USA TODAY International Edition
Danisewicz went from never athlete to elite
Hailey Danisewicz had no plans of becoming an athlete. She was looking for a change in her life, but she didn’t think adaptive sports would be it.
It had taken a rough couple of first years of college to prompt her in 2011 to apply for an internship, one that came with an unusual request. Want the gig? Do a triathlon.
“I fell in love with it pretty quickly,” Danisewicz says.
Although it’s only been five years, a gulf exists between where Danisewicz started and where she is now. One of the top athletes in the sport, she will compete in the Paralympics with sights on a gold medal. Paratriathlon is making its debut this year, and Danisewicz was the first American to qualify for her spot in Rio. The women’s paratriathlon events will be held Sunday.
For Danisewicz, the journey there has meant a shift in mindset from never athlete to elite.
She played basketball and volleyball as a child growing up in Milwaukee, but that changed when she was diagnosed with bone cancer at age 12. Danisewicz, now 25, had surgeries to remove the tumor, chemotherapy, and then more surgeries to reconstruct her left leg.
But it never fully healed. Danisewicz couldn’t really bend her knee or walk without crutches, so at 14 she decided to have it amputated.
“Clearly, it ended up working out,” she quips.
Danisewicz never thought about adaptive sports because she never saw herself as disabled. She knew she wanted to work in the non- profit sector, so when she was unhappy at Northwestern she looked for an internship in that area.
“I didn’t know who I was, what I wanted, what I was doing,” Danisewicz says. “Didn’t have a lot of friends, and so I realized that my life needed to change.”
After that interview at Great Lakes Adaptive Sports Association, Danisewicz got involved with Dare2tri, a paratriathlon club in Chicago. The athletes there helped her remove the excuses she had made for herself, she says. That doesn’t mean it was easy. Like many athletes in adaptive sports, Danisewicz struggled to find a good fit with her prosthesis. But she also had the challenge of building back cardio and stamina — something she had lost after eight years of not playing sports.
“I had so many days where it was just like, ‘ this is not worth it,’ ” she says. “I can run one block before I feel like my heart is going to explode out of me. It was really hard to see the bigger picture and see if this was actually worth doing.”
Slowly it came, though. Running with a prosthesis had its own learning curve, but Danisewicz says it was less jarring because she’d forgotten how it felt to run before her amputation.
The swim is Danisewicz’s toughest leg, but she likes the process of hunting her competitors down in the bike and run.
She competed in her first triathlon in 2011, and she started competing at an international level the next year.
By 2014, she had made a habit out of winning, and 2015 became her breakout year.
She took silver at the ITU Paratriathlon World Championships in Chicago and won the Paralympic test event in Rio. She was named the USA Triathlon Paratriathlete of the Year.
Danisewicz’s path through the sport has required a whole shift in mind- set. She’s found confidence in being an elite athlete, and now she heads to Rio aiming for gold.
“I don’t really believe in luck. I think that this was definitely something that was meant to be,” Danisewicz says. “I think this is what I’m supposed to be doing with my life. I think everything that I went through, from the cancer and the amputation to the kind of miserable first couple of years of college, that all led to this point.”