Ouellet leads Canadian wheelchair basketball team in transition
Rookie-laden squad regroups after fifth-place finish at Rio Paralympics
Cindy Ouellet is a young woman on a mission.
A couple of missions actually. The 29-year-old native of Rivière-du-Loup is in Cali, Colombia, this week representing Canada in the Americas Cup wheelchair basketball tournament. It’s the first step toward the 2018 world championships in which Canada hopes to defend the title it won in 2014.
This is a transition year for Canada. Several key players retired after a disappointing fifth-place finish at the 2016 Paralympics in Rio de Janeiro and the current squad has four rookies, including Élodie Tessier of Laval.
“Rio is in the past and we can only learn from that experience,” Ouellet said via email this week from Colombia. “It remains an awesome experience because how many athletes would have the experience to go to a Paralympics?”
In Ouellet’s case, she has been to three Paralympics and earned a bronze medal in 2008, three years after she was introduced to the sport by a physiotherapist.
She is aiming to make a fourth appearance in 2020 and said she’s encouraged by the early results from this year’s team.
“First of all, we expect to grow as a team,” she said. “It’s a new squad and a new team. We want to put in the work and make progress over the year. We are proud to be representing Canada and we have a strong desire to win and get better. The new players are fitting in well. The new group is a fun group of girls with a lot of potential. We are all on the same page working together to reach our goals.”
Sports have always been a part of Ouellet’s life. She was an avid skier and a provincial-level soccer player before a diagnosis of bone cancer in her hip when she was 12.
The setback hasn’t slowed her down. She competed in swimming and track before concentrating on basketball. She is a passionate spokeswoman for physically challenged athletes and that’s one of the reasons she will be spending most of the next year in Canada rather than in Los Angeles, where she is working on a PhD in biomechanical engineering at the University of Southern California.
“I will take a year off to get my dissertation ready to finish my PhD,” Ouellet said. “I wanted to be back in Canada to play basketball with my team as well as to participate in more conferences and opportunities to reach out to different communities and companies to share my story a little, but also to educate people about Paralympic sports.”
Canada opened the round robin portion of the Americas Cup on Wednesday with an 81-27 rout of host Colombia before defeating Brazil 62-42 on Thursday. Canada faces the U.S., the 2016 Olympic champion, on Friday.