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By Keiran Gorsky, Dan Plouffe & Martin Cleary
It was a nerve-wracking day for Ottawa’s Paralympians in Milano Cortina.
Canada’s para hockey and wheelchair curling teams both survived hotly contested semi-final matchups, neither result locked in until the final moments of play.
In Milano, the Canadian para hockey team held off China for a 4–2 victory, while on the curling sheet, Collinda Joseph and Team Canada edged out South Korea 8–7 in a semifinal that came down to the final throw.
Down the slopes of Tofane, Ottawa’s Sierra Smith and Kalle Eriksson came up just short of a third medal at their debut Paralympics.
Canada emerges from 2-2 tie late in 3rd to top China in semis
The Paralympic Games have come as advertised for Gatineau’s Anton Jacobs-Webb. After a pandemic-plagued debut in Beijing 2022 that he described as not “much of a Paralympic experience,” the 25-year-old has made the most of his time in Italy.
Jacobs-Webb spent his Wednesday traversing the city and feasting on gelato with some of the 20 friends and family members who came to watch him in Milano. They also made a visit to the Duomo di Milano.
“I think that makes a huge difference,” Jacobs-Webb said of his massive travelling contingent in a Thursday interview with the Ottawa Sports Pages’ Keiran Gorsky.
It isn’t just hockey he has to think about. The Université de Montréal architecture student took the entire semester off at school to prepare for Milano Cortina. He uses the rare moments he isn’t occupied with hockey to apply for internships in the summer.
At the moment, though, none of that is racking his brain – it’s all hockey, all the time. Jacobs-Webb continued his stellar play as Canada outlasted a feisty Chinese team on Friday by a score of 4-2 in the semi-finals.
WATCH CBC SPORTS | Canada advances to gold medal Para ice hockey final as McGregor scores twice in win over China
From the get-go, the Canadian team seemed unprepared to deal with China’s relentless forecheck. Canada had bested the Chinese 7-0 at their recent meeting at the 2025 Para Hockey Cup in Dawson Creek, B.C.
Defencemen Rob Armstrong and Tyrone Henry had a difficult game as they struggled to keep up with China’s competition-leading power play. Yifeng Shen, one of their star players, snuck a pass directly through the slot and between the two SHEO alumni, which Zheng Zhang easily poked into a gaping net. The goal brought the game back within one after Tyler McGregor scored twice earlier in the opening frame.
Henry had his ice time curtailed after the fact, logging just 5:44 on the night.
In the second period, China’s Zhidong Wang fought off Armstrong to drop the puck for Jintao Tian, who ploughed into the slot uncontested and beat goaltender Corbin Watson just inside the post.
“It was kind of a battle with ourselves,” Armstrong told the Canadian Paralympic Committee.
It was Dominic Cozzolino who broke the deadlock with six minutes remaining in regulation, his wrist shot deflecting off a Chinese defender and into the net.
Two minutes later, Jacobs-Webb made a proper grinder’s play, winning his puck battle with defenceman Zhanfu Zhu and digging the puck off the sideboards onto the stick of Liam Hickey. Hickey sealed the deal with a goal on a wrap-around.
“They’re like two offensive geniuses,” Jacobs-Webb told Gorsky of his high-octane line with McGregor and Hickey. “I’m good at retrieving pucks and creating space and being hard on the forecheck. So I think if I can do that, I can give those guys space to be creative and do what they’ve got to do.”
The assist marked his seventh helper of the tournament.
‘Cardiac Canadians’ steal 3 in final end to win by 1 and reach final
Stittsville lead Collinda Joseph and Canada’s Team Mark Ideson pulled off their closest win yet in what has been a competition chock full of nailbiters. Canada came from behind to top South Korea’s Team Yang Hui-tae 8-7 in the semi-finals.
After completing the round robin as the first undefeated wheelchair curling team in Paralympic history, Ideson and co. snuck into the finals after a dramatic final end.
“Other than bawling my eyes out?” Joseph said to the Canadian Paralympic Committee reporter when asked how she felt afterwards. “It’s an incredible feeling to be in a gold medal game… I think this is a theme of the week and just goes to show you our tenacity and our resilience in that last game.”
WATCH CBC SPORTS | Canada steals 3 in the final end to stun South Korea and advance to Paralympic gold-medal match
Joseph made two perfect takeouts to open the game as Canada scored two in the first end. The Koreans responded with two of their own before stealing two more in the third. At the beginning of that end, Joseph made a difficult shot to tick a guard stone into the house.
Ideson executed a hit-and-stick to get it back within one in the fourth end and stole one in the fifth even as Joseph was heavy on her second stone of the end.
