Paralympic Games in Paris will stand out for veteran goalball captain Amy Burk

PARIS — Amy Burk doesn't know if her fifth Paralympic Games will be her last, but she does know Paris will feel monumental to her.

Her sons Lucas, 10, and five-year-old Ryan have albinism and visual impairment as she does.

Burk hopes having her sons with her at South Paris Arena will help them fully understand why their mom works so hard at goalball and why it takes her away from them for long stretches of time.

"My kids have never seen me play internationally," Burk said. "I went back to school. I'm a mom who plays high-performance sport. Goalball is something that I absolutely love to do. It's been a huge part of my life.

"They're a huge part of my life. I want them to see you don't have to settle for one thing. You can do multiple things."

Goalball, which was invented in 1946 to help rehabilitate veterans who lost their sight in the Second World War, is played by blind or visually impaired athletes.

Players wearing blackout masks throw a ball that contains bells past opponents and into a net to score points. Each team has six players, but no more than three are on the court.

"The game is so much faster now," Burk said. "Women are now throwing the ball between 60 and 63 kilometres per hour. When I started, I would say if someone hit 50, that was considered incredible."

The captain of the Canadian women's goalball team has great expectations for the six-player squad, which opens Thursday against host France.

"This team is for sure capable to be on the podium," Burk said.

The women's goalball team captured back-to-back gold medals in 2000 and 2004, but has been held off the podium since then.

The 34-year-old Burk, from Charlottetown, lives in Ottawa with her husband Tyler and her two boys.

She earned her medical lab technician certification from Algonquin College last year. Burk started a new job in January with Newborn Screening Ontario.

Edmonton's Brieann Baldock, Vancouver's Maryam Salehizadeh, Whitney Bogart of Marathon, Ont., Meghan Mahon of Timmins, Ont., and Emma Reinke of St. Thomas, Ont., join Burk on the goalball team, coached by Trent Farebrother, that has kept the same lineup since Tokyo three years ago.

Canada didn't make it out of the group stage in Tokyo, but finished fourth at the world championship in both 2022 and 2023. The team qualified for Paris by winning the gold medal at the 2023 Parapan American Games in Santiago, Chile.

Back spasms limited Burk's court time in Tokyo, but even from the bench, she knew the team lacked chemistry.

"Team cohesion was a big thing," she said. "It's learning that it's OK to actually communicate things with each other, whether it's good or bad, you have to communicate it and work through those little things.

"It sounds so simple, but sometimes it can be intimidating and you don't want to hurt feelings. It's how do you go about it the proper way? It's something we learned how to do with each other's personality types."

Silence during game action is desirable so players can listen and react to the sound of the bells in the ball, but Burk nevertheless expects a noisy arena Thursday when Canada, ranked sixth in the world, meets No. 18 France.

"It will be loud. You can guarantee it," she said. "Our sport isn't well-known so we don't tend to have a lot of fans when we're playing to begin with, but in Rio in 2016 we played in front of 10,000 people.

"Even in Santiago, it was loud when we played Chile. We've trained enough that we've learned to block certain things out."

Burk is an ambassador for Unlock The Everyday, which is the umbrella of international health, development and disability organizations striving to improve people's lives through assistive technology such as prosthetics, wheelchairs, eye glasses and hearing aids.

"You see what people can do with the technology. Guys running on a blade, to me that's freaking cool, but there's so many kids that don't get access to that," Burk explained.

"I've been a glasses user my whole life. I have albinism. Even cellphones, I'll take a picture and zoom in so I can read it. You don't realize how much we take that for granted.

"My two boys have albinism as well. Their school has been phenomenal since they started on making sure they have magnifiers, CCTVs, the iPad Pros to make things big so they can see. There are so many kids around the world that don't have access to this."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 27, 2024.

Donna Spencer, The Canadian Press