AS 49-YEAR-OLD PAUL Rosen takes to the ice in Vancouver next month, he is training his sights on a single goal — allowing none. Rosen, the top ranked sledge hockey goalie in the world, will once again represent Canada in the Paralympic Games.

Since Team Canada’s goldmedal win in 2006, he has given back to a group of people who represent Canada in a different way. Rosen has participated in Soldier On, a program that introduces injured soldiers to Paralympic sports.

Doing something for the men and women who have made the ultimate sacrifice for their country has been a humbling experience, he says. Rosen knows firsthand what it’s like to lose a limb.

At 15, Rosen broke his leg in 14 places during a hockey tournament. He underwent multiple surgeries over the next 24 years, in hopes that his leg could be mended. In 1997, when his leg broke again while standing in a German airport, he was forced to endure yet another round of surgeries.

Following one of these procedures, Rosen developed an acute infection in his knee. “I thought I was going to die from what was going on with my leg and my body,” he says.

In 1999, he was given three months to live unless he had his leg amputated.

After losing his right leg above the knee, Rosen decided to go to Variety Village to explore the world of disabled sports. While there, he met Shayne Smith, who now plays wheelchair basketball for Canada’s junior team. He credits the athlete with introducing him to the Markham Islanders, a local sledge hockey team.

Rosen joined the team and quickly impressed his teammates with his skill, despite being slightly older. One of his teammates, Rob Lagace, was playing for Team Canada at the time.

Lagace persuaded him to try out, Rosen says.

In 2002, with the long-time Thornhill resident minding the net, Canada’s sledge hockey team placed fourth in Salt Lake City.

Rosen has since gone on to capture his first gold medal in Torino at the 2006 Games.

It’s a remarkable journey Rosen shares as a motivational speaker.

He says he hopes to teach people, especially kids, that anything is possible.

“No matter what happens to you — today, tomorrow, next week — you can always find the good in a situation,” he says.

Rosen had always been involved in charity work and started speaking at SickKids Hospital after he lost his leg. Like his skills on the ice, public speaking came naturally to Rosen.

“Most of the guys on my team say I’ve got quite a big mouth,” he says and laughs.

It began with a simple desire to help others, says Rosen. But his newfound path unfolded from there as he was booked by large companies and sports teams to tell his incredible story.

Looking back at the past 10 years, Rosen says he wouldn’t be where he is today without a positive attitude.

“That’s the way I live my life,”he says.“If I didn’t feel that, I wouldn’t be alive.”

But Rosen says his greatest source of motivation is his fan base back home — his family. After going through a tough divorce, he has found love again. He and his girlfriend, Louise Berman, each have three grown children.

Rosen says he has bonded with his girlfriend’s youngest over sports. He helps her son, Mitch, with his volleyball game. The 17- year-old plays for Thornlea Secondary School’s team.

For Rosen, Thornhill is home.

As a child, he lived in the Henderson neighbourhood with his parents. Now, having spent nearly four decades in Thornhill, he lives near the Promenade Mall. “I’ve grown up here, I’ve had my kids here, and I want to retire here,” he says.

As Rosen prepares for the Paralympics next month, he will be training hard to ready himself for the challenge of defending Canada’s gold-medal status in sledge hockey.

“Playing for my country is one of the greatest thrills of all time,” he says.

JOAN AND JERRY Lozinski may not have any children of their own, but they have all the enthusiasm of proud parents.

The Forest Hill couple has long supported Toronto’s arts community, taking great joy in seeing young performers master their craft and go on to do extraordinary things.

The Lozinskis began taking an active interest in the arts as they explored the rich cultural landscapes of cities, including Montreal, Vancouver and San Francisco, before finally settling down in Toronto.

“We learned about a whole new culture, a whole new part of living,” Joan says.

The former registered nurse and her husband, who continues to work as an entrepreneur, hadn’t encountered such displays of creativity in their own careers.

It was the artists and performers — the people — that drew them in.

For Jerry, it was the raw sense of passion and determination possessed by the performers.

For Joan, the arts offered windows into the lives of other people. They acquaint us with other cultures and help us to better understand each other, she says.

The short list of Toronto arts organizations that the Lozinskis have supported over the years includes the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Luminato Festival and the National Ballet School.

