CRITICAL THINKING


The cheetah leg became the prototype of the standard prostheses used now by all amputee runners.


AIMEE MULLINS’ HONORS • Past president and current trustee of the Women’s Sports Foundation.


• Served four years as vice president of the nation’s oldest nonprofit employment service for people with disabilities, Just One Break. She was the first woman on the board since the organization was founded in 1947 by Eleanor Roosevelt.


• Appointed to the State Department’s Council to Empower Women and Girls Through Sports.


• Honored by the Smithsonian, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the NCAA Hall of Fame, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Tate Modern museum, both in London, and the Track and Field Hall of Fame. The Women’s Museum recognized her among the “Greatest American Women of the 20th Century,” and in 2017 she became one of the youngest inductees to the National Women’s Hall of Fame.


• Was appointed chef de mission for the United States at the 2012 Summer Olympics and 2012 Summer Paralympics in London.


coach Frank “Gags” Gagliano, asking for a spot on the track team. Gagliano had never coached an athlete with a disability before; Mullins had never been coached. But he admired her nerve, and Mullins became the first woman with a disabil- ity to compete in track and field at the NCAA Division I level, entirely against able-bodied athletes.


LONDON CALLING Mullins had special legs made for the opening of the 2012 London Olympics, where she was the U.S. chef de mission. The gold laurel leaf winged pattern was designed by Betony Vernon and then fabricated by Bob Watts and his team at Dorset Orthopaedic in Ringwood, England. They had to figure out how to get metallic pigment to stabilize within silicone without it losing its metallic quality. (Photo courtesy of Aimee Mullins)


Her next goal was to compete on the United States team at the 1996 Paralym- pic Games in Atlanta. But she realized her old-fashioned prosthetics wouldn’t cut it. Rather than basing a prosthetic on a human leg, “I want to be the fastest women on prosthetics in the world. Why aren’t we looking at the fastest thing that runs if I don’t have to have a shin and a foot below this knee?” she said in the inter- view with Army AL&T.


“Tat was always a big problem,” she said. “It’s like a shin and a foot, it’s going to be a fixed 90-degree angle. No matter how great your stride length or whatever, you’re always re-striking with that heel, and it’s a clunky way to run.”


She enlisted the help of a visionary pros- thetic maker, Van Phillips, who employed material engineers to invent the “chee- tah leg,” a woven carbon-fiber prosthesis modeled after the hind legs of a cheetah, the fastest animal on land. As a human guinea pig, Mullins was the first person to test them and get them to a place where they worked well enough for her to wear them to compete. Te cheetah leg became the prototype of the standard prostheses used now by all amputee runners.


Heading into the Atlanta Paralympics, Mullins held national records in the


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