Adams determined to aid other athletes

Wheelchair champ inducted to Hall of Fame

Make that two hallowed halls in one year for Jeff Adams; one to honour a fine sporting career, the other to kick-start a new vocation.

At 47, the Mississauga, Ont., native who last attended university in 1993 — “pre-laptops” — has just completed his first year of law school at Osgoode Hall in Toronto. And on Thursday, the former wheelchair racer was announced as a 2018 inductee into Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame, along with the likes of quarterback Damon Allen, cross-country skier Chandra Crawford, diver Alex Despatie and Chief Wilton Littlechild.

Adams, who was paralyzed at age nine, competed at six Paralympics — Seoul 1988 through Beijing 2008 — most often racing the 400-, 800- and 1,500 metres. The induction comes as a fitting punctuation mark on a sterling athletic career that produced 13 Paralympic medals and consistently put para sport on the front burner. He also won Canada’s only medal at the 2001 World Championships in Athletics in Edmonton and was a sixtime world champion.

During the announcement Thursday, Adams was particularly inspired by the words of Littlechild, who viewed sport as an escape from residential school abuse. It brought home how much sport can improve a given life.

“I always thought of sport as a bit of a means to an end, that the lessons we learn in sport get much more valuable and real when you take those lessons and apply them to your families, your real lives,” said Adams.

“So listening to the inductees today crystallized it for me. It really is a reminder that as an athlete, you’ve got your coach and your trainer and your teammates and training partners and family and friends, all these people who really help and make it possible for you to get to the start line, and you don’t cross the finish line alone when you’ve got that much help. And it just reminded me to listen for the sound of support that those people in my life make, and more importantly to make it to people who are important to me.”

For Adams, sport was largely a way to react to his disability, and in trademark form. He’s a man who has long eschewed convention and believes he was drawn to wheelchair racing precisely because it turns a debilitating stereotype on its head.

“Because of my disability, I was able to sit in an aerodynamic position and I didn’t have 30 pounds of muscle on my legs to drag around. So my disability was what gave me an advantage, theoretically, over an able bodied person. I can’t think of any other example in life where the physical disability is that which gives you a physical advantage. I’ve thought about this for 35 years. So, being able to participate in a sport where that stereotype is exactly reversed was something that really helped me a lot in terms of dealing with my disability.”

Upon graduation from law school, he wants to turn his attention to dealing with the long-term good of athletes in Canada. He sees himself practising at the intersection of workers’ and athletes’ rights, to make the transition from sport to business a smoother one.

“I think there is a need for an athlete who understands what it’s like to spend 20 years on a national team and there’s no pension and no real help in terms of transition. Some athletes are really successful doing that, but most aren’t. That’s a big problem in Canada.

“It was pretty easy for me, because I recognized it years before I needed to. And I was very, very lucky in terms of the sponsorships I had, McDonald’s and Bell Mobility. I had good corporate sponsors who made it possible for me to focus on racing, but that also gave me mentors within the companies who helped point me in the right direction and started saying to me, ‘You know, you’re 35, you should maybe think about what’s coming up in the next few years.’ ”

At the tail end of his racing career he founded a couple of businesses, one that sold medical devices including wheelchairs. He understands what it takes to move from one realm to another and that some crucial pieces of infrastructure are missing.

“I think there are obvious, systemic things that could be changed, and we need a transitional program to go from sport to business.”

I ALWAYS THOUGHT OF SPORT AS A BIT OF A MEANS TO AN END.