Born: 3 June 1953, United States
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
Donna Vano started skateboarding and snowboarding in her 40s after giving up skiing due to a combination of an ACL injury and breaking her tibia/fibula. “Breaking my leg and blowing my ACL was the best thing to happen to me,” she later declared. She’d also been a competitive in-line skater before shifting her focus.
In 2004, she was one of 24 people recognized at the tenth anniversary of the X Games, alongside her good friend Tony Hawk. As Vano reports, she was handed the award as she was “just finishing up the women’s vert contest.” (Vert is a type of skateboarding that involves performing tricks on a large U-shaped ramp called a half-pipe.) At 51, she was acknowledged as a major contributor who had been involved in the X Games since its inception, competing in inline vertical at the first two X Games and doing a skateboard demo at the third. She’s also worked as a coordinator for skateboarding at the summer games and snowboarding for the winter.
She remembers all the kids who would grow up to be pros, Olympians, and gold medalists: the Teter siblings, Tara Dakides, Elena Hight, Maddie Bowman, Jamie Anderson, and Shaun White.
“I picked Jamie up every day and took her to the mountain. She wanted to ride like her best friend Tara Dakides,” Vano said. “When Shaun White was a little kid, he begged me to talk to his parents to let him snowboard.”
Vano continued to compete into her 60s, with performances like winning gold in boardercross, slalom, giant slalom, slopestyle, and halfpipe, plus four gold medals in the various overall categories in snowboarding at the 17th annual United States of America Snowboard and Freeski Association National Championships in 2006.
“Nine out of nine is amazing,” Vano said at the time. “I’m pretty stoked on that. Not only did I have the opportunity to meet some great women, the competition was fierce. The quality of the competitors in the (50-59) women’s division definitely kept me focused.”
She set several Guinness World records: oldest female snowboarder competing in Superpipe in pro tours, oldest inline vert skater, and most USASA gold medals in all five snowboarding disciplines.
“I’m going to shred ‘til I’m dead,” she said in 2017, aged 63.