Decide Your Destiny

This week we were fortunate to be joined by four guests! We had 3 Paralympic athletes and our guest expert medical professional.

Meet the athletes:
Erica Gavel is an athlete and PhD candidate from Saskatchewan and defended her thesis while training for the 2020 Paralympic games. Gavel led her team to gold in wheelchair basketball at the Parapan American Games in 2019 in Peru.  She graduated with her master’s thesis from the University of Toronto in 2019 and was awarded the “Own the Podium Young Investigator Award”. Currently she continues to work toward her PhD in environmental physiology and performance at the Ontario Tech University with a focus on athletic performance in heat but with a focus on Paralympians.

Read more about Erica here:

https://www.wheelchairbasketball.ca/players/erica-gavel/
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/gold-medal-win-wheelchair-basketball-erica-gavel-1.5267618

Nathan Reich is a 25-year-old gold medal winning Paralympian hailing from Victoria, British Columbia. His career highlights include winning the gold medal in men’s T38 1500 M at both the 2019 IPC World Championships and the Parapan American games in meet record time and he was named Athletics Canada’s Ambulatory Athlete for 2018. He has a long family line of athletes, his father competing in the 1996 Olympics for javelin for the USA, his mother was a pole vaulter for Canada and his grandfather played in the NHL for many teams, including the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Read more about Nate here:
https://paralympic.ca/team-canada/nathan-riech
https://paralympic.ca/news/nathan-riech-reaches-top

 Greg Stewart is an athlete and motivational speaker from Kamloops, British Columbia. He is a thrower in shot-put but also played volleyball and basketball. His personal motto is “trust in the process”. Stewart won a silver medal at the Parapan American Games in 2019 and also the silver medal at the 2019 Para world championship in Dubai, in Shot Put. Stewart was named CSI Pacific Athlete of the Month for January 2020. He was part of the Canadian national sitting volleyball team that won bronze at the Parapan American Games in 2007 and 2011. He also won three world titles with the Canadian national Para standing volleyball team, and played basketball for Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, BC.

Read more about Greg here:
https://paralympic.ca/team-canada/greg-stewart
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/kamloops-shot-putter-wins-silver-at-world-para-athletics-championships-1.5368769

Meet the guest expert:
Dr. Steven Macaluso is an associate professor with the Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry at Western University in the Department of PM&R and a consultant physiatrist on the Stroke and MSK Rehabilitation units. Through his partnership with the Fowler Kennedy Sports Medicine Clinic, he sees athletes of all skill levels, including those with disabilities participating in parasport.

We hope you enjoy listening to our round table discussion. Each individual had so much to offer!

Also check out:
Top of Her Game episode with Chantal Pettitclerc:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6OZWz0nHkk