Did you catch these MN athletes in an Olympics commercial last night?

Josh Sorvik's wheelchair waits on the beach while he kayaks.

While BMW bankrolled the air time, the team behind the commercial is the Make a Hero Foundation, a young non-profit helmed by Kurt Miller, son of action sports filmmaker Warren Miller. The organization has an ambitious plan in place to raise awareness about adaptive sports, including a documentary titled The Movement, partnerships with adaptive sports facilities across the country, and even an operation that allows supporters to donate via text.

But Make a Hero is also creating mini-documentaries about individual athletes, and that's where these Minnesotans come in. Four are featured in the organization's first mini-docs: Scott Anderson, a paraplegic sailor from Duluth; Josh Sorvik, a paraplegic sea kayaker from Duluth; and two young adaptive equestrians, six-year-old Nick Deyo, from Stillwater, who has a spinal cord injury, and eight-year-old Minneapolis native Allyson Taylor, who was born with spina bifida.

The spotlight fell on these four through a few other Minnesota connections. It started when Miller, who's based in Denver, heard about Globe University and the Minnesota School of Business, and decided to get students from the school's digital video program involved in making the movies. Once that was set and the mini-docs were going to be filmed here, Make a Hero reached out to the Courage Centers in St. Croix and Duluth, who put them in contact with Anderson, Sorvik, Deyo, and Taylor.

Globe University students at work in Duluth, interviewing sailor Scott Anderson.

The result is three student-filmed, Make a Hero-produced shorts, each three-to-five minutes long. Each one focuses closely on the individual athletes, and derives quiet inspiration from their stories. There's Anderson, who was paralyzed at 15 when a misfired bullet connected with his spine, saying, "Let's find out what I can do," and then wheeling himself down the dock and skillfully maneuvering into his boat. There's Taylor, who says with buoyant enthusiasm, "Riding on the horse, when it's walking, it feels like I'm walking." And there's Sorvik, who recently graduated from University of Minnesota-Duluth, reflecting on the first time he got out in the kayak after his accident: "I was sitting on a lake and I wasn't in my wheelchair. It's that moment when you feel like you, and you realize, this paralysis, this isn't me."

Snippets of footage from these films and the full feature documentary appears in the Olympics PSA, which will be shown several more times throughout the games. Globe University students put the short films together in just 60 days, and were still working on polishing the commercial on Friday morning.

Miller notes that any money raised from Minnesotans will stay at adaptive sports facilities within the state, like the Courage Center. "We're only focused on the physical, not the mind," he says. "But hopefully, we can change people's minds, and the attitudes of the disabled toward what they can do."

Check out the commercial below, and then click on over to the second page for a look at all three mini-documentaries.