Greg Westlake grew up playing “standup hockey”.

That’s what Canada’s Paralympic sledge hockey players call the good old game.

“I was as big as the other kids, I had the hand-eye coordination, I was a good athlete and a good hockey player but you hit that realization that you’re not going to be the first double leg amputee in the NHL,” said the Oakville, Ont., native.

“Once you come to that realization it’s like, what else? Do I take school more seriously or do I find other hobbies?”

That’s when Westlake discovered that he didn’t have to give up the game he loved at all.

Since taking up sledge hockey, he’s been to two Paralympics, experiencing both the high of a gold medal in the 2006 Turin Games and the heartbreak of fourth place at Vancouver 2010. Westlake hopes to lead the team he now captains back to gold for the 2014 Paralympics in Sochi, Russia, March 7-16.

The Paralympics don’t get anywhere near the attention the Olympics get, but that’s just one more challenge for these athletes to overcome. And they’re very good at overcoming challenges.

These players have survived congenital disorders, childhood cancer, traumatic accidents and even a landmine in Afghanistan. Then, they had to become elite athletes and skilled players to make the national team.

Westlake had both lower legs amputated when he was just a few months old. His teammate Ben Delaney lost a leg to bone cancer when he was 12 years old and became so adept at sledge that he has a shot of making the Sochi Paralympic team even though he’s just 17 and still in high school.

Then there’s the likes of Brad Bowden, one of Canada’s few multi-sport athletes, who’s been on the national sledge team since 1999. Bowden already has two gold medals, one in sledge from the 2006 Turin Winter Games and one in wheelchair basketball from the 2004 Athens Summer Games.

All Paralympic events, from skiing to curling, help break down long-standing stereotypes about disability and elite sport, but sledge hockey — a full contact game — downright smashes them.

“You might see a guy day to day in a wheelchair or missing a leg and people feel pity, people feel charity for those guys and then you come watch a sledge hockey game and you see the hits and the contact,” said Westlake, after Monday’s game against Russia at the World Sledge Hockey Challenge, where he had two penalties for roughing.

“It’s the biggest draw in the Paralympics,” said Kevin Rempel, who started playing after suffering a spinal injury in a freestyle motocross event in 2006. “We want to show the world that given whatever injury or disability you’ve got, we can play just like real hockey ... We’re Canadians.”

Sledge hockey players balance on a single blade, similar to what’s on a hockey skate, and use two sticks to propel themselves across the ice and shoot the puck. Once the game starts, the rough bodychecks into the boards make it look and sound just like the standup game Canadians are more familiar with.

The intensity of the sport is what attracted Dominic Larocque.

He was halfway through his first tour in Afghanistan when the light armoured vehicle he was travelling in hit a landmine. The corporal woke up to discover his left leg had been amputated above the knee and he feared his life was all but over.

“When I joined the team I had a chance to talk to players in wheelchairs with full lives, wives, kids and I realized I just lost a leg,” he said. “My life is not done.”

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The Canadian team is undefeated, so far, in the 2013 World Sledge Hockey Challenge, the last tournament before the Sochi Paralympics. Canada beat Korea 5-2 on Sunday and Russia 5-3 on Monday at the Mastercard Centre.

Tournament play continues all week with the medal games played on Saturday.