Arriving at the Paralympic Village in Milan felt like a sigh of relief. I had spent a week in the city prior to the Milano Cortina 2026 Paralympic Winter Games, speeding across town, checking out venues in advance, planning which athletes I would interview, and eating a lot of gelato. As a wheelchair user, my week was also spent navigating unfamiliar surfaces and bumpy cobblestone streets that had me awkwardly smiling at strangers as my body bounced up and down.
When I got to the village, with its long, smooth ramps, I exhaled. And what awaited me inside was so much bigger than my ramp-shaped heart could have ever imagined.
The Milano Cortina 2026 Paralympic Winter Games spanned three villages across northern Italy: Milan, Cortina d’Ampezzo, and Predazzo, each serving as home base for the hundreds of athletes who traveled from around the world to compete. For the duration of the Games, the village was where they slept, ate, recovered, and prepared. In many ways it was a city within a city: self-contained, changeable, and built entirely to serve the needs of its residents.
After showing my press credential, my tour guide met me and took me around the complex, which housed approximately 1,500 athletes. We moved through the common area, partner activations, the dining hall, and the fitness center. As she guided me, I couldn't help but notice the absence of small steps, a huge change from navigating curb cuts, and little-to-no slope between surfaces.
Laughter rose from a group of athletes having lunch outside, where a wheelchair-using Paralympian had pulled in directly under a picnic table, something most picnic tables make impossible with their fixed benches and closed ends. Inside, a sensory-free room offered dim lighting and quiet for anyone who needed it.
To top it all off, there was Ottobock, a cost-free center open 12 hours a day where anyone with a Paralympic credential could get their prosthetic or wheelchair repaired on the spot. This almost dream-like detail was a particular relief for anyone who knows that, back home in the US, wheelchair repairs can cost tens of thousands of dollars and take months to complete.
Sitting in front of the Paralympic agitos at the center of the village, surrounded by so many disabled people, it quickly became clear that I had stepped into something rare. This wasn't just a real-life community; it was a working prototype for an accessibility utopia. I mean, my tour guide even enthusiastically showed me where the condoms for the athletes were stocked.
I wasn’t the only one who noticed this rare quality of life in the village. For Nordic skier Erin Martin, a full-time wheelchair user who stayed in the Predazzo section, it has been rare to enter spaces without feeling like an outlier. Here, though, she felt like the norm. “This may seem small, but often, shared laundry facilities have tall, stacked, front-loading machines or big, top-loading machines. At the village, the athlete laundry machines were front-loading, not stacked, and sitting directly on the ground,” she said. “During peak laundry hours, it was so nice to know that whatever machine opened up, I'd be able to use it on my own.”
It’s in these seemingly small details that access and freedom live. Martin described how upon entering most spaces back home, she “almost always” has a lot of uncertainty and questions. “Will I be able to get inside? Is there a bathroom that I can use? Can I go everywhere I need to once I'm inside? That moment of worry that I usually have wasn't there when I entered the Paralympic Village,” she recalled.
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That feeling didn’t happen by accident. Federica Sechi, one of the village’s designers and organizers, said that accessibility wasn’t an afterthought when designing—it was the starting point.
From the outset, Sechi explained, the village design followed Italian accessibility standards. This early commitment meant that even during the Olympics, accessibility was present. As a result, “only minimal adjustments were required in the transition between the Olympic and Paralympic Games, since accessibility had been integrated from the very beginning,” she said.
But that integration was only part of the equation: From day one, an internal accessibility team with disabled athletes and consultants oversaw every project and key decision. “They were also involved in testing all areas once completed," Sechi added, "with the support of dedicated Paralympic experts, to ensure that even the smallest details met the required standards.”
What Sechi described is not just a small operational difference, but a fundamentally different act of imagination. In common architecture, the baseline assumption is a non-disabled body, and everything else is retrofitted around that. A ramp gets added at the end, doorways are widened, and a bathroom is made accessible.
At the Paralympic Village, this got flipped on its head. It starts with the questions: Who is going to be here? What do all of their bodies need? This requires you to first picture disabled people as the default user living in a space, not the exception. That's rare enough that when Martin experienced it, she noticed it in the laundry machines.
Not every detail was perfect, as other athletes shared varying experiences with accessibility at the other villages located in the Italian Alps. But those limits help to prove the larger point: If even a space designed from the ground up for disabled people still has room to grow, the gap between the village and the world outside its gates should be impossible to ignore. The village is proof that this is possible; that when disabled people are centered from the beginning, something extraordinary gets built. Yet the Paralympic Village existed within a perimeter fence, and most of the world doesn't.
Said Brenna Huckaby, a Paralympic snowboarder who competed in Cortina and cofounder of Culxtured, a media collective aimed at changing how the world views para sport: “The Paralympics are unique. We are a group of disabled people who push the limits of the human body not just because of who we are individually but because we have access to equipment to allow us to push our limits.”
Huckaby continued, "I can walk the distances I can walk because I have top-of-the-line prosthetics. I can snowboard as well as I can because I have access to top-of-the-line prosthetics. This isn’t to say, ‘Oh, they can only do it because they have XYZ’; it’s to say, ‘Everyone should have access to XYZ because this is what they have the ability to access with XYZ.’”
The village ended up being that access made real. A working model of what becomes possible when the right equipment, the right infrastructure, and the right imagination are all in the same place at the same time. It existed for two weeks. But as a blueprint for what an accessible future could look like, it can be permanent anywhere.
Said Huckaby, “We should be highlighting our stories because we are a reflection of what’s possible with disability accommodations—and how everyone benefits from them.”
