CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy — Laura Dwyer doesn’t need sticky notes anymore. When she picked up the ice, her ritual reminder was encoded in a thin chain around her neck and ingrained in her mind.
It became a custom at camp last summer when someone asked the question, “Why aren’t you more confident?” “That phrase” has evolved into a mantra for first-time Paralympic wheelchair curlers. Dwyer, a Midwesterner through and through, nodded, believing that too much confidence could be seen as arrogance. She hears people often say that her confidence will help her take better control of her shot.
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They even said, “You belong here,” and urged her to echo them.
Dwyer said sharply. Her friend asked her to repeat it, and since August, Dwyer has been writing the words “I belong here” on Post-it notes as a reminder. She would stick it to a wall, a bench, or any surface where the adhesive would find it. At the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic team trials in November, she was told to move it due to broadcast restrictions. That’s when Shawn Olesen, the team’s head ice technician, sent the news home.
“He educated me like Obi-Wan Kenobi,” Dwyer said. “He said, ‘Laura, it’s inside you now. You don’t need it anymore. You know you belong here without this piece of paper.'”
This Christmas, Dwyer’s sister-in-law gave her a necklace, but instead of a pendant, it had a dotted line with Morse code that said “I Belong Here.”
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“Everywhere I go, because I don’t have to put up signs, I wear ‘I belong here’ so I can remind myself,” Dwyer said.
Where Dwyer belongs is at the 2026 Paralympic Winter Games in Milan Cortina, where he makes his Olympic mixed doubles debut alongside three-time Paralympian Steve Emt, who represents the United States. After four games of the seven-game round robin, they are 2-2 and in a five-way tie for second place. The top four teams advance to the knockout rounds.
Pete Annis, national director of wheelchair curling for Team USA, called the two “pretty much the same guy” who have different experiences in the sport but who may be Team USA’s best chance at winning its first wheelchair curling medal.
In 2012, Dwyer was paralyzed in a freak accident. She was working as a landscaper when a 1,000-pound branch fell 40 feet. Emt was paralyzed when he was 25 when he was involved in a car accident involving a drunk driver. Emt didn’t discover curling until 2013. In late 2019, when Dwyer was missing the active part of her life, she discovered the sport through a flyer at her gym’s adaptive curling clinic.
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The two first met at a Team USA training camp in February 2020 — Dwyer didn’t realize the team was there because she just wanted to learn more about how to play the sport. But even from the first moment, Emt had faith in Dwyer, telling her to keep throwing rocks.
When Emt and Dwyer “broke up” with their curling mixed doubles partner about two years ago, they were attracted to each other because of their competitive athletic backgrounds. Dwyer played softball, while Emt played basketball at West Point and finished his college career as a walk-on at UConn under Hall of Famer Jim Calhoun.
As Dwyer said of Emt, “His mental state athletically, just like me being prepared, how to get through a tough game or how to push hard when someone else isn’t up to par, or even when you know I’m having a bad day or he’s having a bad day, we know how to get through it in a similar way.”
Their first mixed doubles match in Scotland didn’t go well.
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“We’re all angry,” Emte said. “Like we hate this, like we’re done. I’ll never do it again. I hate this game, you know, get us out of Scotland as soon as possible.”
Their coach gave them some perspective and reminded them to learn.
“Right now, I don’t want to do anything else,” Emte said. “All I want to do is travel the world with Laura and compete in mixed doubles.”
The two have continued to do so, finishing ninth at the world championships and helping the U.S. secure a spot at the 2026 Paralympics.
Both put in a lot of work and developed routines. Their pregame warm-up is based on the mixed team competition. After the game, they work with their assistant coaches to use a piece of paper to identify turning points in the game when something good happened, as well as the “do it again” and “do it better” parts.
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“I think in some sports that responsibility is overlooked and someone has a (bad) game and they don’t speak out about it and then teammates realize it and then resentment builds and then hostility develops,” Dwyer said. “Steve and I were like, ‘No, we’re not going to.’ We both work very hard in relationships in our lives to keep open lines of communication.”
It’s the art of Emt and Dwyer’s coordinated process that’s necessary to help them reset and move forward. Some of it started with Emt calling himself a drunk driver rather than a curler. To him, the sport is just something he does. Once Emte got over the emotions from the crash and began to forgive himself, he began speaking to high schools across the country about the dangers of drunk driving. A year ago, Dr. Matt Mikesell — a sports psychologist who works with USA Curling through a contract with Premier Sports Psychology — asked Emt how he felt when he walked off the stage after his speech.
“‘Doc, I’m excited. I’m ready and I feel 100 percent great,'” Emt remembers telling Mikesell, who he worked with for about two years. “Whether I was sick or not, it didn’t matter because I knew I did my best and I knew I impacted other people. But even if I didn’t, I still know I did my best and that’s all I can control. He said, ‘Steve, we need to make you feel like this when you leave the ice.'”
Maxell checked in with Emt as he left the ice and worked on that feeling to control the things he could.
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“Now, whether he’s there or not, I check myself, ‘Hey, was this a good practice?'” Emt said. “And even if it’s not, again, think to yourself positively: ‘Yeah, I went through my process and everything was fine.’ … This game is 95 percent a brain game, so we have to train the brain, and we’ve done that over the past year and a half.”
The goal is the first gold medal in the event. But even if the results are in sight, the focus is still on the process.
This is already playing out in these games. Their voices echo across the four ice surfaces of the Curling Olympic Stadium in Cortina. Even amid the roar of the crowd and the three other games going on, the two would meet quietly after the game to practice box breathing — inhale for four seconds, hold for four seconds, exhale for four seconds to reset.
They also had lunch off the ice Thursday to regroup after not feeling well in the first two games. They talk about their communication, thought processes, and how to step up their training to get back to their basics.
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“We’re the best team in the country and one of the best teams in the world, you know,” Emt said. “We got there for a reason. Let’s get back to where we were. Do the things that got us here.”
Where they all belong.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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