How 2 P.E.I. athletes are getting ready for Beijing Paralympics

Islanders have a couple of reasons to cheer during the 2022 Beijing Paralympic Winter Games this year.

Summerside-born Billy Bridges has been at a training camp in Calgary preparing to wear the Maple Leaf for the national sledge hockey team at the Games for a sixth time.

And Paralympic nordic skier Mark Arendz is in Lake Louise, Alta., ready to head to Beijing Friday for his fourth Games.

Bridges, who's 37, said expectations get "greater and greater" with each passing Games — but that he can still rocket an 80-mile-per-hour slapshot.

"To be a part of this team today compared to, you know, before Salt Lake City is night and day," Bridges said.

"We have anywhere from 15 to 20 training sessions a week and a lot of obligations. But at the same time, it makes you such a better hockey player and I'm still getting faster and stronger at the old age that I'm at."

Bridges said he never could have imagined how far he'd get when he first joined the men's national program as a teenager in the late 1990s.

Besides multiple world championships under his belt, he's earned three Paralympic medals as part of Team Canada. He got the gold in the 2006 Torino Games, the last time the Canadian team won the tournament.

"I wish I could go back and tell 14-year-old Billy that I could be doing this full time and travel the entire world and get to go to all these Paralympic Games and compete with all these amazing teammates I have. I never would have believed it," he said. 

He said he hopes the Games can inspire children with disabilities to participate in sports, and maybe become the next generation of Paralympic hockey athletes.

"That's what I think is so important about the Paralympics and the Paralympic movement is that it's more than just