Paralympic medallist Leanne Taylor balancing motherhood, para triathlon return

Leanne Taylor, Canadian paratriathlete, lets her son Oliver play with her Paris Paralympic medal in their home in Oak Bluff, Manitoba on Thursday, May 7, 2026. Taylor has learned how to mother from her chair and is back to training as she prepares for a triathlon in Japan. THE CANADIAN PRESS/John Woods

Leanne Taylor is a new mom learning to parent from her wheelchair while she returns to racing Para triathlon.

Taylor won bronze in the women’s wheelchair division at the 2024 Paris Paralympics to become the first Canadian woman to earn a Paralympic medal in triathlon.

Taylor and husband Scott Dyck welcomed son Oliver on July 23, 2025, less than a year after Paris.

Taylor returns to competition next Saturday at the World Para Triathlon Series opener in Yokohama, Japan. It will be her first triathlon since the 2024 world championship in Spain.

Para triathlon is a 750-metre swim, 20-kilometre bike and 5k run. Taylor pumps a handcycle during the bike leg, and her run is a wheelchair race.

So in addition to transporting a hand cycle, racing wheelchair, leg braces and wetsuit to Japan, Taylor will also have Oliver and all his baby gear with her as they navigate planes and airports in her wheelchair.

Taylor’s mother, Tricia, is also making the trip to help out.

“Your life as a wheelchair user is just intrinsically complex,” Taylor said from her home in Oak Bluff, Man.

“My husband will sometimes, as a joke, be like ‘oh my gosh, why do we pick a sport that has three sports?’ There’s so much stuff, there’s so much logistics, but everything that you try to do as a wheelchair user is logistically annoying and challenging, so you might as well do the things you actually want to do.

“If a daycare drop off for a nine-to-five office job is going to be difficult, then I might as well be navigating that daycare drop off so I can go to a training session and then do some cool international competition.”

Taylor reached the podium in her Paralympic debut six years after she was paralyzed from the waist down in a mountain biking accident. It was while recovering in hospital that she decided she would become a triathlete.

The 33-year-old has chronicled her learning curve as a new mom who uses a wheelchair on Instagram with videos on how she manoeuvres Oliver, now 24 pounds, without the use of her legs.

“I was pretty vocal about it after Paris, saying the next thing we wanted to have was a child,” Taylor said. “A lot of people in the sports world who had done that reached out to me, different mothers who were wheelchair users or had different disabilities, and gave me information.

‘I was like, Oh my God, this is gold, you can’t find this online, you can’t Google this, AI doesn’t have this. What do people do?’ I really wanted to put it online for the people who didn’t necessarily have people they could ask."

Canadian wheelchair racer Ilana Dupont, who competed in a pair of Paralympic Games, was Taylor’s North Star.

“I met her when I was first injured. She helped me even to learn how to push a racing wheelchair, but on the side of that first camp that I went to, that she was at, was her four-year-old daughter,” Taylor recalled.

“Seeing that so early on in my journey, I was like ‘Oh, this exists. This is possible.’”

The World Triathlon Union froze Taylor’s ranking at 11th for her hiatus, which gave her the points to enter Yokohama’s race.

“It’s a nod from the sport saying ‘we encourage this. We have a policy for this, and we’re welcoming it, which I think makes you feel not ridiculous and makes it easier to say ‘yeah, I want to do this,’” Taylor explained.

“Yokohama, I think I’ve raced this five times, and if I didn’t have a ranking freeze, I wouldn’t have gotten in. It’s much less intimidating to go somewhere I’ve been, and a race course that I know, and to bring Oliver to somewhere that I feel comfortable.”

Taylor says her ambitious plan of qualifying for the Paris Games so soon after she started para triathlon worked out well, so why not tackle more big goals?

“When I talked about returning to sport, I felt braver to say what’s the most optimistic plan that could possibly happen, getting back to it in this kind of timeline, and being ready and having actually trained and being in a good position?” Taylor said.

“I was optimistic just because I’d been really lucky in 2024 and things did go according to plan, so let’s just keep planning for success and see what happens.”

Donna Spencer, The Canadian Press