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Thank you very much to our Ottawa Sports Pages partners Boxing Without Barriers for presenting today’s Ottawa at the Paralympics coverage!
Now, boxing is not included in the Special Olympics, and it’s not a Paralympic sport either (yet). But Ottawa is home to a club at the forefront of the charge to make boxing more accessible to everyone.
Boxing Without Barriers offers boxing opportunities for people with physical, cognitive or developmental disabilities and it adapts to each individual’s needs.
“It’s a sport that, like a lot of sports, gives a huge amount of life skills and all these fundamentals. It’s important that it’s available to everybody,” says founder Chantal Deketele, who launched BWB in 2019 in partnership with the storied Beaver Boxing Club.
A teacher during the daytime, Deketele has worked in athletics and recreation programming for people with disabilities for over 15 years and saw the potential to build confidence and empower athletes in a sport that many might not have considered trying.
Most BWB weekly training sessions are non-contact (i.e. boxers don’t square off in the ring, their target is usually a punching bag or a coach’s mitts), although the club does offer competitive opportunities to those who are keen.
Last fall, Boxing Without Barriers made history as Jack Dufour became the first athlete with a disability to be featured on a provincially-sanctioned card in Ottawa at Beaver’s Octoberfist event.
And Boxing Canada has recently added an official Para Boxing division as well!
Also called Wheelchair Boxing, it is a seated version of the sport for athletes with physical disabilities and/or mobility impairments.
Boxing Without Barriers will be offering an introductory Para Boxing class this fall, along with its other barrier-free programming and school and community clinics.
You can read more about the club and how to get involved in this column and you can visit BoxingWithoutBarriers.ca for more info and upcoming participation opportunities.
Ottawa at the Paralympics Day 5 Recap: Close loss for Patrice Dagenais & Team Canada in their final wheelchair rugby match of Paris 2024
Newsletter By Adam Beauchemin, Jackson Starr, Dan Plouffe & Kaitlyn LeBoutillier
Patrice Dagenais and the Canadian wheelchair rugby team fell to France in a closely-fought match for fifth place, losing 53-50 to the Paralympic hosts to finish in sixth place.
Dagenais and co-captain Trevor Hirschfield led the Canadians out of the tunnel to start the match in front of yet another roaring crowd. The Canadians came into the match off the back of a decisive 56-46 victory over Denmark to earn their spot in the fifth-place final.
France took control of the game by earning an early lead thanks to stingy defence. On one crucial sequence in the first quarter, Canada blew through two of its four timeouts to maintain possession of the ball, but the French held strong in their key and managed to keep the Canadians from scoring a try.
While Canada managed to close the gap on the French several times, France always managed to rally and keep their opponents at an arm’s length on the scoreboard.
In the end, France limited their mistakes on the day and narrowly edged Canada out in steals (4-3) and turnovers (1-2), which was all they needed to win the match by three points.
Ottawa Stingers player Dagenais, the four-time Paralympian from Embrun, played a total of 14:32 in the game.
Canada’s wheelchair rugby games have been played in front of packed houses at the Champs-des-Mars arena, and that once again proved to be the case as locals poured in to show support for the host nation.
Throughout the march, the crowd was enthusiastically doing the wave, singing along to stadium anthems during breaks, and especially rooting on the home nation with chants of “Allez les bleus!”
“Wheelchair rugby is definitely a hot ticket,” Dagenais said in an interview with Ottawa Sports Pages reporter Adam Beauchemin last week. “We have thousands of people in the crowd cheering us on from different countries. It’s just loud, so it just makes for an awesome atmosphere.”
The sixth-place result was Dagenais’s lowest finish of his four Paralympic appearances, having earned with a silver medal in 2012, a fourth-place finish in 2016, and fifth at Tokyo in 2021.
The two teams that placed ahead of Canada in their pool both wound up advancing to the championship game in Paris, with Japan defeating USA 48-41 in the gold medal final.
Ottawa Paralympians in action on September 3:
Day 6 Preview: Paralympic rookie/medal contender Bianca Borgella has ‘disappointing’ detour to MRI machine a month before debut
Tomorrow, a pair of Ottawa athletes in their early 20s will make their Paralympics debuts in Paris.
After exploring onto the international para-athletics scene last year with medal wins in the 100 metres and 200 m at the Para Athletics World Championships, sprinter Bianca Borgella will be taking to the Paralympic track for the first time in her career.
The 21-year-old was recently hampered by a pulled hamstring, and while that may keep her from participating in fewer events than she initially hoped, Borgella is set to compete in one of her specialties — the T13 100 metres.
