The Para snowboarder who builds the prosthetic legs his rivals race on

Most athletes measure success by the medals they win. Mike Schultz measures it by something rarer: how many of the people beating him are riding on equipment he designed. The American Para snowboarder lost his left leg above the knee after a crash during a snowmobile competition in 2008 — and instead of accepting the prosthetics available at the time, he decided to build his own.

“My mind has always thought mechanically, since a very young age, and I’m always intrigued by how things work,” Schultz says. That instinct led him to engineer a prosthetic leg with adjustable shock absorption and hydraulic damping designed to mimic the action of quadriceps muscles, adjustable for a rider’s front or back leg and personal style. In 2010 he turned the design into a business, and his adaptive sports equipment has since spread across the sport.

“Mike Schultz measures it by something rarer: how many of the people beating him are riding on equipment he designed.”

By the Milano Cortina 2026 Paralympic Winter Games, roughly 25 Para athletes were expected to compete on gear he had a hand in creating. A former Para snowboard champion himself — with gold in snowboard cross and silver in banked slalom at PyeongChang 2018, and silver in snowboard cross at Beijing 2022 — Schultz now stands at the strange intersection of competitor and supplier, racing against athletes whose legs he engineered.

For him, that is not a conflict but a point of pride. “Whether I’m on the podium or not, I know that somebody that’s using our equipment will be,” he says. It is a rare kind of sportsmanship — one where a champion’s greatest legacy is not only the races he has won, but the many rivals he has helped get to the start line at all.