SI Swimsuit Legend Brenna Huckaby Reveals the Key to Her Positive Mindset Shift at Paralympic Games

The 28-year-old competed at the 2018 games with her oldest child in mind.

Brenna Huckaby was photographed by Yu Tsai in Hollywood, Fla. / Yu Tsai/Sports Illustrated

At her 2018 Paralympics debut, Brenna Huckaby found herself a little frozen on her first few runs. She couldn’t get in the right mindset. She just kept thinking to herself, “If I don’t win, I am worthless. If I don’t win, everything that I did was for nothing. If I don’t win, my whole life is over.”

Of course, that wasn’t true, but under the pressure, Huckaby felt like it just might be. The mindset hurt her performance. She simply “could not put runs together,” she revealed on the set of SI Swimsuit’s 60th anniversary legends photo shoot in Hollywood, Fla.

Struggling under what felt like the highest stakes, the 28-year-old turned to a constant in her life for reassurance: Lilah, her oldest daughter. “I thought of all of our awesome moments and the fact that I was doing it for her,” she revealed. “All the anxiety and worry that I had around competing just was gone. I remember audibly saying, ‘For Lilah,’ before I pulled out of the gate, and I ended up winning.”

That year, she took home a gold in both the banked slalom and snowboard cross events. But, though she was able to pull it out (with the help of her young daughter), she knew she had to “re-work [her] self-talk.”

And that’s just what she did. By the 2022 Beijing games, she was in a better place mentally. “When I competed again, I had done so much work on loving myself, accepting myself and not putting my worth into my achievements,” she said. Competing that year, “My only mantra was, ‘No matter what, this is enough and you are enough,’” Huckaby stated.

She walked away from the 2022 games with another gold medal in the banked slalom, and while she was proud of herself, she knew she would’ve felt as much win or lose. “It didn’t change me—winning or losing,” she explained. Moving forward, Huckaby has a new mentality now: “I’m enough and I’m worthy.”