Team USA left the best for last on the final day of the Milan Cortina Paralympic Games para snowboard events. Of a possible six medals in the men’s LL1 and women’s LL2 banked slalom, U.S. athletes took home four — including both golds, won by Noah Elliott and Kate Delson. It was also a day for firsts and lasts, as Delson stood on top of the podium in her debut Games, Brenna Huckaby took home lessons the three-time champion has never had to consider before, and Mike Shultz rounded out a stellar career with what he said was his last Paralympic run of his career.

“It felt amazing to be competing on the Paralympic stage,” Delson said. “I was really taking it in on my rounds, because I was like, ‘This is my first time getting my first drop, and this is my first time going for a medal at a Paralympics.’ I was trying to be very present.”

At just 20-years-old, Delson represents the future of para snowboarding. She first started on the mountain skiing aged just 3, switching to snowboarding three years later as it was easier due to a congenital disability which affected the muscles of her right leg. It wasn’t until high school, however, that she began racing, and started to see herself as a serious athlete. 

“I never knew I could be athletic, because of my disability,” she said. “I always loved sports and running and playing with soccer balls and basketballs, but I never considered myself athletic until I started training like an athlete, and then realized I can be.”

Delson credits para sports with feeling that her disability didn’t impact her negatively. “I fell in love with [snowboarding] so fast because I truly didn't feel my disability was holding me back when I was riding my snowboard. And right now, I've gotten to a level where it is so fun,” she said.

Fun is what Huckaby also has repeatedly stated she’s focused on in Milan Cortina. She came into her third Games having earned a medal in every Paralympic para snowboard event she has ever entered, and as she edges towards the end of her competitive career (Huckaby plans to compete at least one more season and to see how it goes from there), she said that personal happiness — not medals — is what counts the most.

That doesn’t mean she was thrilled to have walked away from para snowboard cross — an event she was slated to win — having not made it out of the semi-finals when a crash in front of her impeded her time. But with just a few days to reflect she is already underscoring what the loss gives to her and her young family.

“The biggest lesson was that losing isn’t the end of the world,” she said. “As a parent, the number one thing I try to do is show rather than tell. And I believe I did that with this event. They only know me as ‘Mom who wins,’ and they got to watch, ‘Mom who doesn’t win,’ and there was no visible difference between the two.”

Huckaby said that those lessons made her bronze medal in banked slalom all the sweeter. As one of the few snowboarders without a knee, and one of the even fewer ones without a knee on their crucial back leg, she has struggled recently to break the podium in banked slalom at World Cup and World Championship events. 

Her coaches have learned that telling her what to do with her body has had unpredictable results as such a key part of her body is prosthetic. Instead, they tell her what to do with her board, and let her figure out her body on her own. The strategy is clearly working. “Deep down, I still believed I could do it, which is how I ended up on the podium today,” she said.

That creativity and willingness to adapt is present in all para athletes. But it's Schultz who has arguably taken it to an entirely different level. 

When a snowmobile snowcross race accident left him with an above-knee amputation, he started work on what would become the ‘Moto Knee,’ a prosthetic designed for athletes who need high-level shock absorption. He founded BioDapt, a company for sports prostheses, and won gold in para snowboard cross and silver in banked slalom at the 2018 PyeongChang Paralympics, earning another silver in Beijing four years later.

It makes me incredibly proud to watch all the athletes race, and know that ninety plus percent of all the lower limb amputees that are competing are on equipment that I built, and knowing that I played a small part in elevating the performance of it all,” he said.

It’s also why the bronze medal in banked slalom feels like such a gift to Schultz — and partially why he’s calling an end to his competitive career, allowing him to place his attention full time on the company.

“I knew it was going to be my last Games,” he said. “I was very hungry for another podium. But in banked slalom — I’m not usually in the top. Over the last few seasons, Noah Elliott and Team China and Team Japan, those guys have been crushing it. But to be able to throw down a podium finish on my last run of the last Games of my career — man that felt so good.”

Like Huckaby, he’d been stymied in his marquee event, para snowboard cross, and a medal seemed to have slipped away completely.

“I couldn’t be more proud of how it ended, here, in Italy, with a bronze medal, standing next to my teammate, Noah [Elliott], bringing home the gold. I couldn’t have written it better myself,” he added.

Elliott felt similarly, earning his second medal, and first gold, of the Milan Cortina Games. “I’ve worked so hard. This is my ‘Redemption Games.’ And to be able to stand atop the podium today and hear our national anthem — I couldn’t be more proud. 

After a gold and silver in his breakout games in PyeongChang in 2018, his medal-less Paralympic outing in Beijing in 2022 was particularly horrific. Throughout the competition, he sported an injury in which his femur had broken through muscle and skin, resulting in a secondary additional amputation after those Games. Coming back from that, relearning how to walk, how to snowboard, his medals in Cortina held particular personal impact.

“It was hard for me not to cry coming across that finish line,” he said. “I’m so, so proud.

Pride is a recurring theme at any Games, be they Olympic or Paralympic. And for the four athletes standing on the two podiums as the stars and stripes rose high and the Star-Spangled Banner began to play, it was a poignant moment of achievement. Each of the para snowboarders leaving Cortina with medals expressed how much they hope that the division can expand. Huckaby and Delson both hope to see more women out on the track, Schultz plans to expand the ability of prosthetics, mentoring young riders as he goes, and Elliott hopes to one day see mountain riding in the Paralympic Games.

But all of them also noted just how far the sport has come from its first days as a trial sport in Sochi 2014 under the umbrella of para Alpine Skiing. That momentum is something they hope to have written something of a blueprint for, with new riders like Delson to continue that legacy. To quote Schultz as he reflected on the past 12 years the sport has been its own Paralympic category of para snowboarding: “It’s been a hell of a ride.”