An Olympic snowboarder describes a late-night visit from a young girl with prosthetic legs who drove four hours to meet him after seeing his Instagram post. Spending an hour explaining his equipment, he realizes his career's real purpose isn't winning medals but showing people they can pursue their dreams despite physical challenges.
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I get this phone call and they say that there's somebody downstairs to talk to me. And I was thinking, who would it be? It must be my coach, I guess. And so I put my pajamas on, I went downstairs, and there was this young girl standing there on two prosthetic legs with 5 people around her. And they saw on Instagram that I was in this little village and they jumped in the car, they drove 4 4 hours to find me. They knocked down every door in that village to find me.
Wow.
And it was all to figure out how I snowboarded in 2 prosthetic legs so that she could do it too.
That's pretty cool. Just that alone might have been worth the whole experience, right?
Well, it did. It completely changed my whole view on why I did what I did. And it took the kind of pressure of like, oh, like, you know, I'm here to win medals away completely. I thought that's not what it's about at all. I ended up sitting down with her. It was her grandparents and a translator and her leg maker, and they, you know, were all trying to figure out how I set my legs up. I spent the next hour with them. And when I walked away, I thought to myself immediately, I thought, that's why. That's why I do this. Not to win medals, not to be the best in the world, but to show other people that they can do this too, like they can live their dreams too, no matter what challenges they're faced with.
