Nina Sparks ready to join ranks of British snowboard history makers

Nina Sparks will join a growing tradition of making history in British para snowboarding when she becomes the first woman to represent ParalympicsGB in the sport at Milano Cortina.

The 35-year-old from High Wycombe, who has multiple sclerosis, will make her Paralympics debut this March as the only female athlete in a five-strong contingent of British snowboarders heading to Italy.

And while being with the team just feels like the norm for Sparks, the prospect of heading to a first Paralympics is taking a little more time to sink in.

“I’m just living on a cloud at the moment,” she said. “I’ve just come straight off the back of a competition season, straight into finding out about selection. It’s not sunk in at all.

“I was actually in the airport when I found out and I cried. I was with one of my friends who lives in the States and we were just about to part ways, so I needed a reason to cry.

“It’s really weird because I’ve been the only woman on the team since I joined so I’m used to it and I’m quite happy with it. We go to competitions and I go first because I’m the girl and they do girls first - it’s just normal.

“But it’s exciting to make history. Especially in our team, James [Barnes-Miller] made history by being the first para snowboarder and Ollie [Hall] made history by being the first medallist.

“I’ve been training with these guys for the past four years so to join them in making history is cool. But for me, it doesn’t really feel like a big deal.”

It is a natural progression in a sport that is still relatively in its infancy at the Games, with snowboarding first featuring at the Winter Paralympics at Sochi 2014 as part of the para alpine skiing programme, before being contested as its own sport in 2018 and 2022.

For Sparks, who hails from the same county as Stoke Mandeville, the birthplace of the Paralympics, selection for the Games also feels like a natural progression.

She earned her first World Cup podium finish just a month out from Milano Cortina, taking bronze at the Steamboat World Cup in the USA.

“Everything I’d been working on with my coaches around mindset and my actual snowboarding came together at that race. It was such a big deal,” she said.

“It was just like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve done it! I’ve got it together!’ Obviously I got some really good results as well.

“It’s given me a lot of confidence in myself and my abilities. The field was slightly depleted over in the States, so I’m taking it with a pinch of salt, but it’s given me a big confidence boost seeing the time difference off some of the really fast girls.”

Sparks first learned to snowboard aged 13 at her local dry slope, Wycombe Summit, and began on the path to becoming a classified para snowboarder after being diagnosed with MS in 2021.

She competes in the SB-LL2 category for athletes with a lower limb impairment as a result of nerve damage in her right leg.

Now, she will head to a debut Games with aims of showing the world what she can do, with the added bonus of making history as she does.

“I want to go and do some snowboarding that I’m happy with and if it’s good enough for a medal, that would be absolutely incredible,” said Sparks.

“I want to show that I’ve been doing all this hard work for four years so I can put down this performance on the big stage. 

“It’s one of the only times that para snowboarding will be broadcast so it will be a chance for people to watch and be like, ‘Oh look there’s Nina, she’s actually legit on TV.’”