Throughout his life, Stacy Kohut has always been involved in extreme and action sports. In a telephone interview with GrindTV, Stacy recalls memories from his childhood, saying “I can remember charging kids on my street five cents a head to watch me jump my bike over a barrel we filled with water.”
Stacy was a three-time Alberta provincial BMX racing champion in the early 1980s.
Then in 1992, Stacy became a paraplegic when he broke his back after falling from a swing set. The accident, however, did not hinder his desire to participate in extreme sports. Stacy went on to compete in the 1994, 1998, and 2002 Paralympic Games in para-skiing, collecting one gold and three silver medals.
Setting out to develop his own four-wheeled mountain bike, Red Bull featured Stacy on their Youtube Channel, with a first hand perspective of him riding his bike, deeming him the “World’s Fastest Mountain Biker on Four Wheels.”
“But then I realized, the best thing I could do to help people out in wheelchairs is to just go out and be rad,” Stacy says.
“I figured if I could go out and rip a mountain biking trail and look good to the point where someone says, ‘Oh that dude is killing it on his bike’ instead of ‘Oh that paraplegic dude is killing it on his bike’ it would help add a normalcy to what disabled athletes are doing.”
And that’s exactly what Stacy is doing. Stacy has recently shifted his focus from competing in para events to competing against able-bodied athletes. “I just want to be a rider on a team treated like anyone else so that people see wheelchair athletes are no different than anyone else.”