Cristian Ribera leads Brazilian efforts for first Paralympic Winter Games medal
The cross-country skier won a silver medal at the World Championships in January and wants to make more history for his nation at the Paralympic Winter Games Beijing 2022. His greatest asset? The resilience of his family.
Paralympic Games
Brazil, one of the emerging powerhouses of the Summer Paralympic Games, wants to replicate its success at the Paralympic Winter Games Beijing 2022, which began on 4 March.
Although a Winter Olympic medal still seems like a distant dream for the Latin American nation, their Paralympic prospects are better than ever, thanks to Cristian Westemaier Ribera.
The Para cross-country skier won a silver medal in the sprint event at the Para Snow Sports World Championship in Lillehammer, Norway, in January 2022. For the first time, Brazil finished in the top three of a winter sports World Championships.
"I was hoping to get to the final, but I did not expect to finish second. The level was too high," Ribera told Olympics.com.
Before winning the silver medal, Ribera analysed videos of the previous races in Lillehammer, where he finished in the top eight.
"I could see that I was really fast and that gave me a lot of confidence for the sprint," Ribera said. The skier also won a gold medal at the European Cup this season and finished 6th in the 15km race at PyeongChang 2018.
Since the World Championships, Ribera has been training with the rest of the Brazilian team in Italy.
"We'll get to Beijing flying high. I don't know if a medal enters the conversation, because it's a tight race, as it was [at the World Championships], but any medal counts."
'Do you have faith?'
Ribera and his family are from Rondônia, a state in the north of Brazil that is part of the Amazon and borders Bolivia. However, fate awaited him on the other side of the nation.
"As soon I was born, the doctors found out I had a condition called arthrogryposis multiplex congenita. They told my mother 'Do you have faith? So start praying because your son has two hours maximum to live'. It was a shock for her."
Ribera survived, but his family were told he could die if the condition wasn't cared for properly. That type of healthcare was only available in Sao Paulo, in the southeastern region of Brazil.
His mother, Solange Ribera, had to take a painful decision, leaving her other children and husband behind to take her three-month-old son on a 3,000-kilometre trip. The distance from Rondônia to São Paulo is the same as from Lisbon to Budapest.
The pair stayed in the house of relatives in Jundiaí, a city an hour drive away from Sao Paulo. "We kept coming and going [from the two cities] almost every day, because I needed surgeries and the whole treatment was there. It was too hard," Ribeira said. A few years later, the rest of the family were able to join them.
To this day, Ribera has had 21 surgeries.
A family united by snow
Access to proper healthcare allowed Ribera to discover sport. In fact, he practised several sports, such as athletics, swimming, wheelchair tennis, boccia and even capoeira, a Brazilian cultural martial art.
Ribera knew he wanted to become an athlete at age 13, when in 2015 he saw a presentation about roller skiing made by the Brazilian Snow Sports Federation.
"No one knew about it, and I'm a curious guy, so I went [to the presentation] and I liked it very much."
At the end of the following year, Ribera saw snow for the first time in Sweden and began to dream about representing Brazil at the Paralympic Winter Games. Just two years later, he came sixth in the 15km event at PyeongChang 2018.
Cristian wasn't the only Ribera who fell in love with cross-country skiing. His younger sister, 17-year-old Eduarda Ribera, made her Winter Olympics debut at Beijing 2022, competing in the individual sprint, 10km classic and team sprint.
When Olympics.com interviewed Ribera at the end of January, he didn't know yet that his sister would be asked to replace Bruna Moura at the Olympics, after the latter suffered a car accident just a few days before the Opening Ceremony.
"She [Eduarda] almost qualified and next time around she will definitely be there," Ribera said at the time.
In an Instagram post, right before his sister's debut, Ribera sent an emotional message of support to her "Seeing your growth and your evolution is - and will always be - one of my biggest joys."
Ribera will compete in three events at the Paralympic Winter Games Beijing 2022: 18km, 10km and sprint, all in the sitting category. Brazil will take six athletes to the Winter Paralympics, five in cross-country skiing and one in snowboard.