When Josh Elliott signed up for his first adaptive snowboard lessons, his objectives were purely recreational. He’d lost his legs six months earlier while on combat duty in Afghanistan, and he was eager to test his new prosthetics on the slopes.
“I had been a snowboarder for 15 years, so I really thought I could pick up where I left off,” says Elliott, a former Marine sergeant. “But I was very much confronted with my disability. I spent three days trying to relearn a skill that I had been really good at, and it turned out I was not even close to where I was before. I came off the hill broken and in tears. I wanted to throw my snowboard in the trash.”
This was back in 2011, at the annual Hartford Ski Spectacular conducted by Move United. The week-long event still had a day or two to run, so he reluctantly—at an instructor’s insistence—agreed to spend the remaining time learning to sit-ski. To his surprise, it immediately clicked.
“It was made for me,” says Elliott. “I was still on a board in a sense, because it’s just one ski with two edges. The only different was that I’m facing forward.”
Another Ski Spec instructor saw Elliott deftly navigating the hill, and he invited him to a developmental racing camp to be held in a few months. Soon after that, he entered his first sanctioned race and took second place. And before he knew it, the recreational snowboarder was an elite alpine ski competitor, representing Team USA at World Cup events, World Championship races, and—in 2018—the Winter Paralympics in Pyeongchang.
Those were the furthest things from his mind when he started out. “It wasn’t about going out and competing, it was just about moving forward in my recovery,” Elliott says. “Sit-skiing helped me get stronger. It helped me get off my medications. It helped me find focus and joy during a period of my life where there was so much pain, so many things were changing, and there was so many struggles. When I was sliding on snow, I felt a sense of normality that I didn’t really get anywhere else.”
That’s a benefit anyone can enjoy, whether or not they aspire to compete. That goes for Elliott himself: He retired from racing years ago, but he’ll be sit-skiing for the rest of his life. He was back at the Ski Spectacular last December, as he is most years, as an instructor for the latest generation of adaptive snow-sporters. We asked him to reflect on his own unlikely journey to the Paralympics, and the overall growth of recreational opportunities for amputees. You can catch him on Instagram at jtms42.
Our conversation is lightly edited for length and readability.
It sounds as if Paralympic skiing found you, rather than vice versa.
I had no idea the Paralympic pipeline even existed. I was noticed by the development program in Aspen, and they asked me to come up to Mount Hood for tryouts. This was less than a year after I was injured and only a few months after I started skiing, and I went up there with a pretty bloated head and a large attitude.. I thought, “Wow, they asked me to come, and it’s only been these few months!” I thought I was God’s gift to the snow. But I realized really quickly that I had a long way to go.
Describe that learning curve for me. What types of skills did you have to pick up?
I became better a skier than I ever was a snowboarder. I attribute that partly to the amount of time I spent on the snow, but also the fact that every time I was out there, I had a coach or an instructor or a volunteer or someone correcting me, guiding me, and showing me how to do things better. Slowly but surely, they chipped away at all my bad habits and taught me how to find my edge, how to let the ski do the work for me, how to get ahead of the turn, how to look ahead and understand line choice and so many different aspects of this sport that I never would have known. Those three or four years on the development team were about getting rid of all these little bad habits, breaking me down, and building me up.
What are some of the bad habits you had to get coached out of?
The weakest part of my skiing was dropping inside [the turn]—I would put a little bit of weight on my inside rigger [the hand-held “pole” that sit-skiers use for balance]. The second you even touch a rigger to the ground, you’re creating drag and costing yourself a little speed. The best way to go is to be completely balanced over your ski and keep your riggers off the ground. But if you do have to touch them, you don’t want to put your weight on them.
That was the weakest part of my skiing, so I had to come up with ways to trigger myself during a race to remind myself not to do it. For me, it wasn’t about shifting my weight to the outside [of a turn]. It was about lifting my weight on the inside. So my key word became “lift.” If I found myself dropping on the inside, I said “lift” in my head, or even out loud. And the second I would lift my inside, it didn’t matter where I was in the turn—my hips would drop, everything would fall into the correct position, and I would stay balanced. But it was such an ingrained habit, I needed some quick device to remind myself.
How do you like being a coach? Like, what’s the what’s the reward of that role for you?
The reward for me is seeing the development in the athletes. Not just young athletes, but also athletes who were injured and come into the sport later in life. The development even over a five-day period at Ski Spectacular can be amazing if you’re coachable. We talk about coachability as the ability that when you’re asked to do something—even if it’s something you’ve never done, or even if it’s something you’re uncomfortable with—you’ll try and give it your best effort. Watching people have that breakthrough moment where they do something they’ve never done before and realizing, “Oh my gosh, that worked—I can do that!” is amazing. And then they start trying it over and over, and you watch their skiing develop incredibly fast. It’s so rewarding to know that you have this small little hand in helping them become better.
A lot of our readers don’t consider themselves athletes at all. When someone like that comes to Ski Spectacular, how do you get them comfortable with skiing?
I think athlete is a mindset. You can find enjoyment and joy in sports in so many different ways. Not everyone has the ambition or goal to go to the Paralympics, and you don’t have to pigeonhole yourself into that.
Learning a sport, or learning any new skill, is always difficult in the beginning. But the growth you gain from it, and the recognition that you can do something, will always translate over into regular life outside of sports. You develop friends, you meet new people and hear new stories, and you develop your own body and your mind. I can’t really see a place or a time where this wouldn’t help. Even when people come up here and struggle the whole time, they leave here going, “I made progress. I tried something. I made some friends.” There’s always one thing or another you can point to. And I would hope that everyone who comes here for the first time thinks, “I want to come back someday. I want to get back in there and do that again.”
