As the hubbub of Winter Carnival settles on Sunday, Jan. 30, Rosslander Ian Lockey will be on TV racing against five other snowboarders in the first-ever adaptive boarder-cross event at the Winter X Games, held this year in Aspen, Colo.
Adaptive boarder crossers “are disabled athletes who have adapted their technique and style, and sometimes their equipment a bit, so they can compete on the same platform as able-bodied riders,” Lockey explained in a phone interview while he and his wife — Natasha Lockey of Bettygohard — drove to the Spokane airport on Tuesday evening. “We do the same thing in our own way.”
Lockey partially severed his spinal cord in 1998 in an accident that left him half-paralysed from the waist down. It was three years of rehab before he was riding again, but even that was much more improvement than the doctors expected.
“It was really hard,” he said, “but when the doctor told me ‘no,’ I said, ‘Oh yeah, there is some way that I’ll be able to do this.’”
Lockey recently competed in the able-bodied NorAm FIS races at Big White as practice for the big day on Sunday.
“It’s the real deal,” he said about the upcoming X Games. “I’m more intimidated by the track than the competition. This is the X games: Everything there is going to be quite big, I imagine.”
Lockey hopes his sport’s inclusion in the X Games will help raise the profile of adaptive boarder cross so it will be included in the 2014 Paralympic Games.
“If we can prove to them that we’re worthy, they’ll take it to Sochi in 2014. That’ll be cool. That’ll give the kids, like the war amp kids out there, the idea that they can have a go at it as well,” he said.
Currently, only five sports are included in the Winter Paralympics: sit skiing, downhill skiing, cross-country skiing, sledge hockey and wheelchair curling. The International Paralympic Committee have accepted adaptive boarder cross as a sport, but to be included in the 2014 Winter Olympics, athletes and their supporters will have to convince the committee that it is a world-wide competitive sport.
“I think they need seven nations with a competitive federation,” Lockey said. “Right now we’ve got New Zealand, Holland, France, Italy, Australia, USA, and Canada.”
The sport is definitely on the rise. Last year the British Columbia Snowboard Association had an adaptive class at all their boarder cross races and there will be two adaptive World Cup events this year, the first in France on Feb. 1 and the second at Lake Louise on Apr. 15.
If boarder cross gets included in the Paralympics, the scoring will be weighted to account for different levels of disability, but at the X-Games it will be a straight-up “man-on-man” race between six adaptive riders.
One other rider will be a standing paraplegic, like Lockey, and the others are below-the-knee amputees from the States, riding on prosthetics. Lockey knows them all and has raced them before.
“I won’t say I’ll win. It’s a race. But I’m right up there. If I can handle the track, it’s game on.” he said.
“It’s really exciting,” he added. “I’ll do my best to make Rossland proud.”
Lockey is sponsored by RossVegas and Red Mountain, rides with the Kootenay Riders of the Snowboard Academy from RSS, has received strong support from the Canadian Snowboard Federation and will be riding a snowboard given by Olympian Maelle Ricker and adapted to his style with a three-strap binding system that goes around the top of the highback and boot, much like the bindings used by Craig Kelly in the 1980s.
Sit-ski cross will also be an event at the 15th Winter X Games — which runs from Jan. 27 to 30 — running on the same course as adaptive boarder cross, a slightly different track than that used for the able-bodied cross events.
Lockey’s race will be broadcast live on TSN2. It’s scheduled for 1:45 p.m. on Jan. 30.