This coverage was first sent as an email newsletter to our subscribers. Sign up to receive it, for free, on our Ottawa at the Paralympics page.
By Keiran Gorsky, Dan Plouffe & Martin Cleary
The moment Collinda Joseph and the Canadian wheelchair curling team have been dreaming of came true as they won Canada’s third gold medal of the Milano Cortina 2026 Paralympic Winter Games with a dramatic 4-3 win over China on Saturday.
Joseph’s children Hannah and Sara MacKellar know how competitive their mother is. That intensity comes out in family functions just the same as it does on the ice.
“There’s no mercy, even for children,” Sara said of their family card games in a Friday interview with the Ottawa Sports Pages’ Keiran Gorsky.
“When anyone loses, she bangs on the table and chants ‘Out! Out! Out!’” Hannah added.
Hannah, Sara and family spent the Paralympic competition in Cortina stressing in the stands while the “Cardiac Canadians” fought their way to the gold medal. It has been hard to resist the urge to cover their eyes as games have repeatedly come down to the last stone.
Even so, it’s been a genuine pleasure for Joseph’s family to be at the Games after COVID prevented them from seeing her make her Paralympic debut at Beijing 2022. The Cortina Curling Olympic Stadium has been full to the brim with rowdy school children, especially when the Italians were playing on adjacent sheets.
~~~~~~~~~ Advertisement ~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~ Advertisement ~~~~~~~~~
They haven’t actually gotten to see a lot of their mother this week. Their time together has amounted to 20-minute visits after each game of the tournament. Afterwards, Sara and Hannah would unwind at a popular nearby bar frequented by families, volunteers and even athletes.
“It’s labeled a sports bar, although I don’t see any TVs anywhere,” Sara laughed.
The trip to Italy is the culmination of a journey that began long before their mother picked up a curling stone. Before she settled into the rink, Joseph loved to play wheelchair basketball. She was the one who signed her daughters up for every sport imaginable, sometimes even shooting hoops with them on the driveway.
Those early sessions stuck. While Hannah admits she mostly played to spend time with her mother and sister, Sara went on to play basketball for the Mount Allison University Mounties.
They admire a great many qualities in their mother, but above all, Hannah and Sara have always been awestruck by her resilience.
“She’s definitely the toughest, strongest person that I know,” Hannah said.
As adults, they have developed a new appreciation for the work it took to balance parenting and simultaneously chase a late-blooming athletic dream.
Growing up with a disabled mother who remains a dedicated accessibility advocate coloured also Sara’s view of the world. In stairs, curbs and entrances, Sara has been primed to see barriers to accessibility in everyday life. It was what partly informed her decision to become a physiotherapist.
“I think she showed us to live by example and taught us from a young age that you can be self-sufficient and strong,” Hannah indicated. “Especially as a woman, I think that’s really important.”
Hannah and Sara had to be peeking through their fingers as Canada beat China’s Team Wang Haitao 4-3 to claim the gold medal in mixed team wheelchair curling this afternoon. After a nailbiter of a semifinal that seemed impossible to top in intensity, the game came down to the final throw yet again.
Joseph placed a perfect guard on the centre line in the third end after Canada claimed their first point in the second end. She followed it up with a delicate throw on the four-foot behind cover, though Wang made an easy takeout for a single on his final throw.
The teams traded singles for the remainder of what was a closely contested affair. Joseph made her best shot of the game in the seventh end, sneaking a stone around her own guard and nudging China’s opening stone off the button. It might have allowed them to steal had Chinese second Zhang Mingliang not pulled off one of the most impressive shots of the tournament with a hit-and-roll that cleared three Canadian stones from the four-foot later in the end.
Luckily for Canada, Wang missed his final shot of the game just as South Korean skip Lee Hyeon-chul did the day before. In a chaotic final few seconds of play, the Canadian team couldn’t agree whether their stone was closest to centre. With their clock winding down, skip Mark Ideson made a desperation shot with 2.8 seconds remaining to tap their stone onto the button.
“I told one of my teammates early in the week that I think this team is pretty special,” Joseph told the Canadian Paralympic Committee after the win. “This week really proved it. Not just the people on the ice but the people behind the scenes.”
Emma Archibald warms up for cross-country ski finale with relay
With her debut Paralympics reaching its end and the rest of her career stretching into the distance, Emma Archibald is brimming with excitement. A team wax technician couldn’t help but ask her if she was thinking of what might be possible at the next Paralympics after she earned an impressive sixth-place finish earlier this week.
