Paralympics: Audrey Pascual wins four medals

Para alpine skiing is the kind of sport where one rough line can ruin a race in seconds. Audrey Pascual Seco spent the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Paralympics doing the opposite. The Spanish sit-skier left Italy with four medals in five events — two golds, one silver, one bronze — and basically turned herself into one of the breakout names of the Games. For Spain, this was bigger than one hot week. It ended a long gold drought and pushed the country to its best Winter Paralympic showing in years. ### Who is Audrey Pascual Seco? Pascual is a 21-year-old Spanish para alpine skier from Madrid who competes in the LW12-2 sitting class. She was born with a rare congenital condition and started skiing as a child, then built into a serious medal contender with strong world championship results and a huge 2025-26 World Cup season — 10 golds, six silvers, and one bronze before the Paralympics even started. How did she actually win? The clean version is simple. Pascual won silver in the women’s sitting downhill on 7 March, gold in super-G on 9 March, gold in alpine combined on 10 March, did not finish giant slalom on 12 March, and then took bronze in slalom on 14 March. Her official Milano Cortina athlete page lists exactly that medal set — gold, gold, silver, bronze, plus the giant slalom DNF. Is the silver a big deal? Because it was close enough to sting. Pascual finished the downhill in 1:25.84, just 0.05 seconds behind Germany’s Anna-Lena Forster, who won in 1:25.79. That was Spain’s first Winter Paralympic medal of these Games, but the tiny gap also set up the rest of Pascual’s week — she looked fast enough to win, and turns out she was. Super-G. Then came alpine combined one day later. In the combined, Pascual built a 2.82-second edge over Forster in the super-G leg and held on through the slalom leg to win by 0.46 seconds. So the athlete who had just missed downhill gold by a blink came right back and beat the same rival twice in two different speed-heavy events. ### Why does four medals matter so much? Winter Paralympic teams are small, and alpine programs can go entire Games without one athlete touching the podium multiple times. Pascual won all four of Spain’s medals in Milano Cortina 2026. That made her the central reason Spain finished with two golds, one silver, and one bronze — its best Winter Paralympic result since 2002. ### Was this a surprise? Yes and no. If you only looked at Spain’s recent Winter Paralympic history, it looked surprising — Spain had not won a Winter Paralympic gold since Sochi 2014. But if you looked at Pascual’s form, the signs were there. She had already won world championship silvers in slalom and arrived in Italy after a stacked World Cup season. Basically, the breakthrough was sudden for casual viewers, not for people following para alpine skiing closely. ### What kind of racer is she? She looks strongest when the course rewards commitment. Her own comments after super-G made that clear — she talked about starting with the will to win and attacking the speed sections. Even the visual details fit that style. She races in a neon-pink sit-ski that has become part of her identity, and by the middle of the Games that bright setup was also becoming a warning sign for everyone else on the hill. ### So what’s the real takeaway? This was not a one-medal cameo. Pascual showed range across downhill, super-G, combined, and slalom, which is the hard version of para alpine success. One race can be luck. Four medals across different disciplines looks a lot more like arrival.