Welcome to summer camp
‘I WAS THERE’: JOEL DEMBE, GUADALAJARA, 2011
There were a lot of great things about the 2011 Parapan Am Games in Guadalajara, Mexico, but the cuisine was definitely not one of them.
“The tennis stadium was fantastic, but the one thing I vividly recall was how bad the food was,” says Lynden-raised Joel Dembe, Canada’s best wheelchair tennis player. “I’ll give you an example. The morning I got there here is what they served: They cut hotdog wieners in half and gave us unthawed frozen peas with them, along with this other weird bean mix.
“The food was deplorable. You get there as an athlete with a very strict regimen and it all gets thrown out because of the food. London was fantastic compared to that and I imagine Toronto’s going to be good, too.”
Dembe will almost certainly represent Canada in singles and doubles in wheelchair tennis, then is considering giving up the sport at its most competitive level because he’s 31 “and want to get on with a career.”
He competed at the 2012 London Olympics, but was eliminated in the opening round in doubles and singles by a top seed.
In Guadalajara, his first major Games in a Canadian uniform, Dembe and his partner, Philippe Bedard, lost to the Americans, the eventual gold-medal winners, in the quarter-finals and in singles played a strong match but lost the quarters to Argentina’s Gustavo Fernandez, the best Pan Am player, even today.
Earlier in ’11, Dembe had decided to pursue a berth in the ’12 Olympics, so quit his job with a bank and trained and played tournaments full time. At the time, he was rated No. 5 in Canada and was outside the top 100 in the world. By the end of the summer, he had moved to No. 1 in Canada and climbed inside the world’s top 50.
“When I started hearing they were going to send a wheelchair tennis team to the Pan Am Games, I wondered, ‘Where the heck is Guadalajara?’ I got there and I don’t know if I can describe what it’s like being at an athletes village but I’d almost describe it as summer camp for elite athletes. You have to learn how to be in a very close setting with a bunch of others; and learn what you have to do to get ready. Your eyes are opened. You’re meeting athletes from other sports. It was my first time to see wheelchair basketball, and some of the other sports, in a big setting, and to make new friends in other sports. In wheelchair tennis, and other sports, we’re so silo-ed. When you to a Games, you integrate yourself and you gain respect for the other athletes.”
While London set a new benchmark for disabled sports because of the enormous popularity of the 2012 Paralympics, Guadalajara was virtually anonymous beyond the local area.
“There were a lot of locals there for tennis,” Dembe says. “The sense was that it was a big deal for the people of Guadalajara. But you also felt that, outside of Guadalajara, it didn’t mean much to people. It was a huge deal for the athletes, but it didn’t receive media attention, strictly because of where it was. I had no expectations: Just to be there representing Canada was an incredible experience and it prepared me for London. I’d been with the Canadian team, I had lived in an athletes village. I’d been to an opening ceremonies that was very celebratory.
“If it wasn’t for Guadalajara, I’m not sure if I would have gone to the Olympics.”