In what seemed a heartbreaking sixth end, the Koreans managed to use Joseph’s stone as cover as they clustered stones on the four-foot. Korean third Lee Hyeon-chul managed a flawless hit-and-roll to clear two yellow stones and score three.
After a Canadian single in the seventh, Joseph’s guard stone in the eighth and final end proved pivotal. Canadian second Ina Forrest and third Jon Thurston used it to shield two stones around the button. Ideson threw his own highlight reel hit-and-roll to sit three on the four-foot. Lee had to clear just a single yellow stone to force extra ends, but he only managed to remove his own from the house, allowing Canada to steal three.
The result marked Canada’s fourth game at these Paralympics to be decided by just a single point.
“My brother calls us the cardiac Canadians because they’re in the stands and they can’t handle it,” Joseph told the CPC.
The Ottawa Sports Pages will have more on Joseph’s family tomorrow, when Canada takes on China in the gold medal game.
Finishing 4th is worse than crashing, says Kalle Eriksson, now on the podium doorstep twice
At the Paralympics, it is generally the competitors with a monopoly on those bittersweet inflection points. At birth, or through circumstance, para athletes are all at the Paralympics for a reason.
Visually impaired skier Kalle Eriksson, for one, lost most of his peripheral vision after a bout of solar retinopathy when he was skiing on a glacier, where pure, unspoiled snow increases the UV reflection percentage to nearly twice that of a normal surface.
“Everything really changed for me within a week,” Eriksson said in an interview with the International Ski and Snowboard Federation.
Perhaps it’s a little easier to smile through the story now, with two Paralympic medals in tow. The 21-year-old, who was training to become a heavy-duty mechanic at the time, still had his life’s direction fundamentally altered. As he takes to the slopes with his guide and partner Sierra Smith, he knows that he is never alone.
Smith is unusual among VI guides, with a competitive skiing career of her own cut short by injury. Once a promising skier with Olympic dreams in her own right, her solo career was derailed by a brutal fall in Lake Louise that essentially tore her knee apart. As she recounted in a Luxe Magazine feature, Smith spent a year on the mend before she attempted a return. At her first FIS event back, she tore her knee again in a giant slalom race at Georgian Peaks in Thornbury.
When COVID lockdowns more or less shuttered the 2020 season, she surrendered those Olympic ambitions and enrolled at the University of Calgary, where she began coaching the Dinos’ ski team. From there, a surprise invitation came for a female coach to assist at Para Sport International. Smith accepted.
That’s where she met Eriksson. As Smith recalls, the two were inseparable from the very beginning.
“Our first chairlift ride up, I think we clicked immediately,” she told FIS.
They didn’t have the two-way motorcycle headsets they both wear in competition today. Eriksson was simply reliant on the reach of her voice.
“We were totally just Mickey Mouse-ing it out there,” she laughed.
They made for a formidable duo and the wins began to pile up from there. Eriksson’s name will appear above hers in official results, but Smith maintains her partner always makes it feel like a “team sport.”
As time went by, the two grew closer and closer. For better or worse, their romantic relationship is now public, and will doubtlessly form a sizable part of their coverage throughout their long career ahead. As Eriksson describes, though, the two are perfectly capable of keeping this professional.
“No, I actually don’t think it has to be honest with you,” he told FIS when asked if their relationship played a big part in their connection on the ski hill. “I think that our relationship is very much focused on ‘OK, the second it’s a ski day, it’s work,’ and once it’s done, it’s over.”
“Once we’re on a ski hill, we’re on the ski hill. When we’re at home, we’re at home,” Smith agreed.
In a somewhat foreboding section of that interview, Eriksson was of the opinion that narrowly missing out on a podium is the most painful part of competing – even more so than crashing. Eriksson can’t actually see the scoreboard when they cross the finish line. It’s Smith who gets the unenviable task of telling him the bad news.
Smith had that job today as they came heart-wrenchingly close to a third medal at their debut Paralympics. The two of them looked confident out of the gate on their first run, though Eriksson came hauntingly close to missing a gate in the early going. The pair finished their first run in third, 0.93 seconds back of Italy’s Giacomo Bertagnolli in first place.
The course was much bumpier on the second run and times consistently lagged behind. A bigger gap formed between the two than either of them likely intended and both of them stumbled through a particularly rough patch at the top of the hill. Eriksson had his head in his hands as they crossed the finish line.
Their fourth-place 1:06.34 time in the second run left them fourth overall with a combined time of 2:10.03 – 0.12 seconds behind bronze medal winner Michael Golas of Poland. Eriksson also came up short in the men’s super combined event on Tuesday, finishing 0.05 behind the bronze medal winner.
