Oyuna Uranchimeg was born and raised in Mongolia, but has now spent nearly half her life as a Minnesotan. She was not only saved in the Land of 10,000 Lakes, but also transformed by it.
“I have a great job and awesome community,” Uranchimeg (oh-YOO-na ur-RON-chi-meg) said, “and then I’m an athlete. Who would have even thought about that?”
Uranchimeg, a 2022 Paralympic wheelchair curler and a Milan Cortina 2026 hopeful, spends weekdays as an administrator in the emerging media department at the University of St. Thomas in the Twin Cities.
She helps train faculty (eight full-timers, plus more adjunct staff), plans budgets and manages a website. She ensures the second floor of the Schoenecker Center is supplied and ready for some 200 students per semester.
“You kind of have to be overseeing pretty much everything,” said Uranchimeg, who joined St. Thomas in 2014 after nearly 12 years at Hamline, another private university in St. Paul. “I mean, your eyes and hands are pretty much everywhere.”
That includes inside the classroom. She is a regular guest speaker in a sport communication class.
The professor, Dr. Debra Petersen, said end-of-term course evaluations produce a common comment: Uranchimeg is one of the highlights of the semester.
“Before she comes, I take them to the Paralympic website, so they learn about the history of the Paralympics, etcetera,” Petersen said. “Then she tells her story of how she came to use a wheelchair and how she came to curling.”
In 2000, Uranchimeg flew from Mongolia to Minnesota to visit a friend. She was a passenger in a car accident that left her paralyzed from the waist down with a spinal cord injury.
At the time, Uranchimeg had a son turning 6 years old back in Mongolia.
“I was very depressed, and I wanted to die,” she said in a feature article for the St. Thomas website. “I even scribbled a note to my family saying that I’m sorry and asking them to take good care of my son. I started collecting my pain pills with an intent to take enough of them at once and sleep forever. I became completely dependent on others: going to bathroom, bathing, sitting up, dressing and transferring from the bed to a wheelchair. I was in diapers all the time and somebody had to change it. I pretty much lost all my dignities. I cried nonstop for quite some time. Not eating. Not doing my therapy – not interested in living. I felt like there was no point of living if I’m not going to be back on my feet again.”
Uranchimeg thought about her son and became determined. She thought about the lack of wheelchair accessibility in Mongolia and decided to stay in the U.S.
She spent eight years away from her child — aside from visits to Mongolia in 2003 and 2006 — until he joined her in Minnesota in 2008, the year she became a naturalized U.S. citizen. Uranchimeg adopted her biological niece, who came over from Mongolia two years later.
In Minneapolis, Uranchimeg learned to drive through the Courage Kenny Rehabilitation Institute, and even played one season of wheelchair basketball there. She previously played volleyball and basketball growing up in Mongolia.
One day in 2016, friend Kyle Bauman invited her to lunch and said the location would be a surprise. He took her to Four Seasons Curling Club in Blaine, a Twin Cities suburb. The U.S. wheelchair curling team happened to be training there at the time.
“I don’t think we even ate lunch,’' Bauman said, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “As soon as she wheeled in the door, that was it. They got her on the ice that day.’'
After Uranchimeg came home, she googled the sport. She spent a weekend watching curling matches from the Sochi 2014 Paralympics. She started to dream.
Uranchimeg began her wheelchair curling career at age 43. She made her first Paralympic team in 2022 and hopes to compete in the first Paralympic mixed doubles event in 2026.
She primarily trains at the Chaska Curling Center, a 35-minute drive from her home, on weekends. St. Thomas is set to open a new hockey arena this fall.
“I talked to the College of Arts and Sciences dean, is there a way we can have some dedicated curling ice?” Uranchimeg said, chuckling.
Her department set up a big-screen watch party in a classroom for one of her games at the 2022 Beijing Paralympics. The university also gives her a flexible schedule that accommodates her travel for competitions.
She is grateful. She also reciprocates, taking her work laptop with her to competitions and remotely joining department meetings.
Uranchimeg has said she was reborn in America. More specifically, Minnesota, from a Twin Cities hospital to Burnsville, her home for the last 24 years, and sheets of ice in Blaine and Chaska.
And at St. Thomas, where her daughter graduated in 2021 as a neuroscience and biology major.
“Looking from where I am now, I guess everything had some kind of meaning,” Uranchimeg said, speaking from her campus workspace with a Beijing 2022 poster adorning a wall behind her. “It was worth it. I have no regrets or anything. I’m just extremely happy the way things have turned out.”
Throughout the winter, in a series called Hometown Hopefuls, NBC is spotlighting the stories of Olympic and Paralympic athletes from across the United States as they work towards the opportunity to represent their country at the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics. We’ll learn about their paths to their sports’ biggest stage, the communities that have been formative along the way, and the causes they’re committed to in their hometowns and around the world. Visit nbcsports.com/hometown-hopefuls for more stories on the road to Milan Cortina.
