You couldn’t blame Noah Elliott for being a little “hangry” last summer while training for this year’s Paralympics. He was forced to eat only half his normal diet while training in Argentina to lose enough muscle mass so his leg could fit into his snowboarding prosthetic.
The tactic worked. At March’s Paralympic Games, the Colorado Springs snowboarder came home with his second Paralympic gold in the banked slalom and a silver in snowboard cross, adding to Colorado’s nation-leading haul of Olympic medals in Italy. He was among at least 14 Colorado athletes competing in the Paralympic Games last month.
The 28-year-old, who grew up skateboarding in Missouri and tried snowboarding for the first time in Steamboat Springs in 2015, prompting his move to Colorado, is basking in the Olympic limelight right now, and eating as much as he wants as he awaits getting fitted for a new prosthetic this summer and eyes a gold-medal hat trick at the 2030 Paralympic Games in the French Alps.
“Truthfully, right now I’m just trying to enjoy the moment and soak it all in,” Elliott said from his home in Colorado Springs just a day after returning home with a whopping nine pieces of luggage from Milan. “I’m excited to share this gold-medal moment with everyone.”
Medaling in Milan
Forget, for a second, all the hoopla surrounding such Colorado gold medal-winning Olympians as slalom queen Mikaela Shiffrin and halfpipe champion Alex Ferreira. For Elliott, returning from the Milano Cortina Paralympics with another gold medal around his neck, as well as a silver, cements his status in the Paralympic snowboarding echelon.
Held at the Cortina Para Snowboard Park in the heart of the pinnacled Dolomites, Elliott won the men’s SB-LL1 (for athletes with significant impairment in one or both legs, such as above-knee amputations or severe impairment causing balance and control challenges) banked slalom title, along with the silver in snowboard cross. Fellow American Kate Delson captured the women’s SB-LL2 (a lower degree of lower leg impairment) title in para snowboarding.
Elliott, who also won the gold at the 2018 Pyeongchang Paralympics, posted the two fastest times of the competition, barely one-tenth of a second ahead of Japan’s Daichi Oguri, who posted the only other run under one minute. American and prosthetic designer Mike Schultz, 44, claimed bronze in the final Paralympic race of his illustrious career. Elliott missed the podium in China’s 2022 Paralympics, taking fourth while competing on an unhealed residual-limb wound.
“There is always stoke to go around for everyone, but Noah is such a friend to the whole team,” said U.S. Ski & Snowboard Para Sport Director Erik Leirfallom. “And seeing Noah come back from being injured in China to finding the podium in Cortina is extra stoke. I couldn’t be prouder of the team overall. Podiums aside, there were so many great performances and personal bests from all our athletes, who showed that we are pushing the needle in the right direction for more success in the future.”
While snowboarding is a relatively new addition to the Paralympic Winter Games — snowboard cross debuted in 2014, with banked slalom added in 2018 — it hasn’t taken long for Elliott to leave his mark. The mustachioed Elliott, who returned a little bleary-eyed from Milan only to quickly turn around and head off to a U.S. Ski and Snowboard event in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, credits his team, training, background in skateboarding and time spent in his home state to his success.
From Midwest Skatepark Rat to Colorado Snowboarder
Elliott grew up in St. Charles, Missouri, hoping, like many a teenager, to become a professional skateboarder. But at age 15, after a skateboard event, he felt a pain in his leg and was eventually diagnosed with cancer.
Shortly later, in 2015, he visited Colorado for the first time with Sunshine Kids, a camp for children with cancer held at Steamboat Springs. He loved every mile-high moment.
“Steamboat was the first place I ever visited in Colorado, my first time laying eyes on mountains, and my first time on a snowboard,” he said. “I absolutely fell in love with it.”
In 2017, he ended up having his left leg amputated above the knee due to osteosarcoma. Around then he also met fellow osteosarcoma survivor and snowboarder Brenna Huckaby, who convinced him to try racing. He did, and quickly found his calling. So much so that he made his Paralympic debut at the 2018 Winter Paralympic Games in Pyeongchang where, applying his skateboarding skills to snow, he won gold in banked slalom and bronze in snowboard cross.
The next year, he moved to Steamboat, where he spent three years working for Steamboat Adaptive Recreational Sports, or STARS, sharing his love for it with other adaptive athletes. While there, he truly found his calling by giving back and inspiring others.
