Snowboarding
Across the Board
As a snowboarder, Maggie Leon can hold her own with the best pro riders. And as a young engineer for Burton, she’s inventing new prototypes for adaptive athletes
Maggie Leon is making the sport that she loves more accessible for everyone.
When spring comes to northern Vermont, the snow melts in the mountains and the snowboard runs become, sadly, long gooey patches of mud, Maggie Leon makes her way to the local ice rink. She stands by the back door and waits until the Zamboni rolls outside and dumps a huge pile of ice shavings onto the pavement.
Then it’s winter all over again and, using shovels, Leon, 24, and her cronies push thin strips of this Zamboni snow toward nearby obstacles—stair rails, curbs, trash cans—and commence doing sick, super dicey skateboard-inspired tricks that have turned Leon’s body into a matrix of once-broken bones. Everything is filmed, and sometimes Leon gets marquee roles. She’s central to The Uninvited III, a full-length, all-women snowboard movie slated to drop in November. Usually, though, she shows up in videos produced by her own filming gang, Spotheads, whose members make sneering, joyously hooligan YouTube videos and are united, according to their website, by “a deep passion for filming one another fall downstairs.”
If it sounds like Leon belongs to a cult bent on reconnecting snowboarding to its gnar gnar roots—well, yeah! Duh! She’s got religion. And off the snow, working as an engineer at Burton Snowboards, she’s an evangelist—a kind, big-hearted one. Leon spends many hours each week—sometimes as a Burton employee and sometimes as a volunteer—making gear modifications that help make snowboarding work for disabled athletes.
Paralympic snowboarder Brittani Coury rides with stability thanks to Leon.
© Joe Kusumoto
One of those athletes is Paralympic snowboarder and silver medalist Brittani Coury. After a series of severe ankle injuries, Coury got her right lower leg amputated in 2011. She was able to resume riding, but for years her artificial foot did not jibe very well with her snowboard boot. “There was no ankle stability,” she recalls. Coury couldn’t carve her turns with complete brio, so she was largely shut off from a delight she enjoyed pre-amputation—gliding into the “white room,” which in snowboarding means that glorious space a rider inhabits when she carves into a turn, the powder plumes up around her eyes and she’s able to see nothing else.
I love the freedom and confidence snowboarding gives me, and we have the technology to help adaptive riders. Why shouldn’t we help them?
In 2019, with the white room in mind, Leon 3D-printed Coury several plastic- boot inserts, each one a sort of shin guard. She listened intently as Coury described how her artificial ankle flexed against the prototypes—and how it didn’t. She kept tweaking until Coury had a snug, form-fitting shin piece against which she could press, carving deeper into her turns. Eventually, Coury attained ankle stability—and the keys to the white room. “I felt like I was floating into a cloud,” says Coury, who will likely compete in this winter’s Paralympics, set to take place in China in March. “I never thought I’d fall in love with snowboarding all over again, but I did.”
For Leon, whose main job involves designing products for Burton’s vast able-bodied customer base, it was just one of a couple dozen triumphs in adaptive innovation. She’s also helped a 15-year-old Australian girl born with dwarfism, Holly Palmer, by shaping her a custom board—child’s length but stiffer for stability’s sake, and affixed with bindings placed close together to accommodate Palmer’s shorter legs and narrower stance. For Kiana Clay, a Burton pro rider with a paralyzed right arm, Leon rigged her boots with lace-locking clamps—a game-changer. “Before I had to clench the lace in my teeth,” says Clay. “It was taxing on my teeth.”
At Burton, Leon follows in the footsteps of her mentor, Chris Doyle.
© Ashley Rosemeyer
Leon sees her work with adaptive athletes as a natural thing to do, and she downplays the generosity involved. “I love snowboarding so much,” she says. “I love the freedom and confidence it gives me, and we have the technology to help adaptive riders. Why shouldn’t we help them?” She’s following in the footsteps of a legendary Burton engineer, Chris “the Mad Scientist” Doyle, who began crafting gear for adaptive riders in the late ’90s and spurred Burton into an ongoing commitment to people with disabilities.
Last year, in the Italian Alps, several Burton staffers joined a four-day adaptive camp for 40 or so snowboarders from eight countries. A Burton apparel designer, Kyle Smith, had made clothing modifications for disabled riders. But the company can spend only so much on adaptive gear, which doesn’t currently have a mass-market clientele, and often, when Leon is modifying equipment for disabled athletes, she’s working off the clock, driven only by the desire to help people “dealing,” as she puts it, “with problems we can’t even imagine.”
