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Wheelchair rugby legend Garett Hickling was Canada's flag bearer at the 2012 Paralympics
Garett Hickling wheeled into the Olympic Stadium in London before hoisting a large Canadian flag with his left hand.
The wheelchair rugby legend was given the honour of leading 145 athletes, 12 support personnel and 134 officials as Canada's flag bearer at the 2012 Paralympics, a highlight in a career that included four Paralympic medals and a world championship gold medal.
'He is one of the most feared athletes in the sport,' chef de mission Gaétan Tardif said at the time, 'yet also exceptionally humble.'
Mr. Hickling, who has died at 54, competed in every major international wheelchair rugby tournament in a 20-year span from 1995 until 2015.
With a goatee and long, straggly blond hair, Mr. Hickling stood out as a rampaging warrior even among the rough characters who populate the sport. Wearing uniform No. 5 and nicknamed G, he gained a reputation as a ferocious competitor in a sport originally known as murderball.
A prototype of the sport's power forward, he earned comparisons to hockey's Wayne Gretzky for his uncanny ability to anticipate a play, whether intercepting an opponent's pass or finding open space on the court.
Wheelchair rugby is a contact sport not for the fainthearted, as athletes bash into one another in wheelchairs modified to look like chariots from a Mad Max movie. Fierce collisions sometimes result in spills with quadriplegic competitors using hands, elbows or shoulders to break a fall, depending on their impairment. Bruises, muscle strains and painful scrapes to limbs are common.
'Injuries? A few split eyes, stitches, cuts, concussions, fingers, even a broken arm here and there,' Mr. Hickling told Gary Kingston of the Vancouver Sun in 2004.
Mr. Hickling also needed to have his neck surgically realigned that year, ripped his left triceps muscle four years later and separated his right shoulder a year before he served as Paralympic flag bearer.
Like many athletes in the sport, Mr. Hickling took up wheelchair rugby after suffering a catastrophic injury.
On a February weekend in 1987, police in Kelowna, B.C., responded to a report of minor vandalism in a subdivision. After spotting a police cruiser, three teenagers hopped a fence surrounding a golf course before making their way up Dilworth Mountain.
An officer with a tracker dog pursued the trio up the mountain. One of the boys later testified that they panicked when they saw a flashlight and heard a dog. The three changed direction, slipping down a gully and over a 60-metre cliff.
A coroner's inquest later learned that an officer reported over the police radio: 'We just chased a guy down the gully here.'
Darren Michael Gendron, 15, a Grade 10 student, died minutes after the fall from massive internal bleeding. Another 15-year-old boy suffered cuts, as well as a broken arm and leg. Mr. Hickling suffered a broken neck.
The inquest declared the incident an accident and offered no recommendations.
As part of his rehabilitation, Mr. Hickling tested a variety of sports, including swimming, wheelchair track and wheelchair basketball. After moving to Vancouver to attend the British Columbia Institute of Technology, he tried wheelchair rugby.
'I knocked a guy out of his chair,' he once said, 'and never looked back.'
The sport, which was invented in Winnipeg, is played four aside indoors with a volleyball on a basketball court, featuring picks like basketball and blocking like football. Goals are scored by having possession of the ball while crossing the goal line with both wheels.
Players are classified from 0.5 (the most impairment) to 3.5, with all four players on the floor not to exceed a combined eight. Mr. Hickling was rated 3.5, meaning he had high functional ability.
The sport's tenacity and fast pace was captured in the 2005 documentary Murderball, which features the intense rivalry between the Canadian and American national teams. A bitter contest for the world championship in Sweden in 2002 ended with Mr. Hickling scoring the winning goal to give Canada the gold medal. He was named the tournament's most-valuable player, an honour he also won in 1995 and 1998.
Mr. Hickling and his Canadian teammates won silver at the 1996 Paralympics in Atlanta, when rugby was a demonstration sport. He won silver at the 2004 Paralympics in Athens and bronze in 2008 in Beijing. In London in 2012, Canada defeated the Americans in the semi-finals only to lose 66-51 to Australia in the finals. Mr. Hickling, participating in his fifth Games at age 42, scored seven goals in the championship game in claiming another silver medal.
He won five world championship medals (one gold, two silver, two bronze), as well as a gold at the sport's debut at the Parapan American Games in Toronto in 2015.
After his playing days ended, he moved to Toronto where he coached local and provincial athletes, including members of the Toronto Titans club, who compete on an Ontario circuit including the Ottawa Stingers, the London Annihilators and the Quinte West Quadzillas. He served as an assistant coach for the Canadian team at the 2024 Paralympics in Paris.
Garett Deane Hickling was born in the B.C. village of Mica Creek on Sept. 18, 1970, to the former Donna Elaine Deane and John Hickling, a carpenter.
The village boomed during the construction of a nearby hydroelectric dam on the Columbia River for which John Hickling served as a general foreman. In Grade 1, the boy wrote that he had been born underwater since the village had been moved after the dam flooded the old site.
Mr. Hickling died suddenly on June 20 of an unknown cause in Toronto, according to his family. He leaves his father and stepmother, Carolyn, as well as sisters Jeri-Lynne Hickling and Tobi Byrne. He was predeceased by his mother, who died of lung cancer in 2016, aged 69, and by an older brother, Donald Earl Hickling, who died at age nine in 1975 of meningococcus, a serious bacterial infection.
In 2016, Mr. Hickling was inducted into the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame in Vancouver. He has also been named to the halls of fame for Canadian Wheelchair Rugby, Central Okanagan Sports and the Canadian Paralympic Committee. In 2018, he was one of the four inaugural inductees into the World Wheelchair Rugby Hall of Fame.
Among the many tributes and accolades raised in his name after his death, long-time friend and teammate David Willsie recalled one incident that captured Mr. Hickling's leadership after a rival took liberties with one of Mr. Hickling's young and inexperienced teammates.
'Garett delivered one of the hardest fouls I've ever seen,' Mr. Willsie said. 'That's the best in the world standing up for a teammate.'
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