“Monster” Mike Schultz has medaled several times at the X Games—on both snowmobiles and motorbikes. Impressive, right? Even more impressive: He did it wearing a prosthetic leg he built himself out of mountain-bike parts.
You see, back in December 2008, Schultz became an extreme sports cautionary tale. He charged to pass a competitor during a snowmobile race, and his sled started bouncing, pitching him off. He hit the ground so hard it bent his left knee in the wrong direction. “I remember lying there, looking at the bottom of my boot on my chest,” recalls the 31-year-old from Pillager, Minnesota.
The leg had to come off. Five weeks and several surgeries later, Schultz was fitted with a prosthesis. But as soon as he climbed on a snowmobile, he realized his new knee wasn’t going to survive such high-impact activity. Schultz considered retiring. But when he heard that the summer 2009 X Games were adding an adaptive motocross race, he decided to build himself a better leg.
Schultz asked friends at a local R&D facility for mountain-bike maker Fox if he could use their parts and equipment to create a tougher prosthesis. Though handy with tools before the accident—he’d done metal fabrication and welding—he had no experience machining. So he learned. Seven months after losing his leg, Schultz and his homebrew appendage, dubbed the Moto Knee, entered the Moto X Racing Adaptive, winning silver. The next year, the X Games added adaptive snocross and Schultz took gold. He hopes to do it again this year in Aspen, Colorado.
Schultz has started a business, Biodapt, which manufactures a variety of prosthetics designed to handle the wear and tear of action sports. One of his first customers was Keith Deutsch, a retired US Army sergeant who lost his right leg above the knee in an RPG attack in Iraq in 2003; he has since become a competitive adaptive snowboarder. Like Schultz, Deutsch was a talented athlete before he lost his leg. And also like Schultz, he hasn’t slowed down.
