Garrett Barry, Centretown News
Kramer Nancoo throws a dart during the Canadian Deaf Dart Championships earlier this month.The Canadian Deaf Dart Championships, which took place at the Ottawa Travelodge from Nov. 5to 8, was largely a chance for the deaf sporting community to socialize, says Ryan Hardy, a member of the Ottawa deaf darts team.
This was the 14th bi-annual dart championship and involved 166 players, a record for the event, which has attracted an average of 104 participants in the past.
Hardy, who is also the vice-president of the Ottawa Deaf Sports Club as well as co-chair of the championship organizing committee, practises with the other members of the Ottawa deaf dart team weekly in the basement of St. Anthony’s Soccer Club. The club, located in Little Italy, is where the team had been preparing in the lead-up to last week’s championships.
“It’s for lack of a better term, it’s a way to bring us together . . besides being a sporting event, it’s a social event,” he says.
Hardy says that technology, such as Skype and texting, have facilitated deaf communication, but at the cost of getting together. Deaf sports are a chance to socialize face-to-face.
While some sports cause deaf people additional challenges, such as not being able to hear a whistle blow to signify the start of a play, sports such as darts are barrier-free for the hearing impaired, according to Hardy.
Hardy says he was first introduced to deaf sports while playing deaf hockey in Ottawa.
“When I got older, and wasn’t a good hockey player anymore, I turned to other sports like curling and darts.”
An increasing number of deaf athletes are also trying to succeed in the mainstream-sporting world, according to James Roots, executive director of the Ottawa-based Canadian Association of the Deaf.
This can be more challenging because the sports have not been adapted to be deaf-friendly.
“It is usually the deaf athlete who has to adjust,” he says.
“‘Dummy’ Hoy got baseball to adopt the umpire’s hand signals for strikes and balls in order to accommodate his needs, but that was more than 100 years ago. When Curtis Pride was bouncing around the baseball major leagues in the 1990s, he had to deal with rules that were 120 years old and could not be touched because baseball . . . does not accept tinkering with its traditions.”
Gordon Wiebe, president of the Ottawa-based Canadian Deaf Darts Association, got involved with deaf sports while he attended the Manitoba School for the Deaf.
He says that people join deaf sporting leagues because it is a chance to meet old friends and make new ones.
Wiebe says players enjoy fundraising and leadership opportunities the community offers.
Hardy says he has benefited from leadership opportunities with the Ottawa deaf sports community and is interested in bringing the Deaflympics, a competition for elite deaf athletes, to Ottawa in 2025.
Hosting events such as the dart championships, he says, will help him build a profile to give him a better chance at winning a bid to make Ottawa an Olympic city in 2025.
Hardy hopes to lead bids for Ottawa to host the 2020 World Deaf Golf Championship and the 2017 World Deaf Ice Hockey and Curling Championships.
Bringing the Deaflympics to Ottawa would make Ottawa the 4th official Olympic games host city, joining the ranks of Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary.
According to Hardy, “the next step is, of course, the Olympics.”