Davy Zyw can rip down a snowboard cross course at full speed. He cannot zip his own jacket.

Both are because of the motor neurone disease he was diagnosed with at age 30, when doctors told him he had two to three years to live. He is 38 now, seven years past that prognosis, and in nine days he will compete at the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Paralympic Games as what is believed to be the first snowsport athlete with MND ever to do so.

"I've had to accept the impossible," Zyw said. "Within that, there was a freedom. A freedom that nothing is impossible, and that's the message I want people to take away."

The Long Way Back

Zyw grew up in Edinburgh, Scotland. He and his twin brother Tommy started snowboarding together as teenagers at the Hillend dry slope outside the city. He was obsessed with it in the way that some people are with sports that feel like discovery.

A knee injury ended those early ambitions, and Zyw moved into the wine trade, eventually becoming an expert champagne buyer for Berry Bros & Rudd, one of Britain's oldest wine and spirits merchants. Snowboarding stayed in the past. Then the MND diagnosis arrived in 2018.

Motor neurone disease progressively destroys the nerves controlling movement. Muscles in the limbs and torso weaken over time. There is no cure. For Zyw, the impact has been to his hands, arms, and torso. He fatigues severely, experiences cramping and muscle wastage, and loses the fine motor control that makes a zipper, a glove, or a jacket button suddenly difficult in ways that are not visible from the outside.

"I can rip down a snowboard cross course at full speed," he has said, "but I need help putting my gloves on or zipping up my jacket."

That is not a poetic contrast. It is the specific geometry of how MND works in his body: explosive whole-body movement largely preserved, fine motor control diminished. The Paralympic classification system exists precisely to assess what that means for each athlete: what they can do, measured accurately, so that competition is fair.

What Zyw decided to do with that reality was come back to snowboarding. He returned to it not as therapy, but as the thing he had loved before everything else happened, now with a different kind of permission to pursue it all the way.

How He Got Here

In 2024, Zyw decided to pursue Paralympic qualification. Less than two years later, he was on the GB squad.

Here is what that took. Specialists at the sportscotland institute of sport built a training programme specifically around his limitations, developing compensations for the muscle weakness and fatigue that put him at a physical disadvantage in competition. His employer, Berry Bros & Rudd, supported his journey and has raised more than £700,000 for MND research. His twin brother Tommy travels to every competition. When Zyw needed to fund his qualifying costs directly, he crowdfunded them.

None of that is accidental. For families navigating a progressive diagnosis and wondering how an athlete gets from there to a Paralympic start line, the map in Zyw's story is real: a training programme tailored to the actual condition, an employer who showed up, a sibling who travels, a community that funds the gaps. The system had to be built around him, not the other way around.

In February 2026, competing at Big White in Canada, he won two silvers and finished with an overall bronze in the season-long rankings. He earned the spot.

What He Is Making History For

Getting to these Games required classification assessments, qualifying results, and consistent performance at international level. Zyw did it in under two years with a condition that progresses over time.

He will compete in Snowboard Cross on March 7 and 8 at Cortina d'Ampezzo, with the Banked Slalom on March 14. He is not the only first for ParalympicsGB at these Games. Nina Sparks becomes the first woman ever to represent Great Britain in snowboard at a Winter Paralympics, competing alongside him at Cortina.

What He Is Carrying Into the Start Gate

Zyw describes what he experiences as "the tragic beauty" of his situation. When he drops into a course, the condition recedes. The speed is the point.

"I'm seven years on," he has said, "and I've just fought my way up the ladder to get on the team at the Paralympics."

For families who have a diagnosis in the house, whether it is a child, a partner, or a parent living inside something progressive and uncertain, those words carry a different weight. "Fought my way up the ladder" is not a sports figure of speech. It describes the daily work of choosing a goal and moving toward it anyway, one day at a time, surrounded by people who believe in what you are attempting.

That is what Zyw found. That is what he is bringing to Cortina. The Games open March 6. His first event is March 7.