“I felt crazy, but I am already thinking of the next Games. Obviously I’m trying to soak in these Games as much as I can, but I think that competitive mindset does kick in,” Archibald told the Ottawa Sports Pages’ Dan Plouffe on Thursday. “While still being proud of the performance I gave, and knowing it was the hardest I could have gone in this moment, I know there is still room for improvement, and that’s the most exciting thing.”
Conditions haven’t been perfect as spring has sprung, but the 22-year-old University of Ottawa Gee-Gee has learned to make do. Things weren’t much better the last time she was here for World Cup races in February 2025.
“It was just kind of [a] slush fest,” she recalled. “We’ve had the time to just accept the fact that it’ll be hard and it might be a bit sucky.”
The track through Val di Fiemme was rendered a patch of white in a field of green in today’s open 4×2.5-kilometre relay. The event features athletes from different categories (visually impaired, standing, sitting) competing as a single team. Archibald was grouped with three visually impaired skiers in Logan Lariviere, Jesse Bachinsky and Madison Mullin.
Archibald was actually the second oldest of the youthful bunch. She has felt energized seeing the performances of some of her more veteran teammates at these Paralympics, including multi-medallists Mark Arendz and Natalie Wilkie.
“I’ve just seen the hard work that they’ve all put into it, and just the lifestyles that they live, and the determination that they’ve all put into achieving that success,” Archibald said of Team Canada’s veterans. “It’s super cool that I’m able to be teammates with them.”
The Canadians were at the back of the pack by the time Archibald set out in third position. The gap was large enough that she couldn’t be seen on camera. They combined for a total time of 26:40.20, leaving them 10th of 11 teams.
Archibald indicated the skiing has gotten smoother as officials poured more and more salt over the steeper sections of course. Even so, German guide Jakob Bold slipped and fell nearly right out the gate.
Archibald is preparing to comb over her race footage on CBC Gem and pinpoint areas for refinement.
“That’s the most exciting thing,” she described. “You think you’re at your best, and then, there’s always something that can be improved.”
Ottawa Paralympians in action on March 14:
Final Day Preview: Memory of 2024 World Para Ice Hockey Championship upset lifts underdog Canadian hopes against 4-time Paralympic champion USA
It’s the moment Anton Jacobs-Webb and the Canadian para ice hockey team have been waiting for. Canada vs USA for the gold medal in hockey – the third such meeting on Italian ice between the North American neighbours following the Olympic women’s and men’s hockey finals at Milano Cortina 2026.
Team Canada will hope that third time’s a charm following overtime defeats to the Americans in both Olympic championship games, and with any luck, there could be a magical moment like Jacobs-Webb experienced at the 2024 World Para Ice Hockey Championship.
At that event in Calgary, the Sledge Hockey of Eastern Ontario product from Gatineau scored the tournament-winning goal in Canada’s 2-1 win over USA in the gold medal game, snapping a 23-game losing streak against their arch rivals.
“That was the first time since I’ve been on the team that we won a gold medal. We’ve got a whole bunch of silver medals, but there, it was time,” Jacobs-Webb reflected in an article by SportCom, Quebec’s sports information service. “We believed in it and we knew we were capable of doing it. It was so long that we’d been working for that. We didn’t quit, and I think that just amplified the thrill of victory.”
That victory on home ice is an inspiring memory that certainly gives the Canadians hope for Sunday’s showdown with the Americans, who have dominated the rivalry at most other times in recent years.
Make no mistake, the expected result for Canada on Sunday is silver. It will be a daunting task for SHEO defenders Tyrone Henry and Rob Armstrong and Team Canada to contain the speed of the American attack, particularly Declan Farmer, who leads the Paralympic tournament with 14 goals and 24 points in his four games.
The U.S. has won four consecutive Paralympic titles, including a 5-0 beatdown of Team Canada in the Beijing 2022 championship game. But there are certainly hints and hopes that the Canadians are closing the gap and could have a shot at pulling off the upset – the 2024 triumph most prominent.
There have also been significant changes in personnel on and off the ice for Team Canada since their defeat in the last Paralympic final under the cloud of COVID in Beijing.
There are seven new players of 17 playing in Milano Cortina who weren’t on the 2022 Paralympic team. And there’s been a change in attitude instilled by Boris Rybalka, who was appointed head coach heading into this season following USA’s 6-1 vengeance thrashing of the Canadians in the 2025 World Championship final in Buffalo.
