Meet Samantha Bosco:

It all started with a hunter green mountain bike, finished up with a powder-coated bright yellow RockShox fork and a green dinosaur horn. With a smile so bright shining through my dirt-covered face it could light up a moonless night, I dreamt of becoming a professional mountain bike racer. As I zipped along the trails of Kincaid Park, I’d dream of maneuvering over true roots in Spain, through hairpin turns and jagged terrane of Italy, and being stopped by the occasional moose taking a nap in the middle of my home trails in Alaska.

But, at 11 years old, the bike, those trails, and that dream were soon replaced with shiny silver crutches and three years of surgeries to fix a leg-length discrepancy acquired from being born with a bowed tibia. The surgery to length my right leg two and a half inches didn’t go quite as planned, and a scheduled three months in a brace stretched into years. Now I am left with permanent damage: an ankle that doesn’t move more than eight degrees and really dislikes cold weather, nerve damage that lets my toes and calf be lazy, a right leg that lets me claim two different heights when someone asks how tall I am, two different shoe sizes, and a generally smaller right leg.

I’ve had my share of twists along the way after finally graduating from using crutches at 14 — like retiring from rowing after earning a full athletic scholarship to a D1 university — but I found my way back to cycling and road racing in 2011.

To land among the stars you must first believe you are a star.

Two years later, I found paracycling and made the US Paralympics Cycling national team with a bronze medal ride in the time trial at the Paracycling Road World Championships. With its own bit of hiccups as well, I ultimately found my way back to the first big dream I remember ever having.

I achieved my nine-year-old’s dream of being a professional cyclist and became 2× Paralympic bronze medalist at the 2016 Paralympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. Afterwards, I went on to become a World Champion (3K individual pursuit in 2017) and set my sights on the 2020 Tokyo Paralympic Games.

Three days after being named to the Team USA roster for the Tokyo Games in the summer of 2021 I suffered a traumatic brain injury and two skull fractures that would live me riding the couch at home instead of riding my bike in Tokyo. Though the road to recovery was long and filled with a lot of lows in the high moments, I became stronger than ever and went on to win every para-cycling road race I entered in 2022, becoming a double World Champion (road time trial and road race) in Baie-Comeau, Canada August of 2022.

I have since defended my titles at the 2023 UCI Cycling World Championships, along with earning two silver medals and a bronze on the track there as well, adding to the 3× ParaPan Am Games gold medals (2015 road race, 2019 500 meter time trial and 3K individual pursuit), 16× national championships, 3× Women’s Pro 1/2 (able-body) California State Time Trial Championships, World Cup Series Overall Wins (2017, 2022, 2023), and multi-time World Championship and World Cup medals.