Last week in Sochi, Russia, Canada's Paralympic curling team made history, as the Canadian squad topped the host Russians 8-3 to win gold, and make Canada the first nation to ever win the Paralympic and men's and women's Olympic curling titles in the same year.

Helping Team Canada to this historic accomplishment was Mark Ideson, a Western graduate and former Mustangs cheerleader, who served as the team's alternate in Sochi.
Ideson attended Western University and studied Environmental Science, graduating with a BSc in 1999. As an active and athletic individual, Ideson decided to join the Mustangs cheerleading team, and in 1996-97 he helped capture Western's 12^th consecutive National title.

After graduating from Western, Ideson became a long-time helicopter pilot and took up curling later on in his life at the age of 33 in Ilderton, Ontario. While flying a routine route in February 2007, his chopper plunged 740 meters out of the sky and crashed into a frozen farm field just west of Cambridge, Ontario. Ideson broke 29 bones in the crash, including the fifth and sixth vertebra in his neck which caused spinal cord damage. A little more than a week after the crash doctors told him that he was a quadriplegic, and that he would never walk again.

However, Ideson regained the use of his arms and although he uses a wheelchair, Ideson has regained enough leg mobility to occasionally walk with the aid of a walker.

Ideson continued to maintain an athletic lifestyle by taking up wheelchair curling at the age of 37, and his athletic accomplishments brought him a great deal of success. In 2012 Ideson won the Ontario Provincial Wheelchair Curling Championship title and placed third in the season's National Championship. The following year Ideson was part of Canada's gold medal winning team at the 2013 World Wheelchair Curling Championships in Sochi, with the same team that travelled back to Russia to win gold in last week's Paralympics.

Saturday's win was Ideson's first Paralympic gold, a feat that's remarkable enough on it's own, but one that's made even more amazing give that his first experience with wheelchair curling in 2010. After helping Canada claim its third consecutive gold medal alongside skip Jim Armstrong, second Dennis Thiessen, third Ina Forrest and lead Sonja Gaudet, Ideson and the rest of Canada's gold medal winning contingent were scheduled to arrive back on home soil on Monday morning in Toronto.