, just try,” says Tuscany. “That’s always been one of the coolest things that I’ve seen her do is whether it’s a dinner or a speaking engagement or whatever it is, it’s always just try. I think when you use that mentality, it opens up doors.”

Nichols says that the constant exposure to new challenges does make navigating them easier. “You get better at learning because you know you’re supposed to suck at something first,” she says. “Sucking at something is the first step to sort of being good at something.”

Unlike the rest of us, though, Nichols goes from sucking, to sort of good, to really good, to better than almost anyone else in the world in the blink of an eye. The second time Nichols went surfing, she won her division at Duke’s OceanFest, in Waikiki, Hawaii, one of the biggest contests on the adaptive surfing calendar, and a year later finished seventh in an otherwise all-male field at the International Surfing Association World Para Surfing Championship. Meanwhile, less than two years after picking up the sport, she qualified in sprint kayaking for her fifth Paralympics. The 2016 Rio Games would be her last as an athlete, but if anything, her life seemed to speed up from there.

Advocate, Mom And TV Commentator

Nichols now lives in Reno, Nevada, near where the High Fives Foundation is based, and streams in for an interview from her family home in New Mexico. Toward the end of our chat, Gunnar, now 3 1/2, runs into the room in Batman pajamas and proceeds to wipe Cheetos dust on the sleeve of Nichols’ cream-colored sweater. “Gunnar!” she says. “Are you eating Cheetos? It’s only 10:00 in the morning.” She wipes herself off, and after a brief discussion of the awesomeness of Batman, manages to shoo him out of the room. She handles it like someone who has plenty of experience with their child interrupting various work obligations.

Shortly after Gunnar was born, in 2019, Nichols was elected president of the Women’s Sports Foundation, a nonprofit founded in 1974 by tennis icon Billy Jean King to provide more opportunities for women and girls in sports and in life. Nichols had been on the WSF board of directors for six years, and her post as president put her in the rare position to lead discussions about equity and advancement from the perspective of a disabled female athlete who was also a new mom.

Nichols and Tuscany are both active parents with busy lives who travel a lot. Nichols has toted Gunnar cross-country countless times to foundation galas, advocacy events, surfing competitions, media obligations and just about everything else you can think of. It’s not easy, but she has a lot of experience to fall back on. “All those hard days, the never-ending amounts of stress I put my body under, kind of prepared me to be a mom,” she says.

One trip she didn’t take Gunnar on was to Tokyo and her sixth Paralympic Games, this time as a broadcaster for NBC. “I’m kind of cliche and a bit basic, because I’m an athlete who retired, tried her hand at and is still dabbling in broadcasting,” says Nichols. This might actually be true if Nichols was some nondisabled former football star. But television opportunities for female athletes have only started to open up in the past few years and are still nowhere near as common as they are for male athletes. Nichols, a disabled woman, appearing on live national broadcasts as a studio presence and sideline reporter for wheelchair basketball and rugby was groundbreaking for authentic disability representation.

As Nichols pursues her career and her mission to raise the profile of adaptive sports, she hopes society can start to move past the typical “overcoming disability” trope that anchors much of the storytelling in mainstream media. Nichols says it was only recently that she started to unpack the ableism that her own thoughts about wheelchair sports were rooted in. “It was very much, ‘Don’t feel bad for me. I’m playing wheelchair basketball — I’m doing all these cool things,’” she says.

It took years for Nichols to start moving past the mindset where physical accomplishment is the only path toward “normal.” As her perspective has broadened, Nichols has gotten more sophisticated in crafting her own narrative, whether in interviews for major publications like The New York Times or the Today Show website, or when giving a studio monologue on NBC. She tries to steer away from the superathlete narrative, instead highlighting both the challenges and the joys of her life as a disabled woman outside of sports. “I think that wheelchair sports and adaptive athletics are a great starting point for conversations around disability, but it’s one small aspect of the lived experience of so many individuals with disabilities,” she says. “For people with disabilities who are not elite athletes, I can see it being really frustrating that [sport is often] the only representation.”

Sharing the Stoke

One of Nichols’ best days since Gunnar was born came when he was about 3 years old. The family was vacationing on the west coast of Maui. Nichols and Tuscany were going to get in a quick surfing session while Gunnar played with a good family friend on the beach. But when they paddled out, Gunnar started screaming and crying. “He didn’t care that I was out there. He didn’t care that his dad was out there. He wanted to surf, and we left him on the beach,” she says.

Nichols and Tuscany kept paddling, knowing Gunnar would get over it soon enough. Meanwhile Gunnar was negotiating with the family friend, himself an experienced surfer, to take him out in the water. “The next thing you know, Roy and I are sitting in the lineup and here comes Gunnar paddling up with our friend,” she says. The friend got Gunnar on a few waves and soon the blonde toddler was grinning and laughing. “He just had such a good time,” she says. “Something about the fact that he decided on his own what he wanted to do and figured out a way to make it happen, … it made my whole life.”

For Nichols, seeing how catching a wave — or skiing a new run, or balling on the court with your friends — can light up a person’s life has given her purpose as she continues to flow into new phases of her own life. These days, much of her work outside of being a mom revolves around growing the adaptive sports scene. Nichols is on the athletes’ commission for the 2028 Los Angeles Games, where she hopes Paralympic sport can make the jump to prime time, like it did in Britain when London hosted the 2012 Games.

She’s also on the board of the International Surfing Association, where’s she’s active in starting a professional adaptive tour and making surfing a Paralympic event. She still competes when her busy schedule allows. Every year there are new events and riders, a growing community to share the stoke with. “It’s so cool to watch [a sport] that’s growing up right before your eyes, kind of like a toddler,” she says.