Nina Sparks will become the first woman to represent ParalympicsGB in the sport at Milano Cortina.

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

She will be making her Paralympic debut alongside her four teammates.

Sparks, who has multiple sclerosis, 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.

She first learned to snowboard aged 13 at her local dry slope, Wycombe Summit, and earned her first World Cup podium finish just a month out from Milano Cortina.

She took bronze at the Steamboat World Cup in the USA.

She said: "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.

"It’s given me a lot of confidence in myself and my abilities.

"It’s given me a big confidence boost seeing the time difference off some of the really fast girls."

Sparks said: "I’m just living on a cloud at the moment.

"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.

"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.

"But it’s exciting to make history.

"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 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.

Given this background, Sparks’ selection for the Games seems a natural progression.

She is eager to show the world what she is capable of.

She said: "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.

"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.’”

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