“I’m proud of how far we’ve come.” said Eriksson, who seemed to be in better spirits when he spoke to the Canadian Paralympic Committee after the event. “I wasn’t expecting to win the two medals. Obviously these two fourth places really hurt but they won’t define my Games experience and the success we’ve already had.”
Alexis Guimond reaches finish line once, Brian Rowland twice
In the standing section of the para alpine men’s giant slalom, Gatineau’s Alexis Guimond was intent on turning his troubled Paralympics around. The Super-G crystal globe winner and two-time Paralympic medalist failed to finish in his first two events.
“I just want to put on an incredible performance, one of my best performances in my life, in front of my family and friends,” he told the Canadian Press yesterday. “That’s a true thing I want to accomplish.”
He finished his first run at these Paralympics with a time of 1:06.45 in his first giant slalom run – good for fifth place – but he lost his footing and slipped out of the course early in his second run, leaving him with DNFs across the board in Cortina d’Ampezzo.
After a bumpy exit, sit skier Brian Rowland of Merrickville descended the slope slowly but surely for a 20th-place finish in his first run. He flung his hands in the air with a sheepish grin after crossing the finish line.
Rowland was one of a few sit skiers who managed to improve their time on their second run, finishing nearly 4.5 seconds faster en route to a 16th-place showing. Two runs combined, he finished in 17th out of 37 competitors.
Ottawa Paralympians in action on March 14:
Day 8 Preview: Time to ‘finish the task of reaching the top,’ says Collinda Joseph
It’s Canada vs China in the championship game of the wheelchair curling tournament in Cortina d’Ampezzo, and oddsmakers would have a tough time choosing a favourite in this match.
In China’s favour: they are the back-to-back Paralympic champions, the reigning world champs and are ranked #1 in the world.
But Canada had the upper hand in their preliminary round meeting, blowing open a close 5-4 contest with a four-spot in the seventh end. And they’ve been lights out in the biggest moments of all their matches en route to the first-ever preliminary round perfect record followed by the great escape in their semifinal with Korea.
“That was our goal all week to get to the gold medal game,” RA Centre curler Collinda Joseph said via the Canadian Paralympic Committee. “We’ve made that happen. Now we have to finish the task of reaching the top of the podium.”
Canada won the first Paralympic wheelchair curling title 20 years ago at Torino 2006 and won the next two as well before China narrowed the all-time gold medal count to 3-2. Canada kept alive its streak of winning a medal at every Paralympics with Friday’s semifinal win.
Emma Archibald part of Canada’s all-rookie relay lineup
The future will be on full display as the young guns of the Canadian para cross-country skiing team will line up together for the open 4×2.5 km relay Saturday in Val di Fiemme.
Standing skier Emma Archibald, 22, will race alongside three Canadian teammates with visual impairments – Maddie Mullin, 18, Logan Lariviere, 19, and Jesse Bachinsky, 27 – and their guides.
On the heels of a pair of classic style races, Archibald will have her first skate-ski event of the Paralympics Saturday and then again Sunday for the women’s 20 km interval start.
The University of Ottawa Gee-Gee will draw confidence from her top-10 performance in the long-distance freestyle race at last year’s World Championships, which were also held in Italy at Toblach.
“I’m ready to come at this race, how I came at that race last year,” Archibald said in an interview with the Ottawa Sports Pages’ Dan Plouffe on Thursday, before she knew if she’d be chosen for the relay. “Pushing through for that long race, I think I have the ability to do that. I’m excited to just get out there and do it.”
The no-poles skier will enter the relay flying high from her standout sixth-place performance in Wednesday’s women’s standing 10-kilometre classic.
“It was incredible,” recounted Archibald, who felt focused, paced herself well and managed to give a solid kick to the finish. “I was happy with how I felt. I was just feeling really strong.”
Archibald has also drawn energy from seeing the performances of some of her veteran teammates, including multi-medallists Mark Arendz and Natalie Wilkie, plus Brittany Hudak, who earned the bronze medal in the same race where Archibald was sixth. The TV cameras captured Archibald’s elation as she learned, between gasps for air, that Hudak had won a medal.
Archibald remembers that right after her race was done, she immediately wanted to know how her teammate did, knowing Hudak had a good shot at the podium.
“All of a sudden I switched my priorities from collapsing on the ground to keeping the energy high just to find out that answer,” Archibald laughed. “And I think then I was just floating off that. I was super, super proud of her, super proud I could share that moment with her and even have her tell me herself. That was pretty special.”
Canada will be fielding a more experienced lineup in the other relay event Saturday, the mixed 4×2.5 km, with Arendz and Wilkie getting the chance to add to their medal hauls.
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