Watch Wadell and Davis, Parkites, Paralympians, and part-time Parisians

Paris Paralympics. Photo: Augie Roepke

PARIS — Parkites and Paralympians Chris Waddell and Muffy Davis share their time to shine yet again with the rest of the world as the Paralympics begin in Paris.

On Wednesday on NBC Networks, the opening ceremony was co-commentated once again by Waddell. The seven-time Winter and Summer Paralympian has 13 Paralympic medals.

He was just in Paris days before the able-bodied opening ceremony for the Olympic Games as a member of the 2034 Salt Lake-Utah Committee for the presentation to the IOC/IPC and subsequent winning bid announcement.

In the interim, Waddell was present and made a speech a week ago at a backyard fundraiser in Park City for Park City Ski & Snowboard.

He knows how much it takes for families of young, elite athletes as he was one himself. During an alpine ski race for Middlebury College in Vermont, he crashed and his injury resulted in him becoming paraplegic.

Shortly thereafter, Waddell found his way to Park City as an elite racer for the National Ability Center (NAC) where he healed, found community and learned to not only love skiing again but continue his winning ways. Growing up on the East Coast, he then made Park City his new home.

Waddell is so respected by said community that he was nominated to be, and was, one of the final athletes to light the cauldron at the 2002 Salt Lake Paralympics.

The other athlete to light that cauldron at Rice-Eccles Stadium was Davis. Also an NAC alum, Davis is in Paris as a governing board member of the International Paralympic Committee in Switzerland. She’s putting her seven Paralympic medals to good use these days from when she trained and raced for the NAC while living in Park City.

After retiring from competing, she was a state representative and county commissioner in her hometown of Sun Valley Resorts’ Ketchum, Idaho.

It was there at a high school-aged alpine ski race where she suffered a crash that left her paraplegic. Her own father was the emergency room physician of the small town clinic when she was brought in injured. Soon afterward, she moved to Park City to train at the NAC, eventually meeting her husband there. They lived in Salt Lake City, raising their daughter before moving back to Sun Valley.

Davis was sitting in the grandstands in the VIP box at the Paris Paralympics Opening Ceremony, in plain view of the in-studio monitor of Waddell, who mentioned his old friend by name on the NBC broadcast.

In most of the multiple Winter and Summer Paralympics Waddell works for NBC, he also commentates the track and field events. Those begin in Paris in a day.

Both Davis and Waddell competed in Summer Paralympics in the sport of wheelchair track and are no strangers to seeing each other on the world’s biggest sports stages.