>> Strap on a sledge and hit the ice, say
Les Roulants’ Steves Leonard

WARMING UP FOR GLORY:
Leonard (third from left) and les Roulants de Repentigny

by ERIK LEIJON

Every Sunday in Repentigny, at the ungodly hour of 6 a.m., Steves Leonard and his hockey team take to the ice for an hour-and-a-half of pick-up hockey. They may all be good friends, but on the ice it’s a competitive battle featuring bone-crushing shoulder-to-shoulder hits, hard skating and fierce intensity.

The team is so good, they crushed the Mississauga team 3–1 in this year’s annual sledge hockey tournament final, held last weekend in London, Ontario. Two of Leonard’s teammates play on Canada’s national team.

Leonard’s squad, Les Roulants de Repentigny, is one of a kind in Montreal. Leonard, like most of his teammates, is physically disabled from the waist down, as Les Roulants are the city’s only sledge hockey team.

“Everybody thinks the only sport you can play if you’re in a wheelchair is basketball,” says Leonard, 36, who became a paraplegic in a motorcycle accident at age 17. “When I tell people I play hockey, they think I play with my wheelchair on the ice.”

Sledge hockey—a sport invented in Sweden in 1961—features the same rules as regular hockey and plays largely the same except for the sledge, a metal seat every player is strapped into. With a blade underneath the sledge, players glide down the ice and utilize two sticks to push themselves forward.

The shorter sticks look slightly different from the traditional design, and have small spikes attached to the blade so they can grip the ice. The equipment can be pricey—around $600 for a sledge—and Leonard buys his equipment in Ontario, where there are far more teams and players.

“When we were starting out, that was the toughest part,” Leonard recalls. “There was no place to get sledges and everything we used was homemade. We would get pieces of metal and have someone solder the parts.” Leonard says his old sled weighed around 60 pounds, while today’s professional models weigh half as much.

A junior hockey player before his accident, it was at the behest of Leonard’s friends who’d heard about the sport that he gave sledge hockey a try.

CHAMPS! Les Roulants in the flush of victory, 2008

Full contact and fast

“I loved that game. When the accident happened, the first thing I thought was, ‘Oh God, no more hockey,’” he says. “After two or three games, I realized this is the same. There’s hitting, it’s full contact. It’s fast.” One of his able-bodied friends who brought him to that first game, Rod Gilbert, still plays with les Roulants.

Although there used to be a four-team league in Montreal, Quebec sledge hockey hasn’t grown to the extent it has in Ontario. The Readaptation Institute of Montreal (IRM) recommends rehabbing accident victims take up the sport, and thus nearly all of Leonard’s teammates have suffered accidents, as opposed to lifelong disabilities.

With the winter Paralympics coming to Vancouver in 2010 and an opportunity for the national team to repeat its gold medal performance in Torino in 2006, the hope is that the increased exposure will encourage more disabled—and non-disabled—athletes to strap on a sledge and hit the ice.

For Leonard, who has been playing sledge hockey for 18 years, he says he still takes every sledge hockey game very seriously, even more so than in his hockey days.

“I always tell people, if you don’t want to pity me, then play a game of hockey with me. Come play against me and you’ll see, you won’t use your legs and we’ll be at the same level.”

For more information on playing, contact stevesleonard@hotmail.com.