paralympic BHAG

I'm gonna use my recently neglected forum to announce my BHAG (pronounced bee-hag)
I've decided to get involved with Nordic Paralympic sports.
I have a friend who is a guide for a visually impaired x-c skier, so I went to watch him race in Whistler during the Paralympics. I was wildly intrigued! There are 3 categories of skiers:

 

• standing (with arm issues, or leg issues but can stand);
• sitting (with spinal injuries or leg issues that prevent them from standing); and
• visually impaired.

 

Each athlete has individually modified equipment. All of them were really interesting, but I was most intrigued by the sit-skiers. Every one of them had a different set-up: some had their legs out in front, some had their knees folded under them, some had their knees in front. My thought in seeing all these top athletes was: "Wow, if I were an engineer, all I'd want to do is design equipment for these guys. It's challenging, unique, and every second or part of a second is important."

 

So then I had an idea: how about matching corporations with an engineering focus with ahtletes? This would be a terrific corporate citizenship project. And it would be a terrific employee perk to get some paid company time to design specialised equipment for an athlete. Challenging and beneficial - everybody wins!

 

I met with Tony and Jamie, who run the para nordic club in Van, and passed my idea past them. They are thrilled. Turns out that at the Top Level, at Paralympics and World Cup, these athletes have minimal support, and most of them have modified or built their sit skis themselves, in their garages. Another standing skier has a leg prothetic that is only made for walking, not even running, so he has struggled to get it to stick into a x-c ski binding. Crazy!!! They have no access to gait analysis or high-tech equipment or most of the standard things for other high-level athletes.

 

Then I asked Jamie and Tony if it was reasonable that terrific equipment could make the difference of a 15th place finish to, say, a 5th or 3rd place finish? "Yep. Totally reasonable."

 

In fact, it's really hard for a disabled person to TRY sit-skiing, as the equipment is barely available. The clubs have to buy sit skis themselves, at a cost of $2k each, and the sleds SUCK. They are heavy and not set up for racing at all.

 

So, overall, the goal is to get funding, expertise in sports med and engineering and technology, and get the athletes already racing to a higher level, like onto the podium. Also, we'd like to get more wheel chair athletes involved in paranordic events.

I've seen some stuff on other blogs recently about BHAG, which stands for Big Hairy Audacious Goal. And here is mine:

Make Canada the premier country in paranordic skiing. We are going to get gold medals for Canada at the Paralympic and World Cup levels by 2012.

 

Cool, right?