National Ability Center’s Muffy Davis still at the Paralympic podium

Muffy Davis (third from the right on the bottom row) with her fellow Governing Board members of The International Paralympic Committee. Photo: courtesy of the International Paralympic Committee

TOKYO, Japan. — Three Utah women are approaching Paralympic podiums today in Tokyo. Muffy Davis has the honor of handing out medals on behalf of the International Paralympic Committee (IPC), Marybai Huking’s goalball team advanced to the gold-medal game and Ali Ibanez’s basketball team is competing in the bronze medal match. Davis may hand medals to one or both of these athletes.

Park City residents remember Davis’s picture 20 stories high on one of the image-wrapped buildings of Downtown Salt Lake City during the 2002 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Since then, she became a Stanford graduate, met her now husband, Jeff Burley, at the National Ability Center (NAC), gave birth to her now teenage daughter, won seven Paralympic medals in Summer and Winter Games, sits on the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) Board of Directors, sits on the IPC Governing Board and is Representative on the Idaho State Legislature.

This video shows the dignitary handing out medals at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games.

Davis grew up an alpine ski racer parlaying her talent via the athletic offerings at the NAC the into adaptive skiing after a tragic crash as a teenager on the ski hill turned her into a paraplegic. 

Another Utah paraplegic woman blazing trails in sport is Ibanez whose basketball teammates will play Germany for the bronze in Tokyo with the possibility of Davis handing her that medal if they indeed achieve that status. The Team USA women’s basketballers gave today’s game up to  China 36 – 41 allowing the Chinese team their first chance at a medal of any color in Paralympic Women’s Wheelchair Basketball.

Utah’s Huking, one of five children adopted into her family, has a visual impairment and will play Turkey in Goalball to determine if she’ll bring home a silver or a gold medal to go along with the bronze she won in Rio 2016. Today’s win against Brazil, after two sudden-death, deadlocked extra-times, had the only extra shot throw-off in these Tokyo 2020 Games as it’s one of the few sports only contested in the Para’s and not the able-bodied Olympic Games.

With six shots each and only one goaltender, not the three during regulation play, all wearing blacked-out goggles, Huking and her United States teammates eeked out the “W” in the end relegating Brazil to play Japan for the bronze.

The athletes can’t see what their teammates are doing thus the ending of the game being one of the most “exciting…breathtaking….thrilling….nervewracking…nail biting” moments in the entirety of the Tokyo Paralympics, according to the NBC female commentator, the instant that the women won, it takes a sec for their coach to tell the athletes that they have, in fact, won releasing, then and only then, an explosion of joy from the visually impaired team accompanied by happy tears and happy dances.