Alex Hayward competes in the Para track cycling men's C1-5 1000-metre individual time trial final, in Santiago, on Nov. 23, 2023.Angela Burger/Canadian Paralympic Committee
At 15 Alex Hayward was a Triple-A hockey player and good enough to draw interest from Quebec’s major junior league.
On May 25, 2012, while participating in a game in Quebec City, he collided headfirst with an opponent.
The collision was so violent that when his head snapped backward he suffered a broken neck.
“I woke up on the ice and was paralyzed from the neck down,” Hayward, a Canadian Paralympic road and track cyclist, says.
Doctors were unsure if he would ever recover and prepared him for the possibility that he might spend the rest of his life in an electric wheelchair controlled with his mouth.
“It was super uncertain,” Hayward says. “They would never quite say that I would 100 per cent be stuck in a wheelchair. It was a lot for a 15-year-old to consider.”
Two weeks after the accident he was taken to the Stan Cassidy Centre for Rehabilitation in Fredericton, N.B.
“At night I would dream about being able to move,” Hayward says. “When I woke up the next morning my reflex would be to try to move and I noticed something had changed every day.
“With lots of rehabilitation and luck I walked out of there six months later.”
After a miraculous recovery Hayward says most people would not notice that he has a disability. While he is able to use his arms and legs all four of his limbs are impaired.
“I do things slowly,” he says. “Sometimes I have to explain to people why I am in the Paralympics.”
He is able to ride a regular upright bike. His disability is rated as a three on the Paralympics’ one-to-five scale.
Hayward hails from Quispamsis, N.B., a suburb of Saint John, and since 2023 has lived and trained out of Bromont in southern Quebec.
He was first introduced to wheelchair basketball while at the Cassidy Centre and was so good that in 2017 he was named captain of Canada’s junior national team and was promoted to the senior national team as well.
“I started almost right away,” Hayward says. “It was important to me because sports had played such a big role in my life.”
Later that year he decided to return home and pursued a mechanical engineering degree at the University of New Brunswick. He trained remotely with the national wheelchair team through 2020 but was not selected to participate in international competition.
He began to have trouble finding gym time during the pandemic and turned to cycling to stay fit.
“What got me hooked was that it was the first sport where I could compete like everybody else and feel like a normal person again,” he says.
Despite being a relative novice in 2022 he entered and won a road racing World Cup Para time-trial event in Quebec City in his very first race. A week later he finished sixth at the para road world championships in Baie-Comeau.
He then received an invitation from Cycling Canada to attend a camp and try track racing.
“They told me that if I wished to pursue it I probably had a future in the sport,” Hayward says.
He ended up fifth at the world championships in France that same year and now ranks among Canada’s top Para road and track racers.
In 2023, as a member of Canada’s Para cycling team, he won two gold medals, a silver and a bronze at the Parapan Games in Santiago, Chile and this year has a gold, bronze and silver in three starts.
In Paris, he is scheduled to compete in a 3,000-metre individual pursuit track qualifying race on Aug. 30, a road time trial on Sept. 4 and a road race of nearly 70 kilometres on Sept. 7. The Paris Paralympics began on Aug. 28 and will run through Sunday, Sept. 8.
“Ultimately my goal is to finish in the top four on the track so I qualify for a second ride and I feel that I could find myself on the podium in the time trial,” Hayward says. “The road race is a tricky one but I believe I am fit enough to reach the podium in that one, too.”
He will have numerous supporters in Paris. Along with his parents, 11 other family members and friends decided to attend the Paralympics when Canada’s seven-person cycling team was announced in July.
“I might have more spectators rooting for me than some of the French,” Hayward says. “Some of these guys I went to high school with. They knew me before the accident and afterwards and understand how long I have been trying to do this.”