Finding a footing: How Joe Sanchez overcame limb loss

José Encarnación Sanchez stood atop Park City’s “Utah Olympic Park Track,” staring down its icy chute, ready to glide in an adaptive bobsled. With a paraplegic pilot seated up front, he used his prosthetic, fixed in ankle position, to push the 500-pound, $30k sled, jump in, and hold on for dear life, while reaching 80-90 mph. 

“One of the things that I took from my bobsled experience was, and I kept, kept repeating it, is that if I was able to compete at that level physically, it put a closure to my accident,” Sanchez told FanSided.

“It's like going down Mount Everest in a garbage can,” his wife of 22 years, Ginger Sanchez, said. “It's bumpy, wild, hurts, jarring. When you see it… it's pretty. But for them, it's a frightening ride!” That was 10 years ago. Now, 60 years old, Sanchez sits back, his wife sitting opposite, painting flowery Día de Los Muertos “calaveras”, symbolizing life transformations in Mexican culture. Sanchez knows about that since almost losing his own — 41 years ago, he traded a limb for his life. Whenever he sees his racing helmet perched above, he fixates on two seminal rides: the train and the bobsled. 

These ultimate curveballs life shot him made for a multi-decade struggle of peacemaking with his accident. Once a baseball athlete, his athleticism lay dormant for two decades until finding a unique para-sport. It all culminated in 2012-2014 when he joined a unique Utah nonprofit developmental program for persons with disabilities interested in sliding sports called US Adaptive Bobsled & Skeleton Association (USABSA).

This pioneering initiative created dreams of Paralympic glory for people like Sanchez. With an additional team USA athlete membership under USA Bobsled/Skeleton (USABS), he participated in non-sanctioned para-bobsled events to appeal to the International Paralympic Committee for the sport’s inclusion into 2014’s Sochi Paralympics. He went from being terrified of running to absorbing 4-5Gs on curves — done to satiate aspirations derailed by his greatest misfortune.  

It wouldn’t appear that the over 6-footer is missing a limb. He’s balanced, modeling a side-parted haircut. With a gravelly Chicano voice, Sanchez says, “Nobody knows unless I tell them. It’s my identity. There’re no ifs, buts, or ands.” His wife didn’t know until they moved in together, nor co-workers of 20 years in juvenile justice. He learned early how to compensate for what was missing and adopted resolve.

Growing pains

As a 10-year-old non-English immigrant, Sanchez started his business affair of overcoming obstacles. “First year in school, I felt weird and left out. Everybody was teasing, bullying me. So, I do what Joe did best,” he says, slowly holding up two brick fists, “… that’s fighting.”

By 17, he became a military-ready JROTC captain with a baseball scholarship. His family teased him as “Mr. Military.” Everything was well planned out until April 23, 1982. At 11:35 a.m. he hitched a cargo train to school. Going too fast, he stumbled off and ricocheted his foot off a wheel. With shattered bones and dangling toes, two amputations below the calf followed. Students and teachers filled the hospital in support.

“Everything that I had planned on doing for my future was just gone,” he says. “What am I going to do now?”

Seeking normalcy, Sanchez played sports but encountered the torture of uncomfortable prosthetics. “In my head, I don't want to go through that pain cycle again. So, I'm just going to avoid playing”, he says about this complex. Instead, he coached Little League Baseball for 11 years and became Texas coach of the year with three trips to the Little League World Series. It was special for him to teach and mentor.

“That became lucrative. The kids responded. They became better players. I saw them accomplish things. That one thing I couldn't do myself, that was to play college.” Under his tutelage since age three, his son Albert Jones scored a tryout with the LA Dodgers. 

Following a divorce and a career change, he entered the halls of a Utah juvenile detention center as a Supervision Officer. Knowing how to run a team of boys, he successfully ran a unit of girls within four months, sans degree. He became “the problem solver,” says Ginger Sanchez. Understanding how to overcome his obstacles helped him solve others’. Yet, the barrier of pain from uncomfortable and poorly fit prosthetics persisted. “I could tell it hurt. I saw bleeding sores on him you wouldn’t believe,” she says. 

With updates to foam technology, a new life emerged.

Rip ‘n ride

Prosthetics are enormously expensive, costing him as much as $25k. But the technology and design continued to improve. Advancements developed after a rescued dolphin, named Winter, star of the 2011 movie “Dolphin Tale”, lost her tail in a crab trap line and was given a prosthetic tail. New gels from the research and development process were adapted to human prosthetics as a result.  

Every five years, Sanchez needs a new prosthetic due to the wear and tear. His old one had a sleeve with a cardboard-like feel, causing rubbing and pain. “There's nothing there. And it hurts him so bad because he has a bone that sticks out,” Ginger Sanchez says. “We went to ‘Fit-Well’ and they said, ‘we got some new stuff for you’.”

