Evan Strong has earned every title in adaptive snowboarding. He has a gold medal from the 2014 Sochi Paralympics, a silver medal from the 2018 Pyeongchang Paralympics, several World Cup titles, world championship titles, and a handful of X Games medals, too.

What more can a Paralympian accomplish?

Well, the Olympics.

The 30-year-old Strong, who just finished competing in Pyeongchang, has spent the past six years working to become the first Paralympic snowboarder to compete against able-bodied athletes in the Winter Olympics, something he hopes to accomplish at the 2022 Beijing Games.

“It’s all in the works,” he said before the 2018 Paralympics. “After this games I’m going to focus full time on able-bodied racing and step away from adaptive racing for a couple years.”

Strong grew up on Maui and was well on his way to becoming a professional skateboarder when, at 17, he was riding his motorcycle and was hit head-on by a drunken driver. His left leg was partially amputated.

He learned to snowboard three years later, in 2007, and quickly rose through the ranks of adaptive snowboarding. In 2017, he won a national title competing against able-bodied athletes in Colorado.

“Being able to win an able-bodied national title in snowboardcross as someone with a prosthetic leg — it’s, like, almost as euphoric as winning a gold medal in the games in Sochi,” he said.

Strong would not be the first Paralympic athlete to compete against able-bodied competitors. Oscar Pistorius, the double-amputee and sprinter from South Africa, competed in the 2012 Olympic Games. The International Association of Athletics Federations initially barred Pistorius from competing, saying Pistorius’ blade prosthetics gave him an advantage. Pistorius prevailed in court in 2008.

Ten years later, the conclusions of that case remain murky, however, and the scientific debate about whether the prosthetics offer a competitor some unfair advantage has never been fully settled.

When asked if Strong could enter the snowboarding competitions, officials with the International Ski Federation (FIS), which oversees the sport, had to study their rule book.

Oliver Kraus, a spokesman for the FIS, said he was unable to find anything in the 171-page guide that would prevent Strong from competing. But Kraus pointed to rule 222, which states that all equipment used in competitions must conform to FIS regulations. Whether Strong’s prosthetic will be evaluated as equipment remains to be seen.

“Nuances come in with impairment,” said Julie Dussliere, the vice president of U.S. Paralympics. When it comes to athletes with visual impairments, she said, “there’s no question whatsoever” that they can participate in able-bodied competitions. When equipment, prosthetics or otherwise, is required, questions arise.

Much of the prosthetic technology that extreme athletes use today is fairly new, and many recent advances in adaptive snowboarding came from Mike Schultz.

Schultz was a professional snowmobile racer until 2008, when he sustained an injury during competition and had to have his leg amputated. When he returned to snowmobiling, he realized the available prosthetics were just too limiting. “So the wheels started turning, and I decided to design my own knee,” he said.

Schultz founded BioAdapt, a prosthetic company in Minnesota that now outfits the entire U.S. para snowboard team — which includes him. Schultz won a silver medal in banked slalom in Pyeongchang and a gold in snowboardcross in the SB-LL1 classification, for athletes who have significant impairment of one leg.

In Pyeongchang, Strong fell short of the repeat gold medal he was seeking. He finished the games with a fourth-place finish in snowboardcross and a silver medal in banked slalom under the SB-LL2, a classification for athletes with impairment in one or two legs, with less activity limitation.

To get to the Olympic Games, Strong must change his schedule to focus on able-bodied events. He will need to rise through the ranks within the able-bodied divisions, from regionals to nationals to World Cup events.

“The exciting thing is planting a seed and seeing how it spreads,” Strong said, pointing to the flood of runners who went on to break the four-minute-mile barrier after Roger Bannister first did so in May 1954.

“If I could do it, I could give so many people with disabilities the permission to do the same or better than me,” Strong said. “By the end of my career, it’d be nice to leave a legacy to have set a bar somewhere.”