International Notoriety
Living with the effects of Spina Bifida, his limited mobility means he uses crutches and at times a wheelchair; however his disability hasn’t stopped him from gaining international notoriety as a powerful hockey player. Billy started playing sledge hockey in 1996 and eventually made the National Team at a mere 14 years of age. He holds the record for being the youngest player ever to be selected to Canada’s National Para Hockey Team.
He’s participated in 5 Paralympic Games (’02, ’06, ’10, ’14) where he’s twice earned All-Star accolades and was a member of the Paralympic Gold Medal winning team in Torino, Italy in 2006.
Billy is also a 4 time World Champion and has twice been named Championship MVP (’05, ’06).
Billy love for sport has led him to participate in several para sports.
Bridges played wheelchair basketball professionally in Spain. As a member of Team Ontario, he won seven consecutive national championships and a gold medal at the Canada Games. He also helped Canada to gold at the 2001 World Junior Wheelchair Basketball Championships.
The journey to curling
Billy Bridges has only been competing in curling for 2 years, but the sport has always interested him.
“I was the only one in my family who really grew up watching curling, I always loved it, I always was a big fan of it and I didn’t really know the avenues to compete.”
When Bridges met wheelchair curlers in the Olympic villages, they only served to increase his respect for the sport.
Later, when Bridges decided to take a step back from para-hockey, he realized he needed a new social activity, and a chance encounter with a neighbour who curled led him to finally take up the sport. Today, he plays in 3 different leagues, in both wheelchair curling and regular curling.
What he likes most about curling is what he also liked most about para-hockey: the social side, and being part of a team. “Any team that I’ve been fortunate enough to be a part of has just been incredible”
Bridges only recently joined Shauna Petrie’s Ontario wheelchair curling team, and they had to work hard to qualify for the Défi Sportif AlterGo’s Canadian Wheelchair Curling Championships. He is therefore savouring every minute of it.
“A lot of my heroes are here, its fun to be able to share the ice with them and learn from them and skipping and being able to converse with the other skips, it’s been an awesome learning experience.”
