Hennessy is a force of habits
Canadian paddler found strength to succeed by drawing on a lifetime of playing sports
On Thursday morning in Tokyo Bay, before she sets her canoe on a course for the start line, Brianna Hennessy will dip her hand into the dark blue below. Testing the morning waters. Force of habit.
Some habits never leave us, even when they’re no longer helpful. The reflexes still find their way. Hennessy tests the waters even when she knows she can’t judge the results of the experiment. She doesn’t feel temperature any more. Not since the accident.
“At times, my mind is still what it was before,” says Hennessy, who will represent Canada in both para-canoe and para-kayak in Tokyo. “Like, I can’t feel my arms or legs. But I’ll still put my hand in the water to check if it’s hot or cold. It’s what you’re used to your entire life, right? So I still do stuff like that. You catch yourself sometimes going, ‘Oh, yeah … whoops. I can’t do that.’ ”
Old habits die harder than old clichés. But whatever about testing the waters, it is one of Hennessy’s oldest habits that has likely saved her life — twice over. A habit of competitive spirit. Of sporting excellence. Most of all, a habit of the deepest defiance.
Her parents are convinced that it was not just their daughter’s experience but her excellence in contact sports that saved her when a speeding cab driver struck Hennessy in downtown Toronto in 2014.
“Being able to block myself, from hockey, rugby, even boxing … I probably wouldn’t be here if not for that. I actually threw myself onto the hood and my skull smashed into the windshield. Sometimes, I think about how many other people in that exact accident who probably would have been dead.”
Hennessy stepped out that night as a 30-year-old matching her sporting success with professional progress. An underwriting manager with the Business Development Bank of Canada, she was in Toronto from her native Ottawa for a work conference. Her athletic achievements to that point took some writing, too: provincial amateur boxing champion, rugby at the provincial and nationalteam levels, ball hockey at a national level, gold medallist in women’s hockey at the Ontario Games.
Then came the impact on King Street West. Catastrophic. It broke Hennessy’s
C1 vertebrae and severed one of the main arteries to her brain. She woke up in hospital paralyzed from the neck down and would soon be diagnosed tetraplegic, getting some movement back in her upper body but no sensation. She says she was “ready to pull the plug.”
“Not in a way where I wanted people to feel sorry for me,” she says. “But in a way where I said, there’s nothing here for me, there’s no purpose in my life. In those moments, that’s all that was going through my brain. I was ready to let go.”
How did it come to be that seven years later she is approaching one of the biggest and best moments of her life — a Paralympics debut representing her country on the waters of Tokyo? Well,
old habits mostly. Sports saved her again. Not just sports of course but all that comes with it. The Hennessy spirit, a stubborn-as-a-mule, steely IrishCanadian streak that coursed its way across the Atlantic generations ago but survived the journey, coursing on through the descendants.
“That fighting Irish for sure is in our blood, running strong,” she says. “I’ll tell you that right now. Sometimes we’re too stupid to turn down a fight.”
Her father Daniel and mother Norma had both been standout football players. Academically gifted too but sports were everything, Norma even joined Brianna on the rugby field for a mother-daughter midfield combo when she was well into her 40s. In the dark hours in that hospital room in Toronto, the fight, the stubbornness came from Daniel.
“My dad, he’s very close with those roots. It’s always the Hennessy way or the Hennessy spirit,” Brianna says. “I remember that moment in the hospital where he said, ‘Don’t you give up on me, don’t dare give up on me.’ That’s what worked for us. We’re fighters. Before I left for Tokyo, he said, ‘You go show the world your Hennessy.’ ”
She is determined to do just that. Mere moments in her company tell you as much. Hennessy is so utterly infectious that you don’t even need to be physically in her company. Her energy, her positivity, that defiance, all of it jumps off an email or a text message on a phone screen, off her social media feeds, too. It leaps out of a Zoom room and grabs you. There are a million reasons why she shouldn’t be in Tokyo. She’ll happily list them herself and then tell you with a glint why they don’t matter. They were hurdles. They were fights. They mattered until she conquered them. All that matters now is she’s there.
And yet there’s one reason you keep coming back to: She only got in a boat a year ago. Literally. August 2020.
It was wheelchair rugby that had brought her out of her darkness in the first place. The Ottawa Hospital Rehabilitation Centre opened the doors to the sport and she did what she does — blew the doors off the hinges. She was on the provincial team in a flash. Then she was the only Canadian woman to be imported on to a U.S. team, a Division 1 team at that, joining the Tampa Bay Generals.
“Parasport is the biggest part of my ongoing therapy and recovery,” Hennessy says. “(Wheelchair rugby) was my purpose, my way to drive to get out of bed on any given day. It gave me a purpose to keep fighting on.”
Then came the pandemic, closed borders and no team sports. More hurdles. A friend, Canada’s men’s wheelchair rugby team captain Patrice Dagenais, suggested Hennessy chat with the Ottawa Rideau Canoe Club for a COVID-era athletic outlet. She’d done a portage trip once as a child but had largely avoided the water. ORCC coach Joel Hazzan welcomed her into the club and they gave it a go.
It’s much too simple — and simply incorrect — to suggest that Hennessy’s natural athleticism made it a smooth transition. The movement and muscles required were almost the exact opposite to rugby. With contracted fingers on both hands, the paddle has to be taped to her hands. Then there’s the balance.
“These boats were like young unbroken wild mustangs,” Hennessy says. “The kayak bucking me off its back, or the canoe running around in every direction. Over and over I got back in those goddamn boats. I would tame these new beasts if it was the last thing that I did. I had days where I cursed my new body. So many days where I said to myself I could do this … if it were before my accident.”
But the mustangs were tamed. “We began to form a special bond. One that made me feel alive again, running with feral horses, wild and free. It became therapeutic for me. I was finally starting to feel like I belonged.”
Her first competitive race? The national trials. She fared well enough to travel to Budapest for a World Cup that doubled as an Olympic trial. She passed the test. The alwaysthere chronic pain that made a 40-hour journey to Japan almost traumatic is now behind her. She’ll compete Thursday in the heats of both para-canoe (VL1 classification) and parakayak (KL1). The finals are Saturday, Tokyo time, and there’ll be a sleepover Friday night at the ORCC boathouse with young paddlers watching on a projector. The Hennessy household will be glued, too.
Hennessy talks about what just being there means — everything. “Paralympics is about having all the valid reasons in the world to give up, and choosing not to,” she says. “Choosing freedom instead, to fight. Choosing to take a part of our lives back instead. I feel alive again. I feel like I’ve found myself again.”
She’s only been doing this for 12 months and her rivals have years of experience to count on. So, yeah, just being there, it’s everything. And yet … and yet. In the next breath Hennessy is talking wind patterns, training times at her pre-Games camp in Komatsu. How if this goes right or that goes right, things could get interesting.
“I love being the underdog. I just love being underestimated. I love that I’m not on anyone’s radar,” she says, a glint in her eye. “They don’t even expect me to be coming. That for me … that’s my superpower.”
No one said old habits were bad habits. Brianna Hennessy’s got her here. Time to test the Tokyo waters.