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Newsletter By Dan Plouffe, Jackson Starr, Adam Beauchemin & Kaitlyn LeBoutillier
And we’re back! After a quick recharge following our Ottawa at the Olympics coverage, we are eagerly looking forward to keeping tabs on eight local Paralympians over the course of the next 12 days.
The Paris 2024 Paralympic Games got underway today with the outdoor Opening Ceremonies at the Champs-Elysées and Place de La Concorde, though most of ‘Team Ottawa’ was not there.
Half of our local representatives will be on the court for the first matches tomorrow, while another three had pre-Games training camps that likely kept them away.
The only Ottawa Paralympian our (unreliable) Ottawa Sports Pages eyes spotted on CBC’s broadcast was the local athlete who’s newest to parasport of the bunch, Trinity Lowthian.
The 22-year-old is only two years deep into her budding wheelchair fencing career, and in one week she’ll have her first official Paralympic competition on the piste in Paris.
Hers is one of the stories we can hardly wait to share with you during our daily coverage of the Aug. 28-Sept. 8 Games (sign up for our free newsletter to get it to your inbox each evening). But before we get into that too deeply, let’s introduce you to our whole team of Ottawa Paralympians.
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On top of Lowthian in wheelchair fencing, Ottawa has a pair of para-athletics competitors – Keegan Gaunt and Bianca Borgella, who are both making their Paralympic debuts.
The other five local athletes are all returnees from the last Paralympics, held three summers ago in Tokyo. Three of them are teammates with the Canadian women’s goalball team – Whitney Bogart, Amy Burk and Emma Reinke.
Brianna Hennessy and Patrice Dagenais are teammates too, with the Ottawa Stingers wheelchair rugby club, though Hennessy’s Paralympic sport is canoe paddling.
Dagenais is the oldest athlete of the bunch at age 39 and also the lone male athlete, which is lower than the average of the Canadian Paralympic team as a whole (55% female) and the international total (45% female).
While we’re talking numbers, here’s another interesting stat: roughly one in 16 Canadian Paralympic team members are from Ottawa. That’s about 2.5 times higher than expected based on population.
Another neat note: unlike Ottawa’s Olympians where only a small handful still use their hometown as their training base, almost all of our local Paralympians are based in Ottawa.
Part of that could be people with disabilities from smaller centres choosing to move to Ottawa. When Robbi Weldon moved to Ottawa from Thunder Bay in advance of her fourth and final Paralympic appearance is 2016, she said a big part of the pull was the improved transit and accessibility the capital city offered her.
Ottawa fuelled Weldon’s daughter’s development as a high-level runner, and now Ottawa Lions Track and Field Club product Keegan Gaunt is going to the Games herself (she’s the only one of the Ottawa crew who’s moved away, for university in Guelph and now to Victoria for pre-Games training).
The three local goalball players all grew up in smaller communities too – Bogart in Marathon, ON, Burk in Charlottetown, PEI and Reinke in St. Thomas, ON – while Borgella is from Rockland and Dagenais from Embrun. Hennessy and Lowthian have always been city-dwellers.
For some of our local Paralympians, their training facilities lack some sparkle and getting gym time can be a bit of a battle. The Stingers club has been somewhat nomadic in recent years, while the goalball players use elementary schools and non-air conditioned City gyms (more on that in a moment).
But several have found world-class coaching in their backyard too, such as Lowthian (with Ottawa Fencing’s Paul ApSimon), Hennessy (with Ottawa River Canoe Club’s Joel Hazzan) and Borgella (with the Lions’ Yolande Jones-Grande and Gordon Cavé).
“I take a lot of pride in being from the Ottawa area,” underlines Dagenais, who will kick things off for the local crew with the first match of his fourth Paralympics.
While we’re talking about schedules, we’ve got a great tool on our website to help you track who’s in action when (and in our time zone, to boot) – our OTTAWA PARALYMPIANS’ SCHEDULES PAGE.
You can also use the “Ottawa Paralympians’ Schedules” navigation bar at the top of our website to select an individual athlete. You can then click on the “subscribe to calendar” menu at the bottom of the athlete’s schedule page to add/export their events to your digital calendar.
Take a look and you’ll see we’ve got some action for you bright and early tomorrow.
Ottawa Paralympians in action on August 29:
Day 1 Preview: Team Canada goalball women move from elementary school gym to Paralympic stage
There was jumping, hugging, smiling, cheering, screaming and sobbing.
The Canadian women’s goalball team had just beaten arch-rival USA in the championship game of the Santiago 2023 Parapan Am Games – which went down to the last throw of the match – to claim the Americas’ final Paris 2024 Paralympics qualifying position.