Borgella trains with the Ottawa Lions Track and Field Club’s Yolande Jones-Grande and Gordon Cavé and owns the national record in the T13 100 m with a time of 11.92 seconds, which she established in late May.
That’s the second-fastest time run in the world this season, and Borgella and is one of just three athletes in her class to run under 12 seconds this year.
The University of Ottawa biomedical sciences and neurology student is also the national record holder in the 200 m and 400 m races.
While a podium finish is still within reach for the graduate of St. Francis-Xavier Catholic High School in Hammond, Borgella is tempering her expectations in light of the recent injury.
“Before I pulled my hamstring, I was like, ‘I’m going to do great. I’m going to do amazing. I’m going to win,’” Borgella said in an interview with Ottawa Sports Pages reporter Adam Beauchemin prior to the Games. “But after pulling my hammy, I’m not going to be too hard on myself. I’m going to give myself grace and just go into it knowing the fact that I’m going to have fun.
“Now, if I win, then I’ll be surprised, but if I don’t, that’s OK.”
Borgella was born with Leber congenital amaurosis and competes in the T13 classification for athletes who are generally considered legally blind but have some vision.
Both the first round of competition and finals will be taking place tomorrow. Borgella will need a top-three finish in her heat — or one of the next two fastest times outside of the top 3 in both heats — to advance to the finals.
Borgella may also be racing in the 4x100m universal relay on Friday, Sept. 6.
You can read Beauchemin’s full feature on Borgella’s part to Paris here.
‘She’s a fighter’: Trinity Lowthian reaches Paralympic stage 2 years into her wheelchair fencing career
Wheelchair fencer Trinity Lowthian will also be making her Paralympic debut on Tuesday.
The 22-year-old from Stittsville was diagnosed with autoimmune autonomic neuropathy as a teenager, which impacts her digestive system.
Prior to her diagnosis, Lowthian competed in water polo and biathlon, but her condition forced her into a wheelchair and she looked elsewhere to find an athletic pursuit. Lowthian found that outlet in wheelchair fencing, and has rapidly become a force to be reckoned with in her new sport.
In two short years of competitive fencing, Lowthian has filled up her trophy shelf, most recently earning two gold medals and a bronze in the Americas Championships.
While it wasn’t that long ago that she was spending her final years of high school in the hospital, tomorrow, Lowthian will be competing against the best-of-the-best on the world stage.
“I absolutely can’t believe it,” she told Ottawa Sports Pages reporter Jackson Starr before the Games. “I never would have imagined this. I was talking with one of the healthcare providers who cared for me when I was at CHEO, and she absolutely could not believe that I’d gotten here, especially in the last two years.
“It’s just out of this world. I don’t think I’ve fully wrapped my head around how far I’ve come and that I’m actually at this point.”
Lowthian now trains with past Team Canada women’s foil coach Paul Apsimon at Ottawa Fencing and she credits her mentor as key to her rapid success in the field.
“I think part of it has been the great coaching that I’ve had,” Lowthian indicated. “The knowledge that my coaches have brought to the table, but also having an athletic background and taking that part of my life with me into this has really helped.”
Lowthian has quickly immersed herself in the local and national fencing community. She usually practices against local fencers without regular mobility restrictions who strap themselves into a wheelchair to train with her.
“The Ottawa fencing community has really, really rallied around me and become a family,” the University of Ottawa nutrition/food science student underlined. “It’s been great how much they supported me.”
You can read more about Lowthian’s journey into wheelchair fencing in Starr’s full profile here.
Lowthian’s first bout will be against Eun Hye Cho from South Korea in the Women’s Sabre Category B table of 16. Cho is ranked seventh, while Lowthian is 16th (epée is her stronger weapon, with a #8 world ranking).
Team Canada goalball seeks elusive spot in Paralympic final four
The Canadian women’s goalball team hasn’t hit the Paralympic podium since the Athens 2004 Games, before any of the current players were on the team, but Ottawa’s Whitney Bogart, Amy Burk and Emma Reinke will have a golden chance to advance to the Paris 2024 medal round when they take on Israel in Tuesday’s quarter-finals.
Canada finished off their strong performance in pool play with a scoreless tie against South Korea yesterday to clinch second place in their pool. Israel, which is ranked ever so slightly ahead of Canada for fifth spot in the world rankings (330.769 vs 330.686 points), was 1-2 in the other group.
“The pool that we were in is a lot different from the pool that we’re about to cross over into,” Reinke noted in an interview with Beauchemin after yesterday’s match. “We were in a really defensive pool with the Asian countries, and now we’re getting into a little bit more of an offensive couple of games, so the games are definitely going to be different, but if we can just keep doing what we do, then we should be OK.”
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