From Milano Cortina: What strikes you first about Lauren Parker's story is not the medals, though there are plenty of those. It is the sheer audacity of the timeline. Less than a year ago, the Newcastle triathlete had never stood on a pair of skis. This Friday, she will line up at the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Paralympics, competing across six events in cross-country skiing and biathlon.
Parker, 37, arrives in Italy as one of Australia's most decorated Paralympic athletes. At the Paris 2024 Summer Games, she claimed two gold medals and a silver across the triathlon, road race, and individual time trial in the H3 hand-cycling category. A silver at Tokyo 2020 sits alongside those. Now she is chasing a different kind of glory entirely, on snow, in disciplines she only discovered existed as a realistic option for her a matter of months ago.
"It's happened so fast, and I've put in a lot of hard work, and I've had to learn a lot of skills really quickly," Parker told ABC NSW Mornings. "I'm just so excited and so happy that I was able to get the job done. I'm still learning every part of this, and I've been enjoying that challenge."
The path to Milan began with a conversation. A close friend affiliated with Snow Australia approached Parker and suggested she might have potential in cross-country skiing, and that qualification for the Paralympics was not out of reach. For someone with Parker's competitive instincts, that was all the invitation she needed.
"When someone dangles that in my face, I'm always up for the challenge," she said.
The learning curve has been steep by any measure. Cross-country skiing in the Paralympic format covers sprint distances of 2.5 kilometres through to 10 and 20 kilometre races, as well as team relay events. Biathlon adds a target-shooting component, requiring athletes to manage their heart rate and breathing before shouldering a rifle and firing at small targets. Parker fired a rifle for the first time just two days before her debut competition in Canada in December. She will contest all three biathlon disciplines and all three cross-country events in Milan.
Three-time Paralympic medallist Christie Dawes, now a presenter with ABC, offered some useful context for why the transition has worked as well as it has. "The winter events she's competing in have a similar action to wheelchair racing, which she does as one of her legs in the triathlon," Dawes said. "I'm so proud of her, doing the double. The Winter and the Summer Games; it's not unheard of, but it is rare for Australians."
Parker will be only the eighth Australian to compete at both the Summer and Winter Paralympics, a rare distinction that speaks to the physical versatility and mental resilience required to perform at the elite level across two entirely different sporting codes. Paralympics Australia has not historically produced many dual-Games athletes, partly because the disciplines rarely overlap and partly because qualifying for either Games on its own demands years of preparation.
The human cost of her journey to this point is measured not in statistics but in the thousands of hours of rehabilitation, training, and reinvention that followed a life-altering cycling accident in 2017, which left her paralysed from the chest down. What she has built since then, across multiple sports and now across two different Games seasons, is a record of adaptation that goes well beyond sport.
The Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Paralympics open on Friday, 6 March. Australia has a small but determined team heading to the Italian Alps, and Parker will be among its most watched competitors, not because of the medals she might win, but because of what her presence on the start line already represents.