There are champions in Marpole’s midst.
Wheelchair curling’s Team Neighbour, which practises out of the Marpole Curling Club, won the 2014 B.C. Wheelchair Championship in January and is headed to the 2014 Canadian Wheelchair Championship in Quebec at the end of April.
Members of Team Neighbour — skip and namesake Darryl Neighbour, third Frank LaBounty, second Vince Miele, lead Alison Duddy and alternate Gary Cormack — have four B.C. titles and gold and silver from the nationals to their credit.
Neighbour has ice-cred all his own having won gold with members of Team Jim Armstrong at the Vancouver 2010 Paralympics.
Alternate Cormack, 63, also won Paralympic gold with Team Canada in Turin, Italy in 2006, the first year wheelchair curling was included in the Games. Team Canada has won gold ever since — medal games for the 2014 Paralympics in Sochi take place March 15.
Cormack used to curl as an able-bodied person, before he was diagnosed with MS in 1984.
He said he loved being able to start wheelchair curling in 2002 and be part of the community at the Marpole club.
“We’re not only competing against other wheelchair clubs, but … we put teams together to compete against able-bodied teams,” he said.
“We do fairly well.”
According to, Miele, 63, wheelchair curling is just like able-bodied curling, except that players use a pole to push rocks down the ice and there is no sweeping — so it is actually harder.
“A fellow [once] said sweeping was just an admission of imperfection,” said Miele with a laugh.
Miele took up the sport 10 years ago when he was working for the Rick Hansen Foundation and looking into upgrading curling rinks to make them more wheelchair accessible
“Once I found out what it was like, and that some of my buddies were involved, I thought I would give it a try and I have been curling since,” he said on the phone from the Marpole rink where he and the team were about to hit the ice for practice.
Neighbour said the Marpole club, built in 1959, was the first in the Lower Mainland to actively promote and support wheelchair curling.
“It is pretty much where wheelchair curling got started, where it really took off,” he said.
There are now approximately 45 wheelchair-accessible clubs in British Columbia.
The Marpole club’s simple boxy exterior, in the light-industrial area of Marpole, just off of Marine Drive, is deceptive according to Neighbour.
Everyone at the Marpole club has always gone out of their way to be warm and friendly and to accommodate wheelchair athletes, he said.
In 2007, Neighbour supervised the installation of an elevator in the club so curlers can go upstairs to the lounge after a game.
“It is a great atmosphere,” he said.
For more information on the club, go to marpolecurling.ca
