Overcoming the odds: Paralympian shares inspiring journey with SD57 students

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His injury occurred in 2004, but he wasted no time getting back on the slopes, as he quickly took up downhill skiing in a sit-ski. While adjusting to a different style of skiing had many challenges, alongside the daily struggles of living life in a wheelchair, his effort and hard work paid off tremendously when he not only went to the 2010 Vancouver Paralympics, but earned a gold medal. Going from a career ending spinal injury to a gold medal, Dueck says the importance of resilience in the face of adversity is incredibly important not just in sport, but everyday life.

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“Everything that I’ve learned in sport carries over quite nicely into life. Life is the real show, life is the real challenge, the things that I face in sport were for sure large, but we all face life, and life is a beautiful mess. If we learn how to embrace these things rather than skirt away from them, then I think we have a great opportunity to be better ourselves, but also be better in our families and our communities and make it a better province and a country and a world that we’re a part of,” Dueck said.

“Sport has taught me resiliency, perseverance, embracing challenges, embracing failure. There are infinite challenges to this position that I’m in and there’s infinite challenges that we all face. And so it’s a paradigm shift, like how can we embrace these challenges and use them as stepping stones,” he continued.

While Dueck’s resiliency in the face of life changing adversity comes down to your own mental toughness and ability to never give up, he said the community and people around him played a huge role in getting him back on the slopes and helping him turn around a disastrous accident.

“Family is everything. And so my parents were supportive, my wife was supportive, but we collectively just said ‘I need to get back into the mountains.’ And it was cathartic and therapeutic for me just to be in the mountains and then things started to unfold with, ‘Hey, let’s make a go at being an athlete again.’ A lot of the embracing the adversity was a product of the environment that I was in, which is good people.”

His message resonated strongly with the students, who cheered him on during his presentation when they saw video of his incredible accomplishments, including being the first sit-skier ever to do a backflip.

Athletes for the 2024 Para Biathlon World Championships and Para Nordic World Cup Finals will begin arriving in Prince George during the first week of March for what’s expected to be a fantastic tournament featuring the world’s top athletes.

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