By Emily Chen-Newton
As a bilateral above-the-knee amputee, Mandy Horvath has set multiple world records, hoisting herself up mountains and monuments, with only her arms and her willpower. Her greatest achievement to date, is her ascent of Mount Kilimanjaro in 2021. For this and other significant accomplishments, she’s recently been named on the TIME100 Sports list.
Since 1999, TIME Magazine has released an annual list of the 100 most influential people. This June, the publication unveiled its first-ever TIME100 Sports list featuring athletes and industry leaders. The honor came as a complete shock to Horvath. “For a long time, I didn’t consider myself an athlete,” Horvath says.
“I wasn’t climbing mountains because I wanted world records. I wasn’t trying to become fit or build a career around athletics. In fact, I chain smoked on many of my climbs.” She says the only climb she truly trained for was Kilimanjaro, which earned her the title of the first woman without legs to climb any of the “Seven Summits” – the highest peaks on each continent.
For all those climbs, Horvath says she wasn’t chasing athletic goals; she was trying to save her own life. “The mountains gave me a purpose when I desperately needed it. They gave me something to focus on besides grief, trauma, and everything I had lost.”
She competed in the 2025 season of the reality TV and survival show, Naked and Afraid. That’s when her perspective started to change. That experience, she says, demanded a completely different level of preparation and discipline.
She quit smoking, changed her approach to training and “embraced the responsibility that comes with representing the adaptive community.”
“Today, I do consider myself an adaptive athlete,” Horvath says, “but that identity took a long time to earn in my own mind.”
Writing a memoir has long been on her mind, and the recognition from TIME has renewed her commitment to telling her story. Her memoir, which she explains as a non-linear collection of letters to the people, places and events that have shaped her life, will explore everything from “mountains and milestones, to grief, survival, disability, relationships and identity.”
Like many in the limb-loss community, Horvath has survived enormous tragedy. She was struck by a train, severing both of her legs above her knees, on a blurry night in 2014 when she believes her drink was spiked.
Four years later, in 2018, she began to fully embody her new body. The first night she dreamt of herself without legs was after she climbed the Manitou Incline, a trail near Colorado Springs gaining 2,000 feet of elevation up 2,768 steps made of railroad ties. The irony of climbing, swinging her body like a pendulum through her arms up the railroad ties, is not lost on her.
Horvath has also climbed the steps of the Statue of Liberty and The Space Needle in Seattle, as well as Pike’s Peak in Colorado, among others.
If she had the chance to talk to her younger self, the version of herself lying in the hospital bed after losing her legs, Horvath says she would actually hold back and not say too much. The temptation is to try and spare ourselves the pain, mistakes and difficult seasons, but she says, “Every one of those experiences shaped who I became.”
“I’ve learned so much. I’ve grown so much…I’ve stood on mountains I never could have imagined. I’ve lived a life that version of me couldn’t possibly see coming.”
She explains if she tried to change her younger self too much, she wouldn’t be the person she is today. And she adds, “And I like who she became.”
There is a sense of responsibility, Horvath says, that comes along with this new accolade, an obligation to use her platform thoughtfully. So, she wants to keep doing work that “matters, telling stories that matter and encouraging people to pursue goals they once thought were impossible.”
Mostly, Horvath says she wants “that newly injured amputee, especially that little girl who’s scared of what her future might look like, to know that her story isn’t over.”
“There will be days when life feels impossibly hard…But there will also be joy, adventure, love, purpose, and accomplishments she can’t even imagine yet.”
“Dream big. Take up space. Put yourself on the map.”
It’s also important to celebrate the success of others, believes Horvath. “I truly believe it will never be your turn unless you learn to clap for others when it’s theirs.”
In just a couple of days, Horvath will be clapping loudly for others at the TIME100 Sports Gala in New York City.
