UVA rower nabs silver at Paralympics
Make it 15 medals won by Virginia athletes in Paris this year.
Just weeks after current and former Cavaliers captured a school-record 14 medals at the Paris Olympics, rower Skylar Dahl (Col class of ’25) added another, taking silver at the Paralympics on September 1. Dahl competed as a member of Team USA in the PR3 mixed four with coxswain event. The crew of two men and two women finished three seconds behind Great Britain to claim the third consecutive silver medal for the United States in this discipline.
“It was definitely the coolest thing I’ve ever done,” Dahl said. “An incredible experience.”
The fourth-year media studies major made the U.S. team in January and took a break from rowing for UVA to train for the games, a competition for athletes who have disabilities, held every four years just after the Olympic Games. Dahl was born with bilateral clubfoot, a congenital condition in which the feet are twisted out of position, usually with the front half turned inward and the heels pointed inward and downward, according to the Mayo Clinic’s website.
Dahl underwent a series of surgeries as an infant to place her feet in the correct position, she said. Determined not to let her condition slow her, she played soccer and high-level AAU basketball but broke her foot twice. After the second break, which came at age 14, X-rays revealed that the bones in her feet were so close they were rubbing together, she said. The pain and risk of additional breaks caused her to abandon her dream of playing college basketball.
“My feet were not made to do what I was trying to do with them,” she said. “They couldn’t hold up under that kind of impact.”
Looking for an outlet for her competitive drive, Dahl turned to rowing, joining a club in her native Minnesota. In 2023, she helped UVA’s second varsity eight win the ACC title.
“Rowing saved me in a lot of ways,” she said. “It’s by far the hardest sport I’ve tried, but I can do it without being in structural pain. There isn’t this thing that I can’t control stopping me.”
