Keith Gabel Was Written Off Young. He's Been Proving People Wrong Ever Since.
Sitting in doping control after his race at the Beijing 2022 Paralympics, Keith Gabel pulled out his phone and texted his wife.
He had just taken seventh place. Twelve years of World Cup podiums and X Games medals and pushing a brand-new sport into existence from the ground floor had not produced the medal moment he was hoping for, and now he was sitting in a chair, in a room, waiting.
His wife responded with one sentence.
Looks like we're going to Italy.
Gabel read it. He sat with it for a moment.
Yeah, he thought. I think it does.
Written Off
Gabel didn't grow up with a safety net.
"I grew up homeless on the streets, eating out of soup kitchens. By sixth grade, I was running around with gangbangers. I was raised by a heroin addict with multiple personality disorders. I was that kid that was written off at a very early age."
He was written off early and often. By systems, by other people, by circumstance itself. In 2005, he lost his left leg in an industrial accident.
Gabel was a kid who knew, earlier than most, exactly what rock bottom looks like. What that kind of childhood gives you, is a specific instinct: when a door opens, even halfway, you move.
"You give me an opportunity, all I need is one chance. Give me that chance, and I will work for it. I'm not afraid of hard work. I'm not afraid of failure. I'm not afraid to give it my all and leave something with a sense of pride, because I know I put everything I had into it."
That door was para snowboarding. He found the sport at its infancy: before it was in the Paralympics, before infrastructure existed, before anyone outside a small pocket of the adaptive world even knew about it. He pushed and qualified for Sochi in 2014. Then Pyeongchang in 2018. Then Beijing in 2022. Sixty-three World Cup podiums. Two X Games golds. Two Paralympic medals.
And yet, through his entire career, almost nobody saw him coming.
"I've lived in the shadows of others my whole career. I've always been that weird dark horse that not a ton of people have ever heard about. Write me off. All that does is fuel the fire."
His former teammate Evan Strong once watched a competitor map out his bracket to the gold medal round. The competitor got to Gabel's name and essentially waved it off. Strong stopped him.
Don't do that. Don't write Keith off. If given the opportunity, he will capitalize on it in a moment's notice. That's gonna be your downfall today.
It was.
"I ended up going and winning the World Cup that day. Because multiple people wrote me off, for one reason or another. And I'm used to it. I'm okay with that."
15 Hours of Sleep. A Week.
Going into the 2024-25 season (the one that would determine his spot on the Milano Cortina Paralympic team) Gabel was not okay.
For five or six years, phantom pain had been building in his residual limb. By October 2024, giant clusters of nerve tissue called neuromas were firing signals with nowhere to go. It was like an electrical system with a permanent short in the wire.
"I was blacking out at times from the pain. It was so excruciating that if I was able to fight off the blackout, I'd have to pull the truck over and vomit. I was averaging about fifteen hours a week of sleep a week."
He looked at what it would take to make the Paralympic team and thought: I don't know if I can do this.
"I fully mourned the death of my career. I cried late nights. It was a bad time for me. I went through anger, sadness, acceptance…I went through it all."
His orthopedist pointed him toward targeted muscle reinnervation, TMR. Surgeons go in and close the circuit by rerouting the nerve endings into existing muscle groups. His surgeon was honest: results varied. He was hopeful that Gabel might get fifty percent relief, maybe seventy percent if he was lucky. But, ten percent of patients got no relief at all.
"In my head, that's a ninety percent success rate. And anything was better than what I was going through. Better was better. But, to compete safely in a sport where you're riding a very thin line at all times of complete success or complete chaos, you have to be a hundred percent there."
December 16th, 2024. Gabel endured seven hours of surgery. Nurses came in shortly afterward with pain medication.
“I remember it so clearly. I said, why do I need meds? And they go, well, you just had a really intensive surgery, aren't you in pain? I said, yeah, I guess it kind of hurts a little bit, but nothing compared to what I was in before."
The gears started turning.
The Cortina Comeback
Coaches told him to ease in. He told them he didn't have time to ease in. Every marker he hit, he blasted past. He set a team record on the Aerodyne bike. When they told him to slow down on snow, he had one answer.
"Either give me the blessing or don't, but understand, I'm going to proceed regardless of what you say. Let the horse gallop because I'm here," he said. "And I'm here to play."
In the last two World Cups of the season, he posted two silvers and officially secured his spot on the 2026 U.S. Paralympic Team, the fourth of his career.
All or Nothing
While the Cortina Games were everything he had worked for, in the final accounting, they were also the thing that still stings. Despite advancing through a number of heats, he fell just short of a podium finish and came home without a medal.
"When you're all or nothing, and I'll say this to every other athlete out there, you can prepare for the “all” all day. You have to. You can't think about the nothing. But I can promise you: when you come home empty-handed, there is nothing that can prepare you for the nothing of that equation."
It’s a hard truth.
"I know what my last season was. I know what my last four years looked like. I know what my last sixteen looked like. But coming home empty-handed, especially when you have an all or nothing mentality, it's been a heartbreaker."
And yet. At the top of the course on each of his final two race days in Cortina, something happened that Gabel says is what he is most proud of.
Athletes and coaches came up to him, one by one, and said the same thing.
Congratulations on an amazing career. Thank you.
"You chalk up all the medals, and that's great. Flag bearer, that's great. But I'm really proud that people recognize that I gave my career my absolute all. And I am extremely proud of that."
There was one more thing that made Cortina what it was. His son was there, old enough this time to understand what he was watching. A few months earlier, he had discovered a photo of his father on the wall at Buttermilk, where Gabel had won X Games medals over the years. He came home buzzing.
Dad, you're famous.
No, not really.
No — I saw your picture. You're on the wall.
"That was the first time he actually understood what dad does," Gabel says. "For him to go to the Games and see it in person — as a dad, that was so special."
Your Takeaway
Keith Gabel has a phrase he kept returning to throughout our conversation. He said it about poker. He said it about surgery. He said it about a career that started in a soup kitchen and ended at the Paralympic Games.
All I need is a chip and a chair.
Most of us are waiting for better conditions. A better moment, a cleaner shot, a hand worth playing. We tell ourselves we'll go all in once the timing is right, once we have more to work with.
Gabel never had better conditions. He had a childhood that should have ended the story before it started. He had a body that kept breaking. He had a career that was medically, statistically, reasonably over — and he sat in that reality, cried through it, and accepted it fully.
Then he picked up the one chip he had left and stayed in his chair.
You don't need a full stack. You need a chip and a chair. The question is whether you're willing to play.
ABOUT THIS SERIES
I'm Amy Wotovich and I'm on a mission to personally interview 100% of the 2026 U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Team. How do elite athletes train their mindset, overcome failure, sustain dominance, and compete with confidence? Follow the journey to find out as Keith Gabel is one of 304 athletes sharing their unfiltered answers.
