Nate Riech won gold in an eerily empty stadium at the pandemic-affected 2020 Tokyo Paralympics. There will be tens of thousands of fans on hand when the Victoria runner attempts to defend his title in the T38 1,500 metres at the Stade de France in the 2024 Paris Paralympics, which open today with the opening ceremony at Champs-Elysees and Place de La Concorde (10:30 a.m. PT on CBC). The Paralympics traditionally take place in the same city following the Olympic Games.
There will be 126 athletes competing for Canada in 18 sports through Sept. 8, including seven athletes from the Island. The Island list includes medal favourites Riech in track and fellow-Victorian Mel Pemble in cycling and Nicholas Bennett of Parksville in swimming.
“This is a wonderful sports community,” said Riech.
He suffered a brain injury that affected movement on the left side of his body after being struck on the head by an errant golf ball launched from 150 yards away on a course in Arizona when he was 10 years old: “Just try to make that 10-year-old me who was paralyzed in a hospital bed proud,” Riech has said, of this Paralympics quest.
“I want to use my platform to better the Paralympic movement.”
Riech trains on the Pacific Institute for Sport Education track at the Camosun College Interurban campus with the Western Hub middle-distance centre and Canadian Sport Institute-Pacific. He is a dual citizen, who declared to compete for Canada and moved from Phoenix to Victoria in 2017 in order to do that. Dad Todd Riech represented the U.S. in javelin at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and mom Ardin Tucker competed for Canada in the 2002 Manchester Commonwealth Games. Riech’s grandfather, Jim Harrison, played eight seasons in the NHL for the Toronto Maple Leafs, Chicago Blackhawks and Boston Bruins.
The sporting world was back to normal post-Tokyo when Bennett swam to 2022 Commonwealth Games gold in the noisy and packed Birmingham pool, and the Island swim star is touted to do the same over the next two weeks in Paris.
Track-cyclist Pemble, meanwhile, will become a Summer and Winter Paralympian after competing in skiing at the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Paralympics.
“This is so surreal,” Pemble has said, of her rare Summer/Winter Games status.
The native of Lancashire, England, switched from poles to two wheels on the 1994 Victoria Commonwealth Games velodrome in Colwood after beginning her sports career on the ski slopes of Mount Washington, where her parents took her to help her deal with her cerebral palsy. Pemble never looked back, making the 2018 Winter Paralympics in Pyeongchang, and now the 2024 Summer Games in Paris as a world-record track cyclist at the Olympic Vélodrome National de St-Quentin-en-Yvelines.
Canadian wheelchair rugby captain Trevor Hirschfield of Parksville rolls into Paris still going strong at age 40 after competing in the 2008 Beijing, 2012 London, 2016 Rio and 2020 Tokyo Paralympics with silver and bronze medals.
The former Oceanside hockey player was a BCHL Junior A prospect with the Cowichan Valley Capitals before a van accident in 2000, while visiting his grandparents in Sicamous, left him paraplegic. Byron Green of Merville is also on the Canadian wheelchair rugby team.
Cody Fournie of Victoria, who became quadriplegic after an accident when he was 11, started out in wheelchair rugby but will compete at Paris in wheelchair racing on the track at the Stade de France.
Tokyo Paralympics veteran Kady Dandeneau of Pender Island, the first wheelchair basketball athlete in Canadian history to record a triple-double, returns to the Summer Games stage.
Once an athlete always an athlete. Former hockey player Jacob Wasserman, who became paraplegic in the Humboldt Broncos bus crash, turned to rowing as rehabilitation a year ago and qualified for Paris and trained at the national centre on Quamichan Lake in Duncan: “It feels like a bit of a dream. My whole life I have wanted to be a professional athlete and compete against the best in the world. I’m extremely excited to have this opportunity to represent Canada.”