Maggie lives by Burton’s old ethic: Take care of the riders and the business will follow.
Leon got her start in the suburbs of Hartford, Connecticut. Her father, Joseph Leon, was a chemical engineer involved in formulating the coating for Oakley sunglasses, and he so infected Maggie with geek zeal that in third grade she wrote a research paper titled “UV Coatings: Polymers, Oligomers and Monomers.” In fourth grade, she started keeping a design journal in which she sketched new inventions, among them a hovercraft fueled by its own solar panels. She also took athletic cues from her dad.
Joseph was a gonzo skier, and for Christmas in 2005 he bought Maggie and her younger brother, Joey, Kmart snowboards, then let them sculpt quarter pipes in their backyard. Later, the Leon kids took to the slopestyle park in Killington, Vermont, where the family owns a ski house. By the time Maggie was 15, monster rail slides were part of her daily diet. Darkside Snowboards began flowing her free gear. Then she and Joey went larger and grittier, helping to found the filming crew that morphed into Spotheads.
Maggie’s dad encouraged her daredevilry, even after snowboarding brought his daughter two collarbone breaks, a broken wrist and two broken arms. But then in 2013, Joseph contracted brain cancer. After he died the following year, at age 64, Leon knew she needed to attend college in snowboarding’s holy land.
Leon’s father, Joseph, was a skier and chemical engineer.
© Courtesy of Maggie Leon
At the University of Vermont, situated a stone’s throw from Burton’s HQ, Leon happened to meet Chris Doyle, who each year guided four lucky engineering students through a snowboard-related senior design project. She was a junior then, and the Mad Scientist was immediately impressed. “Both engineering and snowboarding are so male-dominated,” he says, “and here’s this young engineer who’s also a punk-ass street rider, a wrinkled-T-shirt rider. I mean, she rides in a hoodie!” Doyle insisted that Leon lead the UVM design team her senior year.
That was 2019, when Leon helped Brittani Coury and other users of a popular prosthetic, the BioDapt Versa Foot 2, perform efficiently while riding in Burton’s Step On bindings. Leon had no previous experience in adaptive sports, but, Doyle says, she’s brought a “real empathy” to the work. Once, Leon studied how pro rider Kiana Clay tied back her long hair while using only one functional arm. Clay loosely knotted the tips to a doorknob and then, with one hand, wriggled a hair band over it. Leon copied the maneuver to tie back her own hair. “It was a reality check,” she says. “It made me think about what adaptive riders might need.”
As Doyle sees it, Leon’s devotion to individual athletes “harkens back to the early days of our sport. Snowboarding has grown up,” explains the engineer, who left Burton in 2020 after 24 years to design electric-powered airplanes. “It’s a business now. There’s a lot of product briefs. But Maggie lives by Burton’s old ethic: Take care of the riders and the business will follow.”
Leon’s passion for invention dates back to the fourth grade
© Ashley Rosemeyer
In Burton’s 44-year-history, Leon is the first engineer ever to double as a sponsored rider. She’s such a unique asset to the company that recently, after marketing herself with a pitch deck, she convinced her bosses to give her long stretches away from the office, so that she can rep for Burton as a rider in snowboard vids.
In that spirit, she slips out of the office one recent afternoon with her dog, Snoopy, a butterscotch-lab mutt, in tow, for a quick sesh at a nearby skateboard ramp. In between rides, clutching her board to her black Torment snowboard magazine T-shirt, she speculates on her limitless future. “I want to be able to film a lot,” she says. “I want to do the best street parts I can. And I want to travel.”
There are, it seems, some primo untapped snowboard spots—perfect rails and hubbas; massive secret walls—in the hinterland of Quebec, and the Spotheads are ready to road trip up there. “I want to do long trips,” Leon says. “I want to post up for a week so we get the shots right.”
She also hopes to step up Burton’s adaptive efforts. “I’d like to be able to dedicate at least half my time to riders with disabilities,” she says. “Everybody in snowboarding keeps talking about how we need diversity in snowboarding, so let’s grow the community of adaptive riders. We just don’t know how big it can be— there are so many amputees out there who haven’t even been on snow. Let’s remove all their obstacles. Let’s show them the possibilities snowboarding can offer.”
Leon is the first Burton engineer ever to double as a sponsored rider.
© Courtesy of Burton Snowboards
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