“Noah helped with a number of our adaptive snowboard lessons,” STARS Executive Director Susan Petersen said. “His enthusiasm for helping others learn and enjoy the sport that he first experienced through STARS at age 16 with Sunshine Kids was truly awe-inspiring. He’s a true leader and an inspiration to others with disabilities.”
As fulfilling as his role helping others was, however, he still felt the itch to compete. So in 2022, he moved to Winter Park for a year to focus on training before eventually moving to Colorado Springs. Although he missed the podium at the Beijing 2022 Paralympics with fourth- and sixth-place finishes — due largely to an unhealed wound on his leg — his decision to settle down in the Centennial State has paid off big time. He’s now a five-time world champion and two-time Paralympic champion with his recent gold in Milan.
Last year and again this year, Elliott returned to Steamboat to compete in the FIS Para Snowboard World Cup, the event’s first return to the U.S. in eight years. At this year’s homecoming event, he cemented the Crystal Globe for both banked slalom and overall, despite losing the banked slalom to longtime friend Schultz. The events marked the first chance for many U.S. para-team athletes to ever race a World Cup in their home country, and for Colorado to shine a spotlight on the sport.
“Both of those events were super cool because my family was finally able to come and watch me compete,” he said. “They’d never been able to before.”
Of prosthetics and competition
Though he excels at each, Elliott professes he’s better at banked slalom than cross. “Banked slalom is more my thing,” said Elliott, who’s sponsored by the likes of Alterra Mountain Co., Winterstick snowboards, prosthetics companies Ottobock and BioDapt, and Celsius Energy drinks. “You get to ride cleaner.”
As a lower limb amputee from his cancer, he also has a different riding style than many other racers on the World Cup and Paralympic circuit. He rides regular, with his left foot forward, placing his prosthetic in front.. “The majority of racers have it in the back,” he said. “But it works better up front for me, especially when I’m free riding.
“Having your good leg in back lets you absorb better and make those backfoot movements you need,” he added.
That’s not to say he doesn’t have issues with his prosthetics. He has two, one for riding and one for walking. In July, before heading to Argentina to train and race, he had bulked up, so his riding prosthetic no longer fit. He went anyway, eating only half his usual calories so his leg would shrink and it would fit. “I lost 10 pounds of muscle from having to make my leg fit for this year’s games,” he said. He’s getting fitted for a new one this summer.
Off the snow, he uses an Ottobock prosthetic as his walking leg, which operated a repair center at the games for all athletes, regardless of equipment type or brand, including adding new set screws and liner replacements (they completed more than 350 repairs over the course of the event).
For riding, Elliott uses a prosthetic from Schultz’s BioDapt. While the socket is the same for each, both take a royal beating. “I’m detaching the bolts and switching out multiple times every day, so it’s a lot of wear and tear,” he said, adding he had to fix his BioDapt prosthetic eight times this season. “Parts strip and liners wear out. So there’s a constant need for new equipment and repairs.”
As for his racing, he said his approach to cross and banked slalom is similar.
“The only real difference is that in banked slalom, there aren’t any outside factors you have to deal with,” he said. “It’s all on my shoulders. I have more comfort knowing that everything that happens is under my control. It lets me home in on my strong spots.”
For Elliott, that’s firm, fast snow. While the course’s snow at the games was borderline too soft during his training run, organizers salted it afterward, making it icier. He didn’t get a training run on the firmer course, but that was OK.
“That kept it firm and faster on race day, which helped,” he said. “I always do better when the course is firmer. It feels more like a skate park, from my upbringing skateboarding on concrete, and gives me something firm to push against.”
As with the cross course, he knew he needed to do well on the top portion, and that there might be problems on the bottom zone, which featured wider turns. There was also a section of rollers in the middle that “bucked a few people.” But he nailed both, with his second run besting his first by two-hundredths of a second. “I just want to leave the course knowing that I left it all out there and gave it my best, which I did.”
Having fellow competitor Schultz, who took the bronze, meet him at the finish also felt great — even though it was Schultz who broke his almost-three-year streak of World Cup banked slalom wins at this year’s last World Cup race in Steamboat.
“If I’m going to lose, I want it to be to him,” Elliott said. “He’s always been a big believer in me and was my first sponsor. I shared the podium with him my first season racing, and I shared it again at his last race. Watching that flag raise together was awesome.”