Whether you’ve followed the team’s journey from the start or just watched a goalball clip for the first time, whether you’re a diehard sports fan or an average Joe, you had to appreciate and feel the emotion that reverberated inside the overjoyed players.
“I think I can replay the memory completely, start to finish,” Emma Reinke tells Ottawa Sports Pages executive director Dan Plouffe.
“I relive it all the time,” concurs Amy Burk.
“I watch the video – that eight minute clip of us qualifying that CBC put together,” signals Whitney Bogart.
The Canadian women’s goalball team’s Parapan Am Games gold medal triumph was voted as the most trending moment of the year for 2023 at the Canadian Sport Awards.
For Bogart, the victory was not only career-defining, it was also career-extending.
“I am retiring after Paris,” notes the 38-year-old who made her first appearance for Team Canada in 2005. “Chile would have been my last competition if we didn’t qualify.
“I wasn’t ready to be done eight months early.”
And so began the final stretch of hard work to prepare for Paris 2024, where Canada will be chasing its first Paralympic podium performance since the Athens 2004 Games – before any of the current players were on the team.
Goalball is a sport you’ll be hearing a lot about in our coverage in the coming days since half of Team Canada’s players are based in Ottawa, including the three starters who helped Canada clinch the clutch berth at Santiago 2023 – Bogart, Burk and Reinke.
If you’re not familiar with goalball, that may be because it’s one of only two Paralympic sports that doesn’t have a direct equivalent event in the Olympics (the other is boccia).
Luckily, it’s very easy for spectators to catch on – get the ball in the other team’s net and you score a point. The sport was created specifically for players with visual impairments (the International Blind Sports Federation is the official governing body).
Players wear eye covers (since most have some vision, the blinders keep the playing field level by ensuring no one can see). They compete in three-on-three matchups where they try to get a ball containing metal bells into their opponent’s goal with an underhand throw, bounce or roll from their half of the court.
Using hand-ear coordination, players use the sound of the bells to judge the position and movement of the ball, to then position themselves in the ball’s path to block their opponents’ shots.
In Ottawa, the sport doesn’t have a huge presence aside from the three world-class players. But stop by Carleton Heights or W.E. Gowling elementary schools on a Thursday evening or Saturday morning, and you may discover Team Canada’s training lair.
That’s the site of their practices most of the year. Decidedly less glamorous venues than when they perform under the bright lights of a Parapan Am or Paralympic Games, they train inside those little gyms with the stage right behind it, doubling as a site for school assemblies or lunches.
The challenges of finding available gym spaces that meet their sport’s needs are persistent for the team (you can read about this in more detail in our full feature via the link below).
Read More: Team Canada goalball women move from elementary school gym to Paralympic stage
But they’ve managed to nonetheless become a serious podium threat for the Paris Paralympics.
That comes on the heels of Canada’s worst performance at the Paralympics three summers ago in Tokyo when it failed to advance past the group stage.
“Since Tokyo, we learned to work a lot better together,” Reinke indicates. “We put so much work into our culture and each other.”
Burk notes that it was important for the team to create a “safe space” for thoughts and ideas to be shared openly.
“We sat down, we talked about our communication with each other, how we can’t just let things boil over, we need to be honest upfront. If it’s constructive criticism, it’s coming from a good place,” outlines Burk, whose team placed fourth at global events in 2022 and 2023.
“Where our team is now compared to where it was three years ago – it is night and day,” adds the captain who’s entering her fifth career Paralympics. “We all have that one goal, and that one goal is to win and to be our best. We’ve all bought into that, and with that comes such good cohesion off the court as well as on the court.”
All the work on team chemistry made the moment of elation that much more special, when the team piled on top of one another as Parapan American champions and Paris Paralympic qualifiers.
“In Santiago, it all just came together,” Bogart highlights. “It was our breakthrough moment.”
Also in action tomorrow will be Canadian wheelchair rugby team co-captain Patrice Dagenais.
Seeking a return to podium for the first time since his Paralympic debut in 2012, Dagenais couldn’t ask for a more exciting way to kick off the Games than a matchup with arch-rival USA.
We’ll tell you more about that match and Dagenais’s path to Paris in our next newsletter, though you are also welcome to check out our pre-Games feature on him to get fully primed here.
We’ll be back tomorrow evening with our recap of Day 1 action, along with more daily previews, profiles and schedules. You can catch livestreams of most Paralympic competitions on CBC Gem and through CBCsports.ca. We hope you enjoy the Games!
From Aug. 28-Sept. 8, we’ll be providing daily Ottawa at the Paralympics coverage via our free email newsletter. Sign up below to follow along!
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