Twenty-two years ago, Colette Bourgonje was a grade-school teacher with a ticket to the Albertville Paralympics. But the school wasn’t about to let her take off for her first Paralympics. She went anyway and began an unprecedented streak of competing at seven Winter Paralympics -- 10 Paralympics in all.
This week's workout comes from Colette Bourgonje, a 10-time Paralympian who recently retired from the Canadian Para-Nordic Team with 10 Paralympic medals to her name. "I like this workout because of the change in pace, which makes you focus on technique with speed and adds variety with the distance you end up putting in," she says.
Brian McKeever and Graham Nishikawa came back from all odds after McKeever went down in Wednesday's sprint, then surged ahead for gold -- his first with Nishikawa alone, second of the Sochi Paralympics, and ninth total. "That was stressful,” McKeever told Cross Country Canada. “Once the cuss words were out, the only thing you can do is get back up and race."
The 2014 Winter Paralympics officially kick off Friday with the Opening Ceremony in Sochi, Russia, and the Canadian Para-Nordic team is raring to be one of the most dominant teams at the Games, shooting for third in the overall medal count.
Brian McKeever continued to impress this season, and Colette Bourgonje and Mark Arendz further showed the strength of Canada's Para-Nordic squad. New to skiing, Tatyana McFadden stood out as the top American female.
FasterSkier Adaptive Skier of the Year Adaptive Skier of the Year (men): Brian McKeever (CAN) McKeever continued his dominance of the adaptive skiing circuit, collecting three cross-country golds at the IPC World Championships and a silver in biathlon. All this hardware came without longtime guide, brother Robin McKeever, who suffered an injury not long before the start of the Championships. Long-time friend, and Erik Carleton took over, and McKeever did not miss a beat. McKeever,...
Four months after the conclusion of the Vancouver Paralympic Games, Canada’s Para-Nordic Ski Team has suffered cuts amounting to roughly one-third of its total budget. According to Cross-Country Canada Executive Director Davin Macintosh, the cuts represented 56 percent of the program’s funding from Own the Podium (OTP), the high-performance sports initiative that was set up to propel Canadian athletes to medals at the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Vancouver. The exact impacts of the...