In a room with a walkway complete with parallel hand bars for walking assistance, Sanchez, now testing the new gel-like foam sleeve fitted into his prosthetic, felt an otherworldly difference. “They let him put it on and the guy left and he said, ‘I gotta try this.’ And he ran immediately in the room. He ran to the other side and back. It felt so good. He wanted to try it real fast, you know. And he said, ‘oh my gosh, it doesn't hurt anymore’,” she recalls. 

With a new leg came the true test. While still reeling from years of mental anguish caused by his intolerable prosthetics, “A juvie Navajo girl asks, ‘Hey, Mr. Sanchez, wanna run with me?’ By this time, it's been 20 years since I ran [at extended lengths]. I'm going to feel ache and pain. It's going to hurt because of other times I've tried. But I said, sure,” he says, glossy-eyed. “So, we take off running… and I'm running... running. I'm not having those pains—thoughts of pain.” Running those laps sparked something that was burning inside afterward.  

Sanchez entered a grueling triathlon against able-bodied athletes, topping his age group. “I'm not there to be competitive with anybody. It's always about testing my limits and pushing myself to do something,” he says. Serendipitously, his wife met a stranger playing basketball with a prosthetic leg at her gym. He told her about para-bobsled, piquing Sanchez’s interest. In a Park City Television interview, USABSA coach Jeremy Holm says, “Athletes were willing to come out, try this, and prove what they could do.” He believes their program pioneered a standard, helping other countries model one.  

Initially, Sanchez had sled issues. An adaptive bar to neutralize the pilot’s neck wouldn’t allow him to fit as the runner/brakeman. “When I'm done with runs, oh man, my back… I come home, and it's like somebody whipped me,” he says. Recognizing this, Holm paired him with a teammate who didn’t require a bar. “Once I jumped in with another girl, my time went from 1:30 seconds to 53, 51. These are comparable to regular Olympic bobsledding,” he says. He was competing with and against athletes much younger than him.

Ginger Sanchez says, “I remember they were asking you, they said, ‘how old are you, Joe?’ And you said, ‘I got sons your age!’ And they're like, ‘wow.’ He got slapped with a realization there.” With no official sport recognition from the likes of the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) or the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation (IBSF), USABSA held their own events. From Jan. 20-25, 2014, the “International Para Bobsleigh & Skeleton Training & Race” events were held. Further giving Sanchez and his teammates exposure. The IPC eventually recognized this initiative.  He was elated and kept training until another irregularity changed his newfound ambition. 

Arrhythmia 

Sanchez’s father died during open-heart surgery in the 70s. He still remembers the bloodstained mattress when his family collected the body. With hereditary fate, one day at a Utah courthouse for a hearing, Sanchez had trouble running up marble steps. “I felt like fainting. I made it up and went to my hearing, and I don’t know how I got through it.” Checking himself into an emergency room, he underwent two minimally invasive heart ablation surgeries. For the second time in his life, the hospital filled with loved ones.

He pulled through and his mind was set on competition; However, doctors wouldn’t grant him medical authorization. His new teammate inquired, “She called me up wanting to see if I could continue working with her, be her brakeman, but I wasn't able to get physically cleared anymore,” he says, effectively hanging it up for him. By the time of the next Paralympics, he would have been too old to compete. Shortly after his recovery, the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) rejected the sport’s full inclusion, citing a scarcity of participating countries, which is still upheld today.

Para athletes pushing for the exciting sport to be involved in the Winter Paralympics have encountered constant rejection in the years since — as recently as the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Paralympics and the French Alps 2030 games. Though the track ended for Sanchez, other courageous athletes are still chasing the sounds of the scraping blade runners; The feelings of being inside a plummeting fiberglass hull, violently rattling through precarious curves. Still, he is grateful for the solace it granted him from the suppression of his inner athlete. 

Looking back, he states, “I think being in that spotlight, at that level, closed the chapter on my accident because now I felt I accomplished the ultimate physical thing that I could’ve—being in a sport and excelling.” It didn’t matter what happened to him in the past anymore. He made it. “I've always found myself in the right places and times. Every opportunity I've had, I've taken to an extreme,” he says. 

With the middle name “Encarnación” (Spanish for incarnation), Sanchez understands he’s a supreme example of perseverance. Ginger Sanchez notes his stubbornness, “I think this guy could use a vacation where he just stays in bed off that leg for one day to let it rest. But he has never in 22 years,” she says. “He refuses to give up. I mean, if I ever went through that, I would give up. But he will not stop ever.”

Occasionally, on the anniversary date of his accident, he runs. Sometimes two or three miles daily leading up to it: a type of celebratory challenge to remember what his life is all about. Today, he focuses on his career, but what’s last on his list? Car-collecting. He removes a dust cover in his garage, slowly unveiling the cherry red stripe to his 2012 Camaro, with another muscle car in the shop. "I'd probably be Rambo if I hadn't gotten on that train," he jokes. "I wouldn't change anything because even the struggles made me stronger."

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