CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy — When Mike Schultz pulled into the staging area for the snowboard cross small final Sunday, a small knot appeared in his throat.
“Nope,” the three-time Paralympian thought as he tried to hold in his emotions. “Not right now. Not right now.”
But with Schultz set to retire following the 2026 Paralympic Winter Games, he couldn’t help getting a little choked up as he soaked in that final snowboard cross run.
At the bottom of the slope came mixed emotions. Schultz didn’t get a shot at the big final — where medals are handed out — finishing sixth. But he will get one more chance at the podium, competing in the banked slalom event, which was moved from Saturday to Friday due to weather concerns. No matter Schultz’s finish, his legacy will go far beyond his own podiums.
It’s already being carried on by those of his U.S. teammates and competitors thanks to his company, BioDapt, which designs and manufactures high-performance lower-limb prosthetic components used for sports such as para snowboarding.
“It’s pretty awesome to look back at my career and all these athletes out here using equipment I built for them,” the 44-year-old Schultz said. “Just being a part of the sport more than just as an athlete. It’s a pretty incredible feeling.”
Schultz was always a racer. From dirt bikes to snowmobiles, racing was always a part of his life as he grew up in Minnesota. “It was his love and passion,” said his wife, Sara, who has been with Schultz since they started dating as 16-year-olds. In 2008, he flew off his snowmobile when competing in a snowcross race. He suffered a severe compound fracture that forced his leg to be amputated above the knee.
It didn’t take long for Schultz to want to get back to racing. The problem was there weren’t many options available that would allow him to get back to motocross and snowmobile. His everyday prosthetic wasn’t conducive to sport.
So he built his own.
“One of the other motivating factors was in the most difficult time of my life after the injury, I needed to put my mind and effort into a positive direction,” Schultz said. “Creating my own prosthetic leg, solving my own problem, was a way that I coped with my recovery.”
Mike Schultz’s company, BioDapt, manufactures prosthetics that several Paralympians use — even to beat him. (TFA Group / Autodesk)
In 2010, Schultz came back with speed. He won gold medals at the Summer and Winter X Games in adaptive motocross and snowmobile cross. BioDapt was founded that same year as he solved a problem for himself and realized others could benefit.
Schultz’s creation, Moto Knee, has a spring assist, which helps him put pressure into the leg without collapsing. His walking prosthetic needs to swing. Wanting it to be versatile, he incorporated different alignment options. Take snowboarding, which, Schultz said, “If you have your prosthetic in the front, the alignment is more upright than if it’s in the back. It needs to be more flexed to get that balance right.”
Schultz found snowboarding when he ran into someone looking for an option, much as he was not long before. When an Army veteran saw him racing snowmobiles at the X Games, he wanted to know: Would his Moto Knee work for snowboarding?
Schultz spent the next few weeks learning.
“It wasn’t pretty. Learning hurts when you’re learning a new sport at 30-plus years old,” Schultz said. “But through that process, I was just thinking mechanically. ‘OK, does this device move and react the way it needs to for the movement needed in snowboarding?’ And in short, I learned enough to understand that, ‘Yeah, this is a good tool for that.’”
That got him into snowboarding.
But it took him a few years to get comfortable going down a racecourse. His products also progressed, which helped ease him into it. He joined the U.S. para snowboard team in 2015, with a young daughter, Lauren, at home and the thought that racing was done. But a door opened.
“I just remember looking at Mike and being like, ‘This is one of those big doors that opens in your life,’” Sara Schultz said. “‘And you have to walk through it, run through it, jump through it, however that looks.’”
Mike Schultz competes this week in snowboard cross. After three trips to the Winter Games, Schultz says this will be his last Paralympics. (Dario Belingheri / Getty Images)
Going into the 2018 Paralympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, he knew he had a real chance at making the team. So the mindset shifted during the 2017 season to lock in on snowboarding. “So that’s really when it was, ‘Heck, yeah, I’m actually really good at this,’” Schultz said.
After snowboarding was introduced at the 2014 Paralympics, with just one men’s and women’s category under para alpine, it evolved into its own sport. The 2018 Games featured three different categories for the men’s snowboard cross event. Schultz made his Paralympic debut that year and won gold in snowboard cross and silver in banked slalom.
In the years since, Schultz has balanced his family, competitive snowboarding and his business. It’s a lot of balance work with a lot of help from Sara, who works with Schultz on BioDapt. The snowboarder spent 175 days on the road last year, which meant Sara was handling their 10-acre farm at home with their now 12-year-old daughter, along with the business.
“The joke is, I’m the chaos coordinator,” Sara said. “That’s my official title, whatever needs to be done. That’s what I’m doing that day.”
The push and pull of time away from family is a big part of Schultz’s decision to retire. As is the next evolution of BioDapt.
“Nothing can go out when he’s on the road,” Sara said. “He puts his TLC into every product we ship out.”
Given Mike Schultz’s busy schedule, product development has been slower than he’d like for someone who has enjoyed helping adaptive sports grow. Schultz and BioDapt have a new partnership with software company Autodesk, which will aim to help the company innovate more across both winter and summer para sports in the lead-up to the 2028 Games in Los Angeles.
But in the final days of his own journey as a Paralympic athlete, Schultz’s impact is already undeniable. At these Games, 29 athletes are using his product. The entire U.S. Paralympic snowboard team in the LL-1 and LL-2 classes — lower-limb impairments — uses the company’s prosthetic knee (Moto Knee) and foot (Versa Foot).
“I couldn’t be more proud to be on his product,” 28-year-old U.S. snowboarder Noah Elliott said. “At the end of the day, he makes the best prosthetic for snowboarding that we’ve seen. To be working with him (and) BioDapt over the years, and being able to kind of play and test things with Schultz, has been such a phenomenal experience.”
That’s a “double-edged sword,” as Schultz says, with the snowboarder up against his top competitors and his American teammates — and they do beat him. Last weekend, that honor went to Elliott as he picked up the silver medal in Schultz’s LL-1 category.
“It’s always fun when you get to wear the leg he made and beat him,” Elliott said. “So I was very proud about that.”
The younger competitors are one of the reasons Schultz is laughing and feeling better about retirement as he finishes his time at Paralympics. “I’ve been at this for 26, 27 years now, and I’m starting to feel it,” he said. “These younger guys and kids are coming up, and they’re pushing me beyond my comfort zone too often, so it’s time to pass the torch on to Noah.”
As Schultz finished those words in the mixed zone after Sunday’s race, another younger competitor, Zach Miller, was waiting to talk with reporters. As they traded places, Miller told Schultz, “I love you, man,” and the two shared a long hug.
Miller struggled to find the words to describe what Schultz has meant to him. The 27-year-old got started in the sport as it was just taking off, ahead of its first appearance in the Paralympics in Sochi 2014. Watching the United States men sweep the podium in the sport’s first iteration was an inspiration.
If Miller could keep up with them, that could be him. While Schultz made his Games debut with a gold medal in 2018, Miller calls it special to have someone such as Schultz to look up to and eventually call a teammate.
“His story is like one of the shining examples of the Paralympic spirit,” Miller said.
