RENFREW – Lou Mulvihill is an inventor, a tinkerer, an innovator, an elite athlete; though he says he was only an average athlete, and a native of the Town of Renfrew. His contributions to the sport of sledge hockey were given permanent recognition with a display at the myFM Centre last Thursday. Around 40 to 50 people attended the ceremony, which included Renfrew mayor Tom Sidney and local MPP Billy Denault.
Mulvihill won a bronze medal with Team Canada at the 1994 Winter Paralympic Games. He also won bronze with Team Canada at the 1996 Sledge Hockey World Championships.
He became paralyzed in a motorcycle accident in 1972 at age 18. He played wheelchair basketball and got introduced to sledge hockey while in 1988. A woman from Medicine Hat, AB received a grant to introduce other parts of the country to sledge hockey and when she arrived in Ottawa, his wheelchair basketball team went to watch. “I feel in love with the sport immediately.” He felt like he was floating as he pushed himself around on the ice because it was so effortless.
The first equipment he used was “terrible” and he started to tinker and develop different designs for sledges. He was moving around in a wheelchair he made himself at the dedication ceremony Thursday. He wanted to elevate the sport to attract more elite athletes to the game.
The original sledge had large metal tubes under the seat that ran on the ice. “You couldn’t turn or anything,” he said, with those runners and the sledges weight upwards of 50 pounds. The runners were also set wide apart which made turning difficult. “I thought of bringing the blades in and using hockey blades,” which allowed for more mobility on the ice and, “makes it a much more exciting game.” It took, he said, about 10 years to develop his sledge concept and that design concept is still used today.
Once he had the sledge figured out, he turned his attention to the stick. Initially the sticks were just broken or cut down hockey sticks. “All you could do at the time was push the puck along the ice.” The angle of the blade works for skaters standing up, it doesn’t work for a player much lower to the ice with the stick at a different angle. Mulvihill decided that wasn’t good enough. He wanted a stick with a blade that was flatter to the ice so a shooter could lift the puck. “To turn it from a two-dimensional game to a three-dimensional game.”
He started by cutting the heel off a traditional hockey stick to flatten the angle. That also cut off part of the blade, which didn’t work well. Next he developed templates of a flatter stick design, cutting those out and creating new stick angles to the ice. He wrapped the blade in fibreglass mesh to make it stronger. “It’s just the progression over the years of coming up with new ideas to make the equipment better.”
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