As Canada’s ballet school turns 50 this year, it will honour the Lozinskis for their ongoing support at a gala event on Feb. 6.

Joan has twice sat on the school’s board of directors, serving two three-year terms. During this time she was involved in Project Grand Jeté, which drummed up $50 million — matched by the government — to fund new facilities for the school.

Together, the Lozinskis made a $3 million donation, one of the largest contributions to the project, toward the creation of 12 new dance studios.

They are also participants in the ballet school’s student partner program, a fundraising initiative that gives donors the opportunity to meet and get to know students.

“It’s fun to watch them as they progress through the learning experience and they become the stars of tomorrow,” Joan says.

Adam Reist of Mission, B.C., now performs with the Zurich Ballet in Switzerland. When Joan and Jerry met him, he was a shy sixth grader just beginning at the ballet school.

Joan fondly recalls the time that she and her husband planned a full day of activities for Reist, going to the AGO and to dinner at the Granite Club. The youngster particularly enjoyed a lesson he got from Jerry in how to play pool, she says. On the drive back to the ballet school, it got quiet all of a sudden. Reist had fallen asleep in the back seat.

Joan says she wasn’t surprised that he was tuckered out, as the ballet school’s students train rigorously, day in and day out.

Dancers must audition every year to secure their spot in the program.

Now that Reist is dancing in Europe, he keeps in touch with the couple via e-mail. Joan and her husband hope to plan a trip abroad to attend one of his performances, she adds.

Seeing Reist dedicate himself to his training and build confidence as a dancer and go on to accomplish his goals has been a rewarding experience, she says.

The couple’s current student partner, Patrick Foster, hopes to follow in Reist’s footsteps and dance on the world stage.

While the Lozinskis’ students may savour the stage, they themselves tend to shy away from the spotlight. The ballet school’s recognition has been both a surprise and a delight for the pair.

“We don’t feel that what we’re doing, what we have done has been more special than anybody else,” Joan says. But she remarks that to be recognized alongside the school’s artistic director, Mavis Staines, is a great honour.

Although neither is a performer or artist, Joan and Jerry have developed a deep and enduring appreciation for the arts.

It gives the duo immense satisfaction to be able to give back to the community that has so enriched their lives.

“Without the arts, life is pretty bleak and pretty grey and not much fun,” says Jerry.

BY NOW, WE’VE heard all about Canada’s ambitious Own the Podium Olympic project, but Chris Rudge, CEO of the Canadian Olympic Committee (COC), one-time Thornhiller and chair of the Own the Podium Committee, has been hearing about it for the past half decade.

As the Vancouver 2010 Games kick off,he’s as anxious as anyone to find out whether five years of an Olympic-sized effort to support Canadian athletes will pay off.

February will tell the tale of exactly how much our nation’s Olympians will benefit from the Own the Podium program, an initiative designed to develop athletic talent in order to increase Canada’s Olympic medal count. The program was funded in part by the COC, the organization Rudge helms as chief executive officer and secretary general.

Launched in 2005, the program invested $110 million in science, technology, medicine, travel and competition development for Canadian athletes leading up to the Games.

It’s arguably a much-needed investment. In the two Olympics Canada has hosted (Calgary in 1988 and Montreal in 1976), no Canadian has ever won the gold on home soil, something Own the Podium is out to change.

“A number of leaders in the sports community recognized that we had not been successful at hosting the Games in the past,”Rudge says.“Our teams didn’t do as well as one might have hoped. Recognizing this,we felt that we had to do something to improve the chances of the team to perform well in 2010, and in order to do that,we had to perform a pretty thorough analysis of where we were with our sports programs and decide what needed to be done. That was really the genesis of what went into the thinking of the program.”

It’s a labour of love for Rudge. He’s an avid sportsman and prolific volunteer who coached the Canadian National Field Lacrosse Team in 1976, played for the National Lacrosse League’s Syracuse Stingers and taught phys. ed. in GTA high schools during the 1970s. Later, he held senior positions at Quebecor World Inc. (one of the world’s largest commercial printers), Maclean Hunter Printing, QueNet Media and the Financial Post.

The experience in both the corporate and teaching worlds gave him the combination of business acumen, mentoring and communication skills the COC needed. But for his part, joining the committee was more about following the wife’s orders ( Janet Nutter, a diver at the 1980 Olympics and 1978 Commonwealth Games medalist) than anything else.

