Georgian College students Brad Bowden and Adam Dixon will play out their boyhood dreams when they take to the ice at the 2010 Paralympic Games in Vancouver this March. Both are members of the 2010 Canadian Sledge Hockey Team.

Bowden, a third-year Art and Design Fundamentals student, has taken the semester off to moonlight as a Paralympic athlete. He was part of the team that won a gold medal in the 2006 Paralympics in Torino. He was also on the Canadian Wheelchair Basketball Team which won gold in the 2004 Paralympics, making him the first athlete to win a gold medal in both the summer and winter Paralympics.

The Mississauga-born 26-year-old has always been a sports fan, but like many youths, Bowden spent a lot of time sitting around the house playing video games and watching TV. He credits his grandparents with motivating him to take up a wheelchair sport.

The natural athlete signed up for recreational wheelchair basketball when he was 12. He quickly became a star on the court, earning Rookie of the Year honours in his first season of play.

Bowden discovered sledge hockey through one of his basketball coaches and soon fell in love with the fast-moving sport.

“Like most Canadian boys, I dreamed of playing hockey in the national league,” he says. “Though sledge hockey wasn’t too appealing to me at first, the actual speed of the game is just tremendous. This is as close to ‘normal’ hockey as you can get.”

His teammate, Dixon, a Midland resident, is also taking time off from school to pursue his dream.

“Right now, hockey kind of takes priority for me over work and school,” says the 20-year-old Electrical Engineering student. “I can always go back to school, but I may never get another opportunity to win a gold medal at home in Vancouver.”

Dixon became involved in sledge hockey after being diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma, a form of bone cancer, at the age of 10. After a year of chemotherapy and an operation to remove the tumour in his right leg, he was pronounced cancer-free. But the surgery involved removing his tibia and half a calf muscle.

After playing hockey as a kid, Dixon had to learn how to walk again. He heard about sledge hockey from a friend and joined the national team in 2006 when he was 17 years old.

Dixon was named top defenceman at the World Championships in 2008 where the team won a gold medal. Bowden was named top forward at the tournament.

Bowden and Dixon have travelled across Canada to prepare for the Paralympics in March and also visited Saskatoon where they watched the junior men’s hockey game. They’re currently playing three exhibition games against Korea. After that, they’ll take part in training camps through Feb. 27 and will move into the Olympic village on March 12.

Canada will open the 2010 Paralympic Winter Games on March 13 against Italy. Canada’s other preliminary games will be against Sweden and Norway.

ABOUT SLEDGE HOCKEY

Sledge hockey is the Paralympics version of ice hockey and, since its debut on the Paralympics program at the 1994 Lillehammer Paralympics Winter Games, has quickly become one of the biggest attractions for spectators at the Paralympics Winter Games. It is fast-paced, highly physical and played by male athletes with a physical disability in the lower part of the body.