Denver curler to compete in Paralympic Winter Games
This article was produced as part of a new episode of Colorado Experience. The documentary uncovers the history behind the Olympic Games that were scheduled to take place in Denver in 1976 but never happened. Watch "Colorado Experience: The Games that Never Happened" on Thursday, March 26 at 7 p.m. on Rocky Mountain PBS or RMPBS+.
GOLDEN, Colo. — With an intensity that would make any bull quiver, Dan Rose stared down a sheet of ice as a round stone glided toward the other end. No amount of encouragement or coaching would change the path the stone was on, but for Rose, that is part of the fun.
“We just sit back and watch it all unfold,” he said. “Which is great if it's an amazing shot, but sometimes when you screw up, it's like watching a train wreck unfold before your eyes.”
Rose is a Denver-based Paralympic curler competing in the the Milano Cortina 2026 Paralympic Winter Games. A first-time Paralympian, he is hoping to harness his nervous energy for the nine or more matches set for the U.S. mixed wheelchair curling team.
“A lot of times people call it kind of like chess on ice. So, it's a lot of thinking that goes on, which is kind of great and also kind of your worst enemy,” said Rose.
He was named to the four-person team shortly after last Thanksgiving. His selection followed years of training and, recently, months of camps to determine the best seven curlers to take to Italy.
“It was kind of a relief,” said Rose. “It validated all the hard work that I've been putting in.”
Rose started playing wheelchair curling in 2019 at a friend’s suggestion. Within just two years, he had made the national team.
“Once I had the opportunity to try curling … I jumped at it because I tried so many different other sports, and you never know what's going to click,” he said.
Before curling, Rose competed in several other adaptive sports like track and field, powerlifting, lacrosse and skiing, the last of which helped pull him out of a dark place following his life-altering injury in Afghanistan.
“I was real negative about it. Just on the drive up even, I was like, ‘I’m not gonna be able to ski. I’m paralyzed. There’s no way,’” said Rose. “But luckily the instructors that they have out there are amazing and [were] able to get me into a ski, and I was skiing independently after the first day. [I] just got hooked. And I realized at that moment — if I can do this, what else is there I can do?”
Rose has been paralyzed from the chest down since April 2011. As a combat engineer in Afghanistan, his job was to look for roadside bombs and set them off safely.
During one of his expeditions, his team came across a road that looked like it once had a culvert diverting water underneath it, but it had been taken out and closed up. However, it was full of explosives.As they drove over the road, about 1,000 pounds of explosives went off, tearing Rose’s truck in two.
Amazingly, no one in the truck was killed. His gunner had a broken ankle and the driver suffered spinal damage, but no nerve damage. Rose got the worst of it.
“It should have killed all three of us,” he said. “As bad as it was, it couldn’t have gone any better.”
“It really wasn't until I had gotten back to Walter Reed [National Military Medical Center] and they did the spinal fusion to actually stabilize my spine where the surgeon told me, ‘You're never going to walk again,’ which was really hard to hear,” said Rose.
From May to September 2011, he completed rehab therapy in Tampa, Florida and then moved in with his parents in his small hometown of Tomah, Wisconsin. Finding himself often stuck at home without an adaptive truck yet, depression took over until a ski trip to Colorado in December that year.
Now living in the Denver area, Rose often finds himself at the Denver Curling Club facility off of 6th Avenue in Golden. The strategy of the sport challenges his mind, and the people in the curling community fills his heart.
“If you ever go to a new town and just go to their curling club to pick up practice ice or whatever, you're instantly going to make 20 friends. So, it's a really nice community and it's great to be a part of it,” said Rose.
“Dan Rose is one of our Para athletes. He has been a newcomer onto the U.S. curling team, but has quickly risen through the ranks and, with some good coaching and tutelage from some of our other members, specifically Pam Wilson, who was a previous member of the USA curling team,” said David Falco, the head ice technician and facility manager at the Denver Curling Club.
Falco’s job includes keeping the ice in pristine condition, with every little bump or scrape making a difference in curling. In the original way to play the game, team members called “sweepers” can use brooms to manipulate the speed and curl of the stone by smoothing out and melting the very top layer of ice.
In wheelchair curling, there are no sweepers. So Rose and other throwers must be incredibly accurate to get their stone where they want. Every round during a mixed-team curling match requires each player to throw two stones, totaling eight per team. At the end of the round, whichever team’s stone is closest to the very center of the house or bullseye will get a point. Wheelchair players can use their hand or an extender grip to push the stones and are allowed to ask for a teammate to hold the wheelchair steady.
Rose and his teammates flew to Italy Feb. 28 to get acclimated before the opening ceremony on March 6. They are some of the 665 athletes competing in 79 medal events across six sports. This year’s Games also mark 50 years since the first Paralympic Winter Games, which took place in Ornskoldsvik, Sweden.
Team USA’s mixed team has nine rounds of games scheduled starting March 7 at 1:35 a.m. Mountain Standard Time, but it will be available for streaming on Peacock. The bronze medal game is March 13, and the gold medal game is March 14, with the closing ceremonies the next day.
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