“Well,I’ve done a lot with my life,”he says. “And after I retired in 2003, I had been working out pretty heavily at the Thornhill Extreme Fitness at Yonge and Highway 7 for about a year. My wife said to me, ‘You’re driving me crazy. Get off your butt and find something to do.’ So I ended up joining the Olympic committee.”

As a former long-time resident of Thornhill — Rudge has lived on Thorny Brae and Deanbank Drives with his family and worked as chair of the Thornhill Recreational Advisory Committee — one need look no further than local environs to see his passion for his home and for sports.

You’ll often find him practising his golf swing at the Thornhill Country Club, working up a sweat at the aforementioned gym and enjoying the peppered beef carpaccio during an evening at Tutto Bene, his favourite place in town to break bread (Not so sporty as the other two activities, but everyone has to have a little bit of fun, right?).

“The committees were very interesting politically with the to-andfroing,” Rudge says. “You had Vaughan on one side of the street and Markham on the other, and they were two very different jurisdictions. It’s like that old political saying, ‘The battles are vicious because the stakes are so small.’ But I have a deep affection for Thornhill. My wife and I were looking for a place that would suit our work and recreational needs, and Thornhill turned out to be exactly that.”

It takes that accomplished, driven person with a tremendous sense of community to put in the work necessary to make Canada a force to be reckoned with in the coming weeks. Not to say that we haven’t performed in the past given our circumstances.

Rudge would have us consider that as a young nation of less than 34 million people, we’ve done relatively well compared to the likes of perennial Olympic powerhouse countries such as the United States and Russia. And unlike other top-medal nations such as Germany, Austria or Norway, Canadians face a unique challenge in contending with the vast expanse of our territory.

“There are a lot less of us then there are in other countries,”he says.“And we in Canada have to support fully both summer and winter sports initiatives.

That really spreads the costs around.

And we have a huge geography to bridge.The Germans,for example,don’t face that. In Europe, you don’t have to travel very far to be in another country. They can be there in a few hours. Even for us to aggregate our athletes and bring them together for training can be a huge challenge. So I think our accomplishments speak well to the Canadian competitive spirit, to accomplishing our goals and objectives when we need to.”

According to athletes on the ground, it’s an objective of Olympic success much closer to being realized than in days gone by, thanks to the infusion of cash and attention paid to our competitors in the years leading up to Vancouver.

“Own the Podium is the best gift we’ve ever had as athletes,” says Olympic snowboarding hopeful Michael Lambert. “Especially at a time when the Games are in our country, we have this influx of spending. That cash allows you to do things that you otherwise couldn’t do if you didn’t have it: have extra coaching, pay to develop equipment, pay for plane tickets, alleviate your stress. If you look at the Canadian results over the last couple of years, it really shows that it’s working. On the other hand, it’s bad because I know it’s not going to be here next year, especially after seeing first-hand what it really does for us.”

So it’s not about avoiding ignominy at home (for the time being, at least!), but inspiring the nation by showing what Canadians can do when we put our minds to it, something Rudge has been looking forward to since he took the job five years ago.

“In any endeavour in life, we all benefit if we help those who have a passion to be the very best they can be,” he said.“I think in particular athletes — who have made so many sacrifices to get where they are — inspire all Canadians to do whatever they do a bit better.And I think Canadians have jumped on to support that initiative.”

OLYMPIC SNOWBOARDING hopeful Michael Lambert took a bit of a gentle ribbing from his teammates during a recent phone interview from Switzerland.

“Jasey [ Jay Anderson] is here, and he’s really giving it to me about the attention that I’m getting,” he says and laughs. “He’s calling me a rock star. He could just be jealous.”

But Anderson, Canada’s top men’s slalom snowboarder, may just have reason to be envious in the coming weeks. Local boy Lambert, star of Over the Bolts, an MTV reality series chronicling the lives of the country’s top snowboarders as they vie for 18 spots on the Olympic team, is Toronto’s best hope for bringing home snowboarding gold in Vancouver, especially after claiming gold at a major race in Nendaz, Switzerland, in January.

Overall, Lambert has put up stellar placement numbers on the FIS Snowboard World Cup Tour’s parallel giant slalom category as the 2010 Games inch nearer and nearer.

