'Rugby made me accept my own disability and thrive'
By Louise Kinross
As part of Team Canada’s wheelchair rugby team, Rio Kanda Kovac just qualified for the world championships in Brazil next summer.
The Toronto resident says he loves the physicality of the sport. “Being able to hit players as hard as you can in your rugby chairs is very empowering for sure," says Kovac, 22, the youngest member of the team. Kovac has Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease (CMT), a neurological condition that damages nerves in the arms and legs.
Before becoming an athlete, Kovac often found himself sitting on the sidelines.
“I went to a Catholic school here and they did hockey for phys-ed, and I always remember sitting in the stands, eating a bag of chips,” he says. “I was the token disabled kid in an able-bodied environment. It was difficult not being able to keep up, not understanding why, and not being comfortable in my own body.”
In 2015 Kovac watched wheelchair rugby at the Para-Pan American Games in Toronto “and that’s where it clicked,” he says. “I started playing a year after that.” In 2018 he was invited to train with Team Canada.
“Rugby made me accept my own disability and thrive,” he says. “I love the community, and the different people I get to talk to that are in chairs. I get to travel and meet people across the world.”
The team plays on a basketball court and players are assigned a point classification depending on their degree of impairment. “0.5 is for someone with a very high spinal cord injury, and 3.5 is for someone with the most function in their trunk and arms,” Kovac says. “I’m right in the middle at 2.5. You have four players on the field, and you can only have eight points.”
Kovac says “keeping your head cool under pressure” is one of the challenges. “I’m usually running the ball and lower classification players are setting screens for me. I’m behind them, letting them know what I’m thinking: ‘Space out. I’m going right or left.’ We don’t have a lot of speed on the Canadian team, so we rely on our spacing for setting up good passes.”
Kovac currently trains four days a week with the team, which includes passing drills, set plays, inbounding, cardio and weights.
Kovac says his progress in the sport was initially slow. “My hands are very weak and when I first started, I struggled with passing. I worried I’d never be good, but my coach and teammates said: ‘Rio you have a great work ethic, you have nothing to worry about.’ I kept showing up and going to practice and eventually I started to surpass my peers. I was like: ‘Did everyone else get slower here? What’s going on?’ Then competing against top nations and keeping up with them gave me confidence.”
That confidence spilled into his school life. “It was cool I was playing for Team Canada. People were interested in how we played and would come to a game and watch and have a blast.”
Kovac’s father Nick, who also has CMT, learned how to play wheelchair rugby after Rio took to it, and is also an elite player.
Kovac says his condition, which is progressive, is quite stable now. He benefits from having medical staff that support Team Canada. “It’s important to be 100 per cent honest with yourself and let your medical team know if anything is bothering you,” he says. “For instance, my back was tight and weak and our medical staff gave me a bunch of exercises to do. My family doctor also gave me a referral for physio which I’m going to look in to, as I want to get back to walking a bit more.” Kovac uses a wheelchair most of the time but occasionally walks.
As a child, Kovac had orthotics and braces made at Holland Bloorview. “I remember coming in to get my casts done. You guys have a very good environment for kids. I always got little Timmies [from Tim Horton’s] as well.”
He encourages parents of kids with disabilities to “let your kid be a kid. Don’t be super supportive and hands-on. Right now they’re in a learning stage, so let them get their reps in and figure it out. That will help them in the long run. I feel like parents these days are over-protective. They get a lot of different information about a condition, and that can be worrisome. But put your trust in the doctor and get your child physically active.”
Kovac has lived in both Canada and Japan but finds people with disabilities face greater stigma in Japan. “People in chairs there don’t want to be seen," he says. "They feel like they’re in the way. It’s engrained in people that you don’t want to stick out. There’s that saying: ‘The nail that sticks out gets hammered first.’ But here, anything is game. We’ll talk about anything.”
Kovac needs to raise $17,000 for a new rugby chair and custom bucket seat. “I’ve grown out of the current one and it’s taken quite a bit of hits. It’s at the end of its cycle,” which Kovac says is about three years.
Team Canada players cover the cost of their specialized chairs and seats.
Kovac has been fitted for a custom bucket seat in Japan which will act like a prosthesis. He’ll be the first on Canada’s team to have one. “It fits better than a cloth seat,” he says. “That extra tightness means I can go around corners better and better engage my core.”
His new chair will be made by a New Zealand company that specializes in rugby chairs.
Kovac says having a father with CMT was a great advantage. “It never slowed him down when it came to his business aspirations in the tech world. He also advised me about not having some painful surgeries that he had as a child, because he didn’t want me going through that. For sure, I wouldn’t be where I am without my Dad’s guidance.”
Kovac says he’s always wanted to be in the Paralympics and “doing so in Paris was a really surreal experience.” He hopes to play for Canada in the 2028 games in Los Angeles. “I love representing Canada. It means a lot because I was born here.”
Kovac plans to do more public speaking and encourage young disabled kids to play team sports. “There’s something for everyone.”
He studied business at the University of Arizona on a scholarship that saw him play on their wheelchair rugby team. Coaching may be in the cards in his future, he says.
Contribute to Rio Kovac's GoFundMe campaign for a new rugby chair that can take him to the world championships in São Paulo, Brazil next summer. Like this content? Sign up for our monthly BLOOM e-letter, follow BLOOM editor @LouiseKinross on X, or @louisekinross.bsky.social on Bluesky, or watch our A Family Like Mine video series.
