The Winter X Games at Buttermilk Mountain in Aspen, Colorado, in January 2013 saw Minnesota’s “Monster” Mike Schultz taking home the gold medal in the Snowmobile SnoCross Adaptive final event. During the race, the 31-year-old amputee was tossed from his sled in the first turn but he limped back to it, got back on and overtook the leaders in just a few laps.
Schultz is not new to X Games, or to snocross for that matter. He started racing motocross in 1997 and snocross a year later, and this was his third consecutive gold medal win at Winter X Games. Schultz suffered a devastating blow to his racing career in 2008 when he crashed in a championship snocross qualifier in Ironwood, Michigan—ending up in a bad spot.
He remembers the accident like it happened yesterday.
“I got a horrible start and was fighting my way through the pack, and about halfway through the race, I got bumped sideways and somewhat bucked off the machine,” said Schultz. “It was just the way I put my leg out to brace my fall as a reaction; my knee went into hyperextension and actually folded the wrong way and it actually came up and kicked me in the chin. From that point on, it was the most painful situation I had ever been in.”
After a gruelling ride to the hospital and several emergency surgeries later, complications arose, and it was discovered that Schultz would need to have his left leg amputated from above the knee in order to save his life. At that point, Schultz thought his career as a professional snowmobile racer was over, but his friends and family thought otherwise.
“In the hospital, my friends and family were joking, ‘Yeah, he will be designing a leg out of a FOX shock or something before too long,’ ” said Schultz.
Redefining his ride
Five and a half weeks after the accident, Schultz was fitted with his first prosthesis—a basic hinge knee. It was not suited well for riding snowmobiles, and after Schultz got back on a sled, he knew that was where he wanted to be, so he set out to build his own prosthesis using a FOX mountain bike shock.
“Throughout my racing career, I was always into tuning my own suspension, so this was kind of a fun project for me,” he said.
After a month with his project on the drawing board, Schultz asked the people at a FOX research and development facility—which was located near his hometown—if he could use their equipment to build a prototype of what he named the Moto Knee. They agreed, and a week later, Schultz had finished the prototype and was testing his new appendage.
“I finally got it together and bolted on and I took 10 steps over to my dirt bike and went for a ride down the trail and within minutes, I knew I was on to something,” he said.
After winning a silver medal in an adaptive motocross event at Extremity Games in 2009, Schultz made another, more refined version of his Moto Knee and took home the silver at Summer X Games 2009 for adaptive supercross. The following year, he started Biodapt Inc. with a plan to develop and sell performance prosthetic equipment.
Inspiring others
Since then, Schultz has sold about 50 production models of his Moto Knee to amputees from a variety of sports-related fields.
“I have the best job in the world right now,” he said. “I can still do all the activities I love because it’s helping to develop my equipment. Whether it’s dirt biking, snowmobiling, snowboarding, horseback riding—everything I do revolves around the Moto Knee and I can just write it off as research and development. And the other side is I get to help all these other amputees, allowing them to do the activities they want to do—so it’s a win-win for everybody.”
Schultz’s story of success has even reached the U.S. military. Two years ago, he and snowmobile freestyle heavyweight Levi LaVallee went on a 10-day trip overseas to visit the American troops. While they were on tour in Germany, Schultz said, he and LaVallee spoke to a couple of soldiers who had just come off the battlefield and were suffering from severe injury.
“I came in and they didn’t notice at first that I was missing my leg," he said, "but when I started telling my story and brought out the X Games gold medals . . . their attitude brightened right up and they were laughing and smiling (by the end of our visit).”
Schultz was moved by the experience, and since then, he’s been on four other troop tours in the U.S.
Since his accident, Schultz has become a Summer X Games gold medallist, an Extremity Games Motocross gold medallist and, with his most recent win at the 2013 Winter X Games in Aspen, Schultz can boast he is a three-time Winter X Games gold medallist.
Racing on
What’s next for Monster Mike? In addition to building his company Biodapt Inc., Schultz will be competing at the 2013 Extremity Games this spring. He will also be following the new Terracross Championship—a Polaris RZR racing circuit—in the U.S. this summer.
He added, “I’m working close with FOX with some big plans. I’ve always got my mind open to new opportunities. New things come along all the time and we will just see where it goes from there.”
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