But none of it would be possible, he notes, without the strong connection to his Village friends, family and coaching staff who have supported him over the years.

A particularly special moment came for Lambert last December when he carried the Olympic torch through Hamilton. “My mom was really proud of me that day,” he says. But at the moment, Lambert is focused solely on one goal: Vancouver.

“I’m excited to go because I want to represent the people who believed in me and helped me to get there,” says Lambert, 23. “People like my mother, my sponsors, my coaches. The last couple of years weren’t amazing for me, and they believed in me and fought for me to no end. I’m excited to race well for those people, the ones who helped me truly get there.”

Lambert spent the greater part of his childhood around Lower Forest Hill — calling Austin Terrace, near Casa Loma, home up until a recent move — the oldest of three children born to athletic parents.

He regularly works out at the University of Toronto and continues to have his hand in quite a few sporty activities.

During his time off, you can find him hanging around Yorkville, in particular Sushi Inn and MBCo. (Montreal Bread Company), two of his preferred places to grab a bite.

As a student of Royal St. George’s College, he played on the rugby and soccer teams. “I definitely wasn’t the star,” Lambert says of his tenure as a footballer, though he says the sports he loves most were never associated with school.

His summer pastime, sailing, often finds him out on Lake Ontario. Lambert calls it a good way to stay in shape and a refreshing break from intense, hard-working winters on snowy hilltops.

Though for Lambert, these pursuits match neither the prowess nor the passion he has for tearing it up on the slopes. His first brush with the sport came at the Caledon Ski Club when, at the tender age of two, pint-sized Lambert was put on skis and towed downhill.

Developing a need for speed and a damn-the-torpedoes style, Lambert gave his worried dad reason to slow his son down but, in the end, ended up only speeding him up.

“I was a reckless skier, apparently,” says Lambert. “You know, when you see someone going down the hill and you’re just waiting for them to crash, to explode? I was definitely one of those kids. So my dad gave me a snowboard to slow me down a bit. He [had] had enough of me being reckless. That’s actually how I got into snowboarding. I didn’t so much as ask for it as it was presented to me.”

It was arguably an exercise in futility on the father’s part. The pastime became the beginning of a budding career in 1998 when Lambert took part in a snowboarding championship series at Caledon.

“I got my first exposure to actual racing then,” he said. “There were three kids in my age category, and I won, but for me it was just about going fast again, you know?”Lambert started doing provincial tours every other weekend, then moved on to races in Quebec, then Colorado. “I think a lot of this stuff, you don’t really know how it happens. I was doing it because it was fun. You don’t plan for it to be your job, but when you do well, you have coaches around and opportunities start to spring up,” he says.

Following his graduation from Royal St. George’s, Lambert went full-time on the board, training 220 days a year at various Canadian locales.

The key to victory isn’t so much physical as it is mental, he says. One might memorize a hill to familiarize oneself with the unexpected, but it does little good when weather conditions change over the course of a 10-run day.

Focusing in the midst of such changing conditions can be difficult.

And indeed, concentration problems combined with a tendency to overthink have hampered Lambert in the past. Meditation and scripting his every move up until he comes out of the gate have helped address those issues, he says, and adding the use of one-word mantras centres his focus during his runs.

“I’ll keep repeating ‘Attack, attack’ in my head,” he says. “And if I need to speed it up or if someone gets in front of me, I repeat, ‘Believe, believe.’ Everyone’s got their own system, and I find this is the one that works for me.”

So far, the training appears to be paying off. January’s win, plus a second-place finish behind Jasey Jay Anderson (currently ranked number one in the world) at a race in Telluride, Colorado, means Lambert is hitting his stride at just the right time.

Lambert, however, doesn’t sweat the pressure of the Games bearing down.

“I want to perform my best, obviously,” he says. “I hope I’m not heartbroken. It’s a dangerous thing to do, to make a link between performance and happiness. It’s a very bad place to be, and unfortunately a lot of people think that way, and they think that it’s OK to think that way. It’s no way to live your life, that if you don’t do well you don’t deserve to be happy. And not thinking like that has been bringing me some great results, knowing that life is bigger than the race, bigger than the medal. At the same time, I’m not a flaky racer. I can put it together when I need to. But I’m going to be happy no matter what happens.”