The games aren’t over yet.
TheWinter Paralympics kick off in Milan, Italy on Friday, March 6 — and New York area locals are competing.
Three of those taking part are New Jersey-born paralympic sled hockey players Josh Pauls, 33, from South Plainfield — the seven-time world champion team captain and defenseman — and his mentee Jack Wallace, 27.
They will be joined by Caldwell, NJ, native and paralympic alpine ski racer Kelsey O’Driscoll, 32, as well as 229 other athletes who have impairments and disabilities who are competing on Team USA.
Pauls and Wallace have a long-standing hockey bromance, having played for the same youth adaptive ice hockey team in Woodbridge, NJ, as kids.
Wallace credits the team captain with inspiring him after a tragic accident sidelined his original dream of making it to the NFL. He lost his right leg at age 10 in a boating accident while water skiing.
“[Pauls] is the reason I got into sled hockey,” Wallace, who also dreamed of playing for the New Jersey Devils as a kid, told The Post Tuesday.
“He’s been a massive role model and constant pillar for USA hockey and the sled team. I got to play a couple games with him before he aged out of our children’s youth league,” Wallace recalled.
Their full-contact sport involves players sitting in custom-fitted, double-bladed sleds and using two short hockey sticks with metal picks on one end to propel forward and blades on the other to pass and shoot the puck.
Before they get on the ice both players have their rituals.
Pauls has a superstition where he points a Mr. Potato Head toward the opposing team’s locker room before every game.
Wallace, a defenseman, gets in the zone with mellow music from singer and rapper Jon Bellion, he says, “to keep me in the zone and let the nerves be at ease.”
Wallace was born in Suffern, NY, and raised in Franklin Lakes, NJ. After his accident, he spent a year in and out of the hospital and in rehabilitation programs while getting his first prosthetic.
A camp counselor at a program for children with disabilities, Camp No Limits in Connecticut, introduced him to sled hockey and helped him find a team back.
There, he first met Pauls, who was born with a condition called tibial hemimelia. That meant he had neither of his tibia bones, more commonly known as the shin bone, leading him to have his legs amputated above the knee when he was 10 months old.
Like Wallace, Pauls discovered sled hockey at age 10. By age 15, in 2008, he had joined the US National Sled Hockey Team. He was the youngest member of the team when they won a world championship in the Czech Republic a year later.
Pauls recalled Wallace’s determination from an early age.
“Jack started playing on that team when he was first injured, being teammates on the US team is a cool, full circle moment,” he said.
Wallce joined the US sled hockey team ten years after Pauls in 2018 and landed his first gold medal that year, before going on to win two World Championships in 2019 and 2022.
He and Wallace may play nice on the ice, but they have a heated rivalry when it comes to one longstanding Jersey food fight — whether to call breakfast sandwich meat Pork Roll or Taylor Ham.
“I’m a pork roll guy. It’s the one thing me and Jack [Wallace] don’t agree about. I believe he’s a Taylor ham guy,” Pauls told The Post.
Win or lose, Pauls, whose grandfather was born outside of Naples, Italy, says he’s going to be celebrating in Italy, family style.
“I’m a big pizza and pasta guy,” he said.
Meanwhile O’Driscoll, 32, grew up skiing on Gore Mountain, in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York with big dreams of competing in the Olympics, but as a track and field athlete.
However, a battle with asthma made running a challenge. She kept skiing and, in summers, relished surfing in the Jersey Shore, telling The Post, she’s just at home riding the waves as she is skiing the slopes.
“My favorite break now is Pitney Ave in Spring Lake,” she told The Post. In 2019, she graduated from the State University of New York Adirondack as a registered nurse.
However, disaster struck in 2021 while sledding with family. O’Driscoll sustained spinal fractures which left permanent damage. She had to relearn how to walk — and ski, her cherished winter pastime. But she never gave up.
In 2024, she traveled to Chile to train with adaptive ski racers and began training for the 2026 Paralympics —her first time in the big games.
On February, 16 she was officially called to compete in Cortina. “I’ve been dreaming of going to the games since 2002 when I was in second grade,” she shared on Instagram after the good news.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: nypost.com
