By Callum Fraser
Chantal Beauchesne experienced two unplanned life-changing events in 2009.
The first was not at all pleasant. She was the passenger during a motorcycle crash and had her left leg amputated on the spot when it was sliced by a hydro post cable.
Later that year came a much better turn. At the Canada Army Run, Beauchesne met Karen McCoy.
“She mentioned she was part of the national sitting volleyball team and asked if I wanted to join,” recalls Beauchesne, who knew next to nothing about the sport at the time.
The Ottawa-born athlete who grew up in St-Isidore now says in her Volleyball Canada bio that “sport saved me.”
“Without sport it would have been difficult to rehabilitate as fast as I did and accept what had happened to me,” Beauchesne adds.
The chance meeting with McCoy unlocked a world of opportunities for Beauchesne. The 32-year-old is now set to make her Paralympic debut this summer as a veteran influence on Canada’s Rio 2016-qualified women’s sitting volleyball team.
“For five and a half years now, we’ve been dreaming of going to the Paralympic Games,” underlines the Toronto 2015 Parapan Am Games bronze medallist. “We’re excited. Basically, this has been our goal since we’ve been funded.”
Beauchesne recalls not having much experience with volleyball when she first tried out the sport, but the national team didn’t have much depth at the time, so she was offered a spot in the program shortly after a trial in Toronto.
The Canadian women have slowly grown since then, meeting up to train together before tournaments.
“We all fly into Edmonton and then train together at a facility. We’re from just about everywhere in Canada,” highlights Beauchesne, who does get to practice regularly alongside team captain Jolan Wong in Petawawa, where she lives with her husband, a member of the Canadian armed forces.
In preparation for their trip to Brazil later in the summer, Team Canada competed at the Mar. 17-23 World ParaVolley Intercontinental tournament.
“We’ve been multiple times in Europe, but this was our farthest trip to go and compete, and it was entirely worth it,” signals Beauchesne, whose team competed in a pool alongside other teams already qualified for the Paralympics. “We were kind of in a safe zone, but it was going to give us a really good idea as to what we were going to get competition-wise in Rio.”
Canada went 1-5 at the event to finish in 6th place.
“We’ve been somewhat of an underdog in the sport so far,” notes Beauchesne. “We are a very young team and we have a lot of new athletes within our team. We’ve competed quite well considering.”
The goal for Team Canada at the Rio Paralympics is to place in the top half, she says.
“There’s tons of pressure on us, but we’re putting a lot of pressure on ourselves,” Beauchesne adds. “For Canada, it’s our first Games (in women’s sitting volleyball), so we have high hopes.”