Page 6 - Mobility Management, April/May 2020

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Going Places
New Adventures with Amylior Ambassador Ben Leclair
As a professional wakeboarder from Canada, Ben Leclair is used to traveling the world as an elite athlete, pushing through pain during training, and appearing on film with the great outdoors as his backdrop.
In November 2016, while training in Florida, Leclair sustained a C3 complete spinal cord injury that changed his life.
But Leclair will also tell you that, maybe surprisingly, some things haven’t changed at all.
Learning New Possibilities
Today, Leclair is still an athlete, still trains, and still travels the world: “I’m probably more of an athlete now than ever before. I eat better, I train much harder and I’m constantly giving my body the tools needed to optimize.”
Filmmaking remains a big part of his life, both in front of and behind the camera.
And rather than slowing down, he’s added credentials to his résumé. He’s now an ambassador and spokes- person for Amylior, the power wheelchair and seating manufacturer in Vaudreuil-Dorion, Quebec, and will help design and develop future products. He’s still an ambas- sador for O’Neill, the surf wear/lifestyle brand, as he was during his wakeboarding career.
Leclair has come a long way from November 2016, when he was on a ventilator and a feeding tube, rehabil- itating first in Orlando, Fla., then in Montreal.
He shares his story not just to encourage people living with disabilities, but also as a lesson to the able-bodied world: “People are capable and deserving of all the adventures and possibilities that life has to offer.”
One goal is to make everyone more aware of available seating, mobility and electronics options, and what a difference those options can make.
“It’s hard to know what’s out there, even though there are more social media pages now,” Leclair said. “When you’re new to this world [of assistive technology], it’s not easy to find. When I was at my rehab center in Montreal, they tell you what they know, and you think that’s all that’s out there.”
A priority of Leclair’s is to help people to use assistive technology to move forward in new ways.
“When I was there, I couldn’t move my arms,” Leclair said, of his starting point during rehab. While he said he was aware that some people undergoing rehab with
6 APRIL-MAY 2020 | MOBILITY MANAGEMENT
him were “going to be able to play rugby or some kind
of sport, which might give them a passion,” Leclair didn’t learn until much later that wheelchair sports include people with various levels of injury. “I just heard recently that people play soccer in wheelchairs. It’s things like this I’d like to share. It’s not about the level of injury. There’s something you can do at almost every level.”
A Cinematic Career
Filmmaking is front and center of Leclair’s life now, as
it was before his injury. “I was working for a wakeboard company that did wakeboard events in Canada, and
it was televised on a French-Canadian TV channel,” he said. “I had a TV crew that followed me around, and they came to Asia and Europe with me a couple of times.”
Spending so much time with the TV crew taught Leclair cinematography.
“That’s where I really learned how to film and edit,” he said. “We were all in the same hotel room, and they were always editing. I got the work ethic from them.”
Today, Leclair uses those lessons to make his own films. “Camera gear got a lot less expensive and a lot higher quality, so you don’t have to bring this huge camera around,” he added. “You can throw a small camera into your backpack, and the quality is pretty amazing.”
Leclair wants his films to be polished, with the beauty he became accustomed to when TV film crews were constantly turning their cameras on him.
“I don’t want them to look medical,” he said of
the films. “I don’t want people to feel bad when they watch. I want them to feel happy for the people they’re watching.”
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PHOTOS: SIMON DUBÉ (PAGE 6); GOPHRETTE POWER (PAGE 7/RACING)