Nina Sparks ready to make history after SportsAid support helped power ParalympicsGB dream

Photo: ParalympicsGB

For the Buckinghamshire athlete, it’ll be the next chapter in a remarkable journey that began on a local dry slope and was helped along the way by early support from SportsAid.

Nina said:

“It still feels surreal.

“Even saying it out loud, that I’m going to be a Paralympian, is mad.”

The SportsAid Eastern supported athlete first discovered snowboarding on family ski holidays before learning the sport properly at Wycombe Summit, her local dry slope.

She said: “I started skiing when I was about eight.

“Then I learned to snowboard when I was 13 on the dry slope in the town where I live.

“I wasn’t someone who was on snow all the time. I considered myself really lucky if I got one week a year, maybe a school trip or going away with friends.”

Her passion for snowsports continued through university, where she joined the snowsports team and began racing on dry slopes around the UK.

But the path that would eventually lead her to the Paralympic Games began after a life-changing diagnosis.

While working in Austria in 2021, Sparks began experiencing neurological symptoms and was later diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS). Nerve damage in her right leg meant she was eligible to compete as a para snowboarder.

“When I was first diagnosed with MS, I couldn’t really find people who had done the same thing.

“I was Googling and looking on social media trying to find someone who had been through something similar, and there just wasn’t that much out there.

“I knew about Kadeena Cox and the amazing things she’d done with MS.

“Seeing athletes like that makes you think, ‘maybe this could be possible for me as well’.”

“I instantly wondered if MS might make me classifiable.

“That’s when I started looking into para snowboarding.”

Nina quickly threw herself into the sport, self-funding her first season while teaching piano lessons online to help support her training.

It was during this early stage of her career that SportsAid stepped in with crucial backing, support Sparks says made an immediate impact.

She said: “I remember it vividly.

“I got £1,000 from SportsAid and I used it to buy a race board, a pair of bindings and heated socks.

“That race board was huge for me. I needed proper kit to compete and it meant I didn’t have to scrape the money together myself or ask my parents to help again.”

The snowboard proved to be one of the most important investments of her career.

“That board lasted me years.

“I was still using it in competitions not that long ago.

“It sounds like such a simple thing, but it completely changed my training and racing. It unlocked everything.”

With better equipment and growing experience, Sparks’ results began to improve rapidly.

She went on to win the overall Europa Cup title in banked slalom during the 2022–23 season, establishing herself as one of the rising athletes on the international circuit before stepping up to World Cup level.

“It was that period where things really started to click,” she said. “I was doing more training, more laps on snow and I could see the progress every time I went back to training camps.”

Now she heads to Milano-Cortina 2026 making history in British sport, fresh from a banked slalom bronze medal at the Steamboat World Cup in the USA, one of the strongest results of her career.

But beyond the performances, Sparks hopes her presence at the Games can help inspire others to follow in her footsteps.

That is one reason Sparks now shares her journey online, documenting the realities of training, racing and living with MS.

“If you can’t see it, you can’t be it.

“I’m kind of writing the guide as I go along.

“If someone else is diagnosed with MS or wants to try para snowboarding and they see what I’m doing and think, ‘maybe I could do that too’, then that would be amazing.”

Now, as she prepares to step onto the biggest stage of her career, Sparks hopes she can play that same role for the next generation.

Whatever happens in Italy, Sparks already knows the journey has been worth it.

“I just want to go out there and show what I’ve been working towards for the last few years,” she said.

“And if my story inspires even one person to believe they can do something similar, then that would mean a lot.”