There are athletes whose results tell only part of the story, and then there is Davy Zyw.
The Edinburgh snowboarder has made history in Cortina by becoming the first Winter Paralympic athlete to compete with motor neurone disease (MND). Zyw finished 18th in the men’s SB-UL snowboard cross seeding in his Paralympic debut, but for him the significance of the moment stretches far beyond a finishing position.
“The reality is, I’m delighted to make history here, but I really want to banish this disease to history,” he said. “Using this platform, I want to help find a cure for this currently incurable condition.”
Such contrasting emotions have followed Zyw throughout a journey he has described as a “tragic beauty.” He is proud to be representing Great Britain on the big stage, yet every achievement sits alongside the reality of living with a progressive and incurable illness. Diagnosed in 2018 at the age of 30 after first noticing numbness in his left thumb while working in London as a wine buyer, Zyw was told he had motor neurone disease.
When he received that diagnosis, he was given only two or three years to live. Eight years later, he is still carving tracks through the snow and into the history books.
Zyw’s story began long before Cortina. He first stepped onto a board at 12 years old on Edinburgh’s dry slopes alongside his twin brother, with his grandmother taking them to Hillend. Snowboarding quickly grew from just a childhood hobby into something more serious. After school he moved to the French Alps and started competing professionally in freestyle by his early 20s, competing in big air and slopestyle before a knee injury ended those early ambitions.
In one of the cruellest and most remarkable twists, the disease that changed his life also led him back to that first dream. Zyw has said MND was a “tragic beauty” because it brought him back to the childhood ambition of being a snowboarder and gave him a sense of freedom within an impossible situation.
After his diagnosis, Zyw set his sights on the Paralympic Games. Competing in the SB-UL classification for athletes with impairments in one or both arms, he entered his first Para snowboard competition in Landgraaf in 2024. Supported by his employers Berry Bros & Rudd, as well as crowd-funding, he then put himself forward for the Great Britain team at the end of that year.
Yet his journey has never been measured only in medals or placings. Since his diagnosis he has repeatedly used sport to raise awareness and funding for MND research. In 2020, he and his twin brother completed the North Coast 500 in Scotland, covering 500 miles in four days and raising significant funds for My Name’5 Doddie Foundation. Since then, he has been unable to continue cycling in the same way because of neck fatigue caused by his condition.
He and his brother have also taken part in Sheffield University research into the link between exercise and MND. For researchers, identical twins such as Davy and Tommy Zyw offer a rare chance to compare shared genetics with different outcomes, helping shed light on how the disease develops. Zyw believes a cure for MND will be found one day and has spoken of the lack of funding holding that back. That is why this moment in Cortina matters so much to him. He has become the first UK Paralympian with MND, but he wants to ensure he is remembered not just as someone who made history, but as someone who helped push the cause forward.
In becoming the first UK Paralympian with MND, Zyw has given his sport one of its most powerful stories. More than that, the Edinburgh native has shown how resilience, ambition, and purpose can carry an athlete far beyond the start gate.
“Hillend ski slope” by Richard Webb is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.