Brittany Hudak displays her "surprisingly heavy" bronze medal from Beijing at the 'This Girl Can' event on Wednesday in the Ches Leach Lounge. (Jeff D'Andrea/paNOW Staff)

By Jeff D’Andrea

This Girl Can

From sweeping Art Hauser Centre floors to winning Paralympic medals; Brittany Hudak’s story

Mar 30, 2022 | 10:31 PM

For one of her jobs as a teenager, Brittany Hudak used to clean the Art Hauser Centre after hockey games as a janitor and event worker. Throughout the night, Hudak would sweep the seats, mop the floors in the rink, then she and the rest of the crew would tidy up the Ches Leach Lounge.

Fast forward to Wednesday, when Hudak walked on that same floor she used to clean to take the stage as the event headliner for the This Girl Can event, prior to the Prince Albert Raiders taking on the Brandon Wheat Kings. Hudak talked about her journey from cleaning hockey arenas in the middle of the night to competing at three Paralympic winter games and winning two bronze medals.

“What a privilege and an honour to be the girl that can mop the bleachers and then come full circle and get to be here today, speaking to you all on this exact floor,” Hudak said. “I think that’s the thing I like the most about my story, I never actually grew up having the Olympic dream like many athletes.”

While many Olympic and Paralympic Nordic skiiers were “born on skis” or came from a competitive skiing family, Hudak didn’t start skiing until she was 19. She didn’t even know what the Paralympic Games were. That all changed when Collette Bourgonje, a Saskatchewan Paralympic sit-skiing hall of famer in her own right, met Hudak when she worked at the local Canadian Tire and encouraged Hudak to strap on some skis.

That interaction “completely re-routed” Hudak’s journey of working hard to get a degree and a career, to pursuing the pinnacle of a sport she had seldomly done, let alone taken seriously.

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Since then, Hudak has won two Paralympic bronze medals and has attended three different Paralympic Games, in Sochi in 2014, Pyeongchang in 2018 before this year’s games Beijing.

Hudak picked up her Beijing bronze medal she won in the 15km cross country skiing event and showed it to the young female athletes, the Prince Albert Northern Bears hockey team and other minor hockey teams from Big River who were in the crowd.

Her biggest piece of advice was to the crowd was to have a determined mentality, think of obstacles as challenges, and to not let anything get between you and your goals.

“When people are trying to put you down, you just decide you’re not going to let them. So many people told me because of my physical disability that ‘this is going to be hard for you,’ and ‘you shouldn’t do this.’ The more people that told me I can’t, I thought, ‘I’ll show you what I can do,’” Hudak said.

Cianna can

Also in Beijing this year was Cudworth’s Cianna Lieffers, who was a referee at the 2022 Beijing Olympics for women’s hockey.

One of the obstacles Lieffers and the rest of the officials and competitors had to go through was all the isolating and testing. Lieffers said she has isolated for 89 days in the past eight months just to get to the Olympics. And once there, Lieffers said she was confined to the hotel and the rink during the games.

“The Olympics were such an incredible experience, and I would go through those 89 days again and again just for the experience. I was very fortunate to have been part of the team Zebras in Beijing,” Lieffers said.

Lieffers said she was proud to be a part of the This Girl Can event as one of its speakers, and said the motto has fit her officiating career quite well.

“Even at the Beijing Winter Olympics, I had to prove that ‘this girl can’ officiate on the world’s biggest, even if that meant getting a stick to the face, getting a few stitches, and returning eight minutes of play later,” Lieffers said.

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Jeff.dandrea@pattisonmedia.com

On Twitter: @jeff_paNOW