Chantal Petitclerc

Chantal Petitclerc grew up in a rural area near Quebec City. At 13, she and a friend were building a makeshift bicycle ramp out of an old barn door when it fell on her, fracturing her spine and leaving her paralysed from the waist down. It was the kind of ordinary, unremarkable accident that could have happened to any teenager, and it changed the entire course of her life.

A high school physical education teacher encouraged her to take up swimming to rebuild her strength after the injury, and through the disabled sport community she discovered wheelchair racing in the late 1980s. She found she had real speed on the track and began competing seriously, working her way onto the Canadian national team through a sport that had little funding or public attention at the time.

She competed at five Paralympic Games between 1992 and 2008, winning 21 medals in total, 14 of them gold, and repeatedly broke world records across sprint and middle-distance wheelchair racing events. She retired after Beijing 2008 as one of the most successful Paralympians Canada has ever produced, and was awarded the Order of Canada and the Lou Marsh Trophy as the country's top athlete of the year, a rare honour for a Paralympic competitor.

She later became chancellor of a Canadian university and, in 2016, was appointed to the Canadian Senate, where she has continued to campaign for accessibility and disability rights.