"Monster" Mike Schultz lost his left leg after he was thrown from his snowmobile during a race in 2008. The amputation didn't hold him back.
Seven months later, the St. Cloud resident won a silver medal in adaptive motocross at the ESPN X Games with a rugged prosthetic racing leg that he designed to handle the unforgiving terrain.
The lifelong tinkerer, now 38, went on to create his own business. Today BioDapt Inc. engineers mechanical knees and prosthetic limbs so other amputees can have the strength and reliability needed in rough-and-tumble sports.
Schultz's customers include hundreds of veterans, cancer survivors and other athletes from around the world. Still, Schultz hasn't lost sight of continuing to improve his creations.
Determined to make a better leg for himself after winning gold and silver in snowboarding at the Pyeongchang 2018 Paralympic Winter Games, Schultz designed the Moto Knee and Versa Foot 2 system. The new prosthetic parts, recently manufactured by Maple Plain-based Protolabs, helped Schultz take home the gold on Jan. 25 at the adaptive snow bikecross competition at the 2020 Winter X Games in Aspen, Colo.
His 10th X Games victory was extra special since it came using Schultz's first full redesign in about 10 years. The new parts, milled by robotic machines in Protolab's Brooklyn Park plant, gave Shultz "a more natural range of motion" between the mechanical knee and foot, he said.
Schultz selected Protolabs to turn his product design into reality because of its fast production capabilities, he said.
Protolabs's robotic-milling machines whittled blocks of aluminum into precise parts in just hours, which meant Schultz could quickly test and fine-tune his components. He could even swap the new parts into some of his other leg frames, he said.