Rybalka, previously a Team Canada assistant since 2023 and a long-time coach and general manager with the Camrose Kodiaks in the Alberta Junior Hockey League, has continued to build on the team’s confidence. Within a 48-hour period of taking over, Rybalka phoned every player on the team. He championed something of a refreshing “win-now” mentality in contrast to the seemingly unending emphasis on development of years past.
The message might not have resonated so well had the team not already proved they could compete. The un-retirement of Greg Westlake provided institutional memory – and perhaps a good luck charm – from the last Canadian Paralympic triumph back in 2006, which also came on Italian ice, in Torino. And the emergence of fresh, young talent has done a great deal to strengthen the existing core.
“I think we have a lot of new players who are key, but I also think the players who were young in Beijing stepped up to key roles,” highlighted Jacobs-Webb, who was 21 when he made his Paralympic debut in Beijing. “Our top guys are still our top guys but I think our secondary leadership has learned a lot.”
Following the thumping in Buffalo, the Canadians have enjoyed improved performances against USA. They went to overtime before losing 2-1 in the preliminary round and then lost 3-0 win an empty net goal in October’s International Para Hockey Cup in Czechia, and then fell in two hard-fought contests 3-2 and 2-0 (with an empty-netter again) in December at Hockey Canada’s Para Hockey Cup.
“Those two games were probably some of the best we’ve played against them in a long time,” Jacobs-Webb indicated in a pre-Games interview with the Ottawa Sports Pages’ Keiran Gorsky. “I think it’s a testament to our coaching, to what we’re learning, to the team, the belief and the work we’re putting in, every time we play them.”
Canada went through the Milano 2026 round robin undefeated and then pulled out a 4-2 victory over China in the semifinals in a game that was tied at 2 deep into the third period.
Heading into the final, Jacobs-Webb has been the tournament’s top faceoff man by a wide margin, winning over 70% of his draws. If he’s not winning possession off the drop of the puck, then his job as Canada’s #1 centre is to win scrums, create turnovers and dig the puck out to Liam Hickey and captain Tyler McGregor. Jacobs-Webb is tied for the team lead in assists and fifth overall in the tournament with seven.
“They’re like two offensive geniuses,” Jacobs-Webb told Gorsky during a Thursday call from Milano. “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.”
Puck drop for the final competition of the Milano Cortina 2026 Paralympic Winter Games is 11:05 a.m. ET.
Emma Archibald ready to grind through tough conditions in cross-country ski marathon
The last event on the para cross-country skiing schedule is the Paralympics’ version of the marathon, and Emma Archibald of the University of Ottawa Gee-Gees is eager to take on the challenge of the women’s standing 20 km interval start freestyle event.
If the task on its own wasn’t difficult enough, add to that the fact the 22-year-old who was born missing fingers doesn’t use ski poles, and the springtime snow conditions make the who proposition that much more of a grind.
“That course, with no polls, it is a bit trickier,” Archibald indicated in an interview with the Ottawa Sports Pages’ Dan Plouffe after recording a breakout sixth-place performance on Wednesday in her debut Games. “But I think it was just proof that I can do hard things.”
Archibald, who only took up cross-country skiing around the time of the last Paralympics, draws determination and experience with unusual weather from her Fall River, N.S. roots, where winter weather can be very unpredictable and has taught her to be adaptable.
“At the end of the day, we gotta get our training in, so, you know, sometimes mid-winter, if there’s no snow, bam, we’re whipping out the roller skis,” Archibald recounted. “Some people in Ontario or out west, they might think that’s crazy to be ripping out on roller skis mid-season, but you’ve gotta do what you gotta do sometimes. I think that just shows the grit of Nova Scotians too.”
Archibald, who enjoyed soccer, basketball, flag football and track and field growing up, has never backed down from a challenge. She even insisted on playing the piano when she was little.
“Emma, really? You’re missing fingers. Is there not another musical instrument you want to play?” her father Stephen Archibald recalled thinking, Sports Pages reporter Keiran Gorsky relayed in his pre-Games feature. “That’s just who she is, you know, there’s nothing [she wouldn’t do].”
Archibald’s confidence heading into her final event at her first Paralympics is also buoyed by 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 underlined. “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 final para alpine skiing races of the Milano Cortina Games are also set for Sunday morning. Ottawa guide Sierra Smith and Kalle Eriksson will race in men’s visual impairment slalom after opening the Games with a downhill silver medal, a super-G bronze and fourth-place finishes in alpine combined and giant slalom.
~ SUPPORT LOCAL JOURNALISM ~
We need your help to keep producing the local sports news you can’t find anywhere else!
