Paralympic curler called to Hall of Fame
Vernon’s Sonja Gaudet joins Victoria’s Steve Nash on 2020’s list of all-time Canadian sports greats
It is rarefied company Vernon’s Sonja Gaudet joins in the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame’s class of 2020, although an induction ceremony is being held off until next year.
Gaudet won three Paralympic gold medals in wheelchair curling — in 2006 in Turin, 2010 in Vancouver and 2014 in Sochi — as well as three world championships, making her Canada’s most decorated para-curler.
She is joined by two-time NBA Most Valuable Player Steve Nash of Victoria, Charlottetown golfer Lorie Kane, former NH-Ler Sheldon Kennedy and Olympian show jumper Eric Lamaze.
“Oh gosh,” she said. “I’m honoured to be among this group, for sure.
“And humbled.” Gaudet played basketball and volleyball growing up. She swam, she skied, she played tennis.
And she rode horseback. One day, 23 years ago just before her 31st birthday, she was on her mount, riding in a big hayfield, and stopped to chat with a girl walking her dog in the field.
“My horse did not want to stand still,” she said. The horse reared up, they both went over backwards and her back and spinal cord were dislocated.
It’s hard to fathom what goes through a person’s mind after something like that. Walking, like breathing, is something almost all of us take for granted. “Suddenly, life changes. “You do that (feel sorry for yourself) momentarily, and that moment lasts longer for some than for others, but for me it didn’t last long because I couldn’t let it last long because I had two kids.”
Her daughter was six years old, her son, three.
“What was the option? Do I turn into a victim and be secluded from my family’s life? Or do I suck it up for my kids’ sakes, because that’s what it was to start with and I had to get on with it.
“Because of them, before you know it you’re creating a new normal,” she said. That was 1997.
Five years later, Gaudet was at the Vernon Curling Club helping make the washrooms and other areas accessible.
“That’s when they told me curling would be in the Paralympics soon for the first time,” Gaudet said. “There was going to be this big search on for para-curlers, would I be interested?
“I wasn’t at first. But once they got me on the ice and I got a sense of what the sport was all about, it caught my interest.”
She’s retired from curling going on three seasons after 15 years of playing competitively, and now advocates for better accessibility. Being named to the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame is an excellent platform for that.
“This came unexpectedly,” Gaudet said. “This is an opportunity to take the messaging from parasport and take it now to community and society, life in general.”
We’ve come a long way, she said. But there’s a ways to go yet.
“It’s frustrating at times, absolutely.”
Why, for instance, do we weigh the option of putting in stairs or a ramp?
“I’d like to see the whole notion of access and inclusion just being universal. Why is it not just normal, why do we have to think about it? ‘Do we put in an extra washroom or do we not?’ Well, yeah you do, you make it universal.”