Campbell River’s Tyler Turner continues to make Canada, and his home town, proud.
Turner will be coming home from the 2026 Paralympic Games in Italy with a bronze medal in the Para snowboard cross event on Sunday.
Turner, who lost both legs below the knee in a 2017 skydiving accident, was the first Canadian to win a gold medal in the event in the 2022 Beijing Paralympic World Games. He also won bronze in the banked slalom event.
He says he’s come a long way since his life-changing accident.
“As an athlete, physical injuries, we have to deal with them often, and that was normal,” he says in a video produced by the Paralympic Games. “The hard part was, how to recover from this mentally. How do you cope with that idea that maybe there’s no fun left for you out there?”
Turner says as he struggled through rehabilitation, learning to walk and snowboard on prosthetics, he decided to make it his goal to compete at the highest level possible.
“The Paralympics weren’t on my radar after my accident. It wasn’t this initial goal,” he says. “And once I decided it was the goal, I was all in. There was no turning back, and I wanted it.”
Turner went on to compete in the 2022 Paralympic World Games, winning two medals and earning his place as one of Canada’s top tier Paralympians.
He says he loves the elite level of competition, and is proud to represent Canadians who live every day with limb differences and amputations. He wants to help them find the same joy in sports that has helped him so much.
“We need to get out there, we need to show the world, it’s just not known,” he says. “I want to use whatever voice I have to get the word of Para sport out there.”
Turner earned the third-place finish, behind Zhongwei Wu from China who won gold, and Noah Elliott from the U.S. who earned silver.
During the race he had a collision with Japan’s Junta Kosuda, but judges determined Kosuda was at fault and was disqualified, putting Turner in the bronze medal position.
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