After watching her Paralympian mom compete, roles to be reserved for Keegan Gaunt’s Paralympic debut in Paris

KEEGAN GAUNT
Sport: Para Athletics
Events: T13 women’s 400 m & 1,500 m
Classification: Visual impairment
Age: 24
Birthplace: Thunder Bay
Local Club: Ottawa Lions Track and Field Club
First Paralympics

VIEW KEEGAN’S COMPETITION SCHEDULE HERE.

By Adam Beauchemin

With a passion for competitive sport learned from her Paralympian parents, and having narrowly missed out on her first try at reaching the global Games, Keegan Gaunt is fully appreciative of the chance to make her Paralympic debut at Paris 2024.

“It’s an amazing opportunity to represent Canada, and I’m very much looking forward to that,” says Gaunt, a middle-distance runner who will compete in the T13 class for athletes with visual impairments.

“But in a whole other sense as well, it’s a stage where people with disabilities are able to highlight what’s possible with a disability,” she adds.

The 24-year-old Ottawa Lions Track and Field Club gained a full appreciation for para-athletes’ powerful potential from her parents, Robert Gaunt and Robbi Weldon.

Her father won a silver medal with the Canadian men’s goalball team in his second Paralympic appearance in 1996.

And her mother attended four consecutive Paralympics from 2010 to 2016 – twice as a cross-country skier, and twice as a cyclist.

A young Gaunt was on hand to watch Weldon win a gold medal in the London 2012 women’s road race.

“My dad competed prior to me being born, but my mom [competed] when I was growing up,” recounts the Thunder Bay-born athlete who moved to Ottawa as a teenager. “Being able to watch her compete definitely inspired me to do what I do now and try to achieve to get to that level that she was at.”

Gaunt grew up in an active household, but says she was never pressured by her parents to follow in their footsteps and pursue high-performance sport.

She did often help guide her mom at the head of their tandem bike on training rides in the later years of her para-cycling career, and showed her strong fitness as a track and cross-country runner while representing Merivale High School at the OFSAA provincial championships.

Gaunt went on to join the powerhouse University of Guelph Gryphons varsity U Sports team, where she also officially became classified as a Paralympic-eligible athlete.

Gaunt has Stargardt Disease (as does her mom), which has progressively deteriorated her central vision since age 16 and left her with blind spots.

Gaunt immediately served notice that she’d be an athlete to watch in the parasport world when she registered a new Canadian record time of 4:41.62 in the T13 women’s 1,500 metres just a month outside of the Tokyo Paralympics in 2021.

Despite her impressive debut season and strong international ranking, Gaunt didn’t make it onto Canada’s shrunken Tokyo para athletics team roster, which had only seven women’s places available across all track and field disciplines.

“We had a very small team that went and I was kind of in that next spot, so I was very, very close,” recalls Gaunt, now one of 10 Canadian women set to compete in para athletics at the 2024 Games.

“I just used that as motivation for the Paris Games and made sure that over the past three years, I’ve done everything that I can to put me in the best spot to try to make that team,” she adds. “It’s great. It’s really, really great to have a different outcome this time.”

With a bit of distance, Gaunt says she considers missing out on Tokyo as partly a positive.

“I was going through an injury at the time, and it gave me the time to heal,” reflects Gaunt, who studied management economics and finance at Guelph, and then selected Victoria as a new home training base after earning her diploma.

“Of course, I would have loved to have gone, but I think in retrospect, it all helps — every step — moving forward to these Games.”

Gaunt is now treasuring her delayed opportunity to prove herself on the world stage. Her season-best performance of 4:46.86 in the 1,500 m is the sixth-fastest time posted by athletes in her class this year.

Nine athletes have run under five minutes, while the top-3 posted times of 4:18.90, 4:26.69 and 4:34.74. Gaunt says she isn’t getting too caught up in any expectations.

“It will be my first time competing with a lot of these competitors, so there’s a bit of an element of unknown, but I’m trusting in our race plan and seeing what happens on the day,” signals Gaunt, who is also scheduled to take another lap around the track later in the Games, though she isn’t as strong in the 400 m at #14 in the T13 world rankings for that event.

Gaunt sees the Games as an excellent showcase for the work of parasport athletes, and she’s also encouraged to see the increased attention the Paralympics have received recently. She notes that a recent campaign to shift the verbiage around the Paralympics resonated with her in particular.

“I’m not participating at the Paralympics, I’m competing at the Paralympics,” Gaunt underlines.

“That really struck home, because it is an extremely hard team to make, and we train just as hard as able-bodied [athletes].”

That was a lesson learned early on from Gaunt’s parents’ Paralympic pursuits, and now she’s thrilled for the chance to show them the same thing with roles reversed.

“I’m really looking forward to race day and knowing that all of my family is in the stands,” smiles Gaunt. “When I was younger I traveled twice to watch my mom compete at the Paralympics with my grandma, and now my grandma’s coming to watch me in Paris.

“It’s a really full-circle moment, so I’m super excited for that.”

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