Aurélie Rivard was vulnerable and bullied when she was young because kids would point out her underdeveloped left hand. Swimming gave her a purpose.
Ms. Rivard, of Saint-Jean-sur-Richeleau, Que., was 16 when she won her first Paralympic medal – a silver in 2012 at London. The Paris multisport competition will be Ms. Rivard’s fourth Games.
“Just going to my first Paralympics allowed me to see myself as an athlete rather than a girl with a disability,” Ms. Rivard says. “Now I don’t have anything to prove to anybody anymore.”
Wheelchair basketball player Nik Goncin was diagnosed with bone cancer in his left leg at 15. He underwent an amputation and is now 31 and a key member of Canada’s national team.
Mr. Goncin and Ms. Rivard are part of a Canadian contingent in France of 126 athletes who will compete in 18 sports from Wednesday to Sept. 8. In all, more than 4,400 athletes from 184 delegations will put their skills on display in Paris. By the time the Games conclude, 549 medals will have been handed out in 23 events.
Ahead of the Games, Paris attractions like the Arc de Triomphe have been decked out in the Paralympic logo, a series of three coloured swooshes called agitos.Tingshu Wang/Reuters
For the first time, Canada’s Olympic Committee will reward Paralympic medal winners with $20,000 for a gold, $15,000 for a silver and $10,000 for a bronze. That is the same prize money offered to its Olympians.
The first Paralympic Games – the pinnacle of sports for athletes with a disability – were staged in Rome in 1960. Canada has sent a team since 1968 and has won medals at every competition.
The oldest Canadian to qualify this year is Ruth Sylvie Morel, a 67-year-old wheelchair fencer from Pincourt, Que. The youngest is swimmer Reid Maxwell of Edmonton, who celebrates his 17th birthday on Sept. 2.
Four athletes will compete in their sixth Paralympics – wheelchair basketball player Pat Anderson, wheelchair racer Brent Lakatos, wheelchair basketball player (and nordic skier) Cindy Ouellet and wheelchair rugby player Mike Whitehead.
The top medal-winners returning are Mr. Lakatos, who has earned 11 medals in five Games, and Ms. Rivard, who has won 10 in three, including five medals in Tokyo three years ago.
At Tokyo, Aurélie Rivard brought home five medals, adding to the four she got in Rio.Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press
Aurélie Rivard, swimming
Aurélie Rivard has won 10 medals in her long Paralympic career, including five golds, and now ranks as the most decorated female Paralympic swimmer in Canadian history.
This is the fourth Paralympics for Ms. Rivard, who was born with an underdeveloped left hand. She is one of three captains of Canada’s 22-member swimming team, along with Katarina Roxon and Nicolas-Guy Turbide. Beginning on Thursday, she will compete in four events in the S10 category, which is for swimmers with minimal disabilities.
Ms. Rivard won four medals in Rio de Janeiro in 2016 and five in Tokyo in 2021. She comes to Paris as the women’s world-record holder in the S10 50- and 100-metre freestyles, and is also scheduled to compete in the 400-metre freestyle and 100-metre backstroke. There is also a possibility she may swim with relay teams.
“You always have goals and mine are to get as close to my best times, if not to break them,” Ms. Rivard says. “I am also trying to be more present in the moment. I still have to think about the next race but I am trying to find more balance and enjoy myself.”
She thinks back to her first Paralympics and then returns to the present.
“It’s like I have had two different lives,” she says by phone from France. “In London I had zero expectations and had no idea what I was getting myself into. Everything was magical. Swimming has been the centre of my life for half of my life and it has become more like a job for me.”
Jacob Wassermann, one of the survivors of the Humboldt Broncos bus crash in 2018, discovered para rowing four years later and has risen far in the sport.MAURO PIMENTEL/AFP via Getty Images
Jacob Wassermann, rowing
On April 6, 2018, Jacob Wassermann survived the crash that killed 16 players and staff members of the Humboldt Broncos hockey team and injured 13 others. He was left paralyzed from the waist down when the charter bus in which he was riding collided with a tractor-trailer after its driver ran a stop sign on a highway in rural Saskatchewan.
The accident occurred a little more than a month after Mr. Wassermann, then 18 and a promising goalie, had been chosen co-rookie of the year in the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League. He also sustained a brain injury that resulted in him being placed in an induced coma, as well as a broken shoulder blade, collapsed lungs and fractured ribs and nasal bones.
After being released from the hospital he tried sledge hockey but found it wasn’t for him, then tried adaptive water skiing, at which he excelled. It wasn’t until late 2022 that he was introduced to para rowing and has since experienced a remarkable rise in the sport.
Mr. Wassermann won a gold medal in 2023 at the Canadian Para Rowing Championships and a silver medal this year at the 2024 World Rowing Americas Paralympic qualifying regatta in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
“My wife put it one way … I’ve been an athlete my whole life,” Mr. Wassermann said during a virtual news conference earlier in the summer. “I joined rowing two years ago, but I have been training for 24 years. All that work I’ve done my whole life, whether it was a hockey player before, or since the crash all the other sports I’ve done and all the training I’ve done, it’s all gone into this sport.”
