‘From earthquake rubble to top of the Dolomites’ – Haiti’s first Winter Paralympian

For eight hours, Ralf Etienne waited.

Buried upside down, his left leg was trapped by the rubble of a building which collapsed during a 7.0 magnitude earthquake that devastated Haiti in 2010.

But in a measure of the man, he was not thinking of himself in that moment.

“I decided that if I survived this tragedy, I would live a life to serve people,” Etienne said.

He was eventually rescued – and pushed in a wheelbarrow for a day to reach a hospital.

It was a further week before Etienne, then 20, was seen by a doctor and had his leg amputated.

More than 200,000 people died in the Haiti earthquake, a disaster that destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure and economy.

At the time, Etienne was a successful entrepreneur. In his home country, he had built what he called “a media empire” – including his own magazine, radio show and production company – by the age of 16.

But the earthquake changed his life’s mission. After travelling to the USA with an American orthopaedic surgeon he met in Haiti to receive a prosthetic leg, he moved in with that doctor and enrolled at college in Indiana.

Over the following years he would frequently return to Haiti to carry out humanitarian work, including distributing 40,000 pairs of glasses for those who could not access eye care, helping to repair roofing on homes destroyed by Hurricane Matthew in 2016, and supporting health care initiatives.

Back in the US, he trained as an investment banker, wanting to focus on “impact investment”.

Through skiing, he has achieved that.

He first experienced the sport on a trip with friends, but it was only two years ago that he realised this was his way to make his mark on the world.

“I touched the snow, and I never turned back,” he said. Etienne wanted to become the Caribbean nation’s first Winter Paralympian.

“At first skiing meant freedom to me, and then I realised it was inspiration. That is what the Paralympics are about.

“It is a message of hope to disabled people and the rest of the world.”

With US restrictions on Haitian immigration rights making it difficult for him to travel to train, last year – supported by his employer Bank of America – Etienne relocated from New York to London to be closer to the mountains of Europe for weekend training.

“Sometimes I’m leaving the office at 2am because I have work I need to finish before I get on a 6am flight to get to Switzerland,” he told the Wall Street Journal.

On Friday, after just 80 days on snow in his life, he achieved his dream of racing at the Milan-Cortina Winter Paralympics.

Aided by a 12-month grant from the International Paralympic Committee’s Sport for Mobility programme, he has joined athletes from El Salvador, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Portugal in making their nations’ debut at the Games.

His result, a disqualification on his second run of the standing giant slalom, is secondary to his story.

“Haiti has a skier. That’s the most beautiful sentence I have heard in a long time,” he said.

“On the first run I proved that Haiti can ski competitively. Before the race, I had won.

“I get to say that there is hope, I get to tell the Haitian youth that if I can do this today with one leg, they can do anything.

“I’ve gone from the earthquake rubble to the top of the Dolomites with the very best skiers in the world.