Saskatchewan wheelchair rugby athlete heading to Rio Paralympics

Saskatchewan's Miranda Biletski is making her Paralympic debut in Rio on Canada's wheelchair rugby team. 

She sacrificed a lot to get there. After not making Team Canada for the London Paralympics, she moved to Victoria to train, and stepped up her work. This included cutting back on her social life.

"I don't want to say giving up or sacrificing because it's kind of a choice that I made," Biletski said, adding how it's great to have the chance to finally live her dream.

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Growing up in Assiniboia, Sask., Biletski was always an athlete. When she was about three years old, her parents put her in tee-ball and swimming lessons.

When Biletski was a teenager, she suffered a spinal cord injury in a diving accident. Sports, which had always been a big part of her life, just became useful in a new way.

"Post-injury it was a great way to learn about being in a chair and gaining independence and kind of creating this whole network of people and have taught me a lot."

Biletski describes the wheelchair sports community as tight-knit, and within weeks of being injured several local athletes showed up to talk to her.

"I still wasn't quite ready to talk to people.... But definitely within two weeks of my accident I was made well aware of all the different sports opportunities that were out there."

Biletski hadn't played rugby before the accident, but immediately liked it. She had played water polo and enjoyed the aggressiveness of it and the camaraderie. After her injury, she tried out a few different sports including track, but took a liking to rugby.

"Just the camaraderie of the team sport and then obviously the contact nature," she said. "Rather than competitively staring down a line all day definitely appealed to me."

Being a woman on a coed team

Wheelchair rugby is coed, and what it's like to play as a woman is the most commonly asked question Biletski gets.

She said she's fortunate to have an inclusive team. Other women came before her, and she said she didn't pave the way. But she's still glad to see more women joining the sport in Canada.

Looking forward

Cheering her on in the stands in Rio will be Biletski's mom, one of her best friends, and others she's close to. It means a lot to her to have the support.

Her team also happens to be ranked number one, but she's not letting that get to her.

"Being ranked the number one team going in, I think a lot of people think is some added pressure," she said. "But I mean the team is really like a second family so just kind of pulling together and see what we can do there is going to be awesome too."