He is one of 12 members of Canada’s para rowing team and will compete in Paris in a single scull from Friday through Sunday. He competes in the PR1 class, which is for athletes with no leg or trunk function, or missing limbs.
These Paralympics will be the third for racer Austin Smeenk of Oakville, Ont.Lintao Zhang/Getty Images
Austin Smeenk, wheelchair racing
Austin Smeenk finished fifth and seventh in two events at the 2021 Paralympics in Tokyo. The wheelchair racer from Oakville, Ont., realized he was not properly prepared.
“I was living at home in my hometown, which by itself was a distraction,” says Mr. Smeenk, 27. “I would see friends on weekends when I should have been training and I wasn’t pushing myself hard enough. I had not put everything I had into my performance.”
In 2023 he drove cross-country and moved to British Columbia, where many of Canada’s Olympians and Paralympians train. He began to work out with other elite athletes and noticed the difference immediately.
“Coming out here allowed me to focus on one thing,” Mr. Smeenk says from Victoria. This will be his third Paralympics. “Inherently you become more productive and that is the genesis of this next level that I have taken myself to.”
Last year he set a world record at 800 metres at the World Para Athletics championships in Paris. His time of one minute 38.10 seconds eclipsed a record he had set two months earlier. More recently in June he set records at the World Para Athletic Grand Prix in Paris at 400 and 800 metres.
Mr. Smeenk is afflicted with the rare neurological disorder spastic paraplegia, which causes weakness and stiffness in one’s leg muscles. He races in the T-34 class, which is open to athletes with that and similar impairments.
He seems primed to win a medal – or medals – at the Paralympics beginning on Sunday.
“Last time I was winging it, this time I have a remarkable calmness,” he says. “It all comes from homework and investing more time in myself than I ever have. I feel like I am prepared to write this test.”
Nik Goncin, wheelchair basketball
Nik Goncin was three when he moved to Canada with his family from the war-ravaged former Yugoslavia. As he grew up he loved sports but the Goncins were refugees – his father came with $100 in his pocket – and could not find room in their budget for hockey.
Mr. Goncin enjoyed gymnastics, skiing, soccer and tennis as a kid but became especially adept at basketball. While playing in a league in his adopted hometown of Regina, he broke his left fibula as he landed after taking a jump shot.
X-rays were taken as soon as he arrived at the hospital.
“There was a grey cloud over my bone,” Mr. Goncin says. “It was like something straight out of a textbook. Bone cancer.”
He was 15.
Mr. Goncin underwent an amputation and chemotherapy and a year later was introduced to wheelchair basketball in his high-school gym class. A coach tried to recruit him but Mr. Goncin declined.
“I was extremely resistant,” he says. “In my mind I was just going to go back to doing exactly what I was doing before.”
A week later the coach invited him again and Mr. Goncin found it more challenging than he anticipated. Next thing you know, he was hooked.
Fifteen years later he is a key member of Canada’s men’s wheelchair basketball team. The Games in Paris are his third Paralympics. The Canadian men finished 11th in 2016 in Rio and eighth in 2021 in Tokyo. They have won golds in 2000, 2004 and 2012. The Canadian women’s squad is the only wheelchair basketball team to win three gold medals in a row – in 1992, 1996 and 2000.
Mr. Goncin, who builds orthotics at the Alberta Children’s Hospital in Calgary, hopes to help the team return to the top in Paris. Long term he has other plans.
“I want to facilitate the next generation of athletes coming in,” he says. “I am becoming more and more passionate about it.”
Jody Schloss will compete in Paralympic dressage in Paris, the third Games where she has competed.Michelle Fernandes, courtesy of Michael Schloss
Jody Schloss, equestrian
When she was 23 years old, the car Jody Schloss was driving flipped and rolled four times. Her friend, a passenger, was killed.
It was four months before Ms. Schloss, at the time a student at the University of British Columbia, began to awake from a coma. She had incurred a traumatic brain injury and had post-traumatic amnesia for six months.
Doctors recommended she be placed in long-term care. Her mother interceded.
“She told them, ‘Over my dead body,’ ” Ms. Schloss says from her home in Toronto. She was born in Edmonton but moved to Toronto with her mom after her parents divorced when she was 13. She is 51 now and about to compete in Paris for the third time as a member of Canada’s para-equestrian team.
Previously she participated in London in 2012 and the pandemic-delayed Tokyo Games of 2021. She was a reserve in 2016 but did not travel to Rio de Janeiro.
In 2009 Ms. Schloss participated in a series of events for para-equestrian athletes and three years later was chosen for Canada’s Paralympic dressage team. She helped it to an eighth-place finish in London and finished 11th individually in 2021 in Tokyo.
In Paris, Ms. Schloss will compete in para dressage aboard a 15-year-old gelding named Denver that is coloured like a Dalmatian. The Appaloosa answers to the nickname of Denny but the official name on its passport is El Colorado. (Yes, horses have passports.)
She will compete in three disciplines beginning Sept. 3. She competes in the Grade 1 category for athletes with severe impairments. Two other riders – Austen Burns of Vancouver and Roberta Sheffield, a dual citizen from Britain – will also represent Canada.
GABRIEL BOUYS/AFP via Getty Images
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