After years of hard work, Dr. Andrei Krassioukov has finally earned admission to the Athletes Village at the 2010 Vancouver Paralympic Games.

But Krassioukov isn’t a competitor — he’s an internationally recognized expert in spinal cord injury (SCI) and leader of the only research team to be granted access to the Vancouver Athletes Village during the Games.

Krassioukov and research team members will investigate the controversial practice of “boosting.” Practiced by some individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI), boosting involves intentionally raising blood pressure to stimulate the body’s energy and endurance. Non-athletes with SCI may use boosting to feel more energetic and alert. Paralympic athletes use boosting to win — it can improve performance by up to 15 per cent. Stressing techniques to stimulate parts of the body below the level of the spinal cord injury, and to produce a spike in blood pressure, can range from wearing pressure stockings, to compressing the testicles by sitting on a handful of ball bearings, or blocking a urinary catheter to distend the bladder.

Injury to the spinal cord disrupts control of heart and blood vessels that are normally regulated by the autonomic nervous system, part of the nervous system that provides non-voluntary control to various organs. This disruption — which varies in severity between individuals — means the body cannot properly replenish energy consumed through exercise leading to a drop in peripheral blood flow, sweating, shortness of breath and faintness . This creates significant disadvantages during competition, leading some athletes to use boosting as a drastic measure to correct functions lost through injury.

Besides creating an unfair competitive advantage, boosting is a dangerous practice. The sudden surge in blood pressure typically seen during boosting is known as autonomic dysreflexia and can lead to stroke, heart attack or death. But the International Paralympics Committee (IPC) 1994 ban on boosting has been difficult to enforce.

A physician-scientist at Vancouver Coastal Health’s GF Strong Rehabilitation Centre, Krassioukov has studied autonomic functioning in SCI patients for more than 30 years and has collected data from paralympic athletes headed for competition since 2006. During the last five years he has urged the IPC to go beyond the ban to address how differences in autonomic function affect elite athlete performance.

Krassioukov believes that adding autonomic functioning to the athlete classification system that currently measures only motor and sensory functioning will more evenly match competitors and reduce motivation to boost.

“Being allowed to conduct research in the Athletes’ Village is an exciting milestone for me,” says Krassioukov, an associate professor in UBC’s Dept. of Medicine and co-director of the International Collaboration on Repair Discoveries (ICORD), part of Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute (VCHRI). “It suggests the IPC will consider how differences in autonomic function create inequities in performance and fuel the risky practice of boosting.”

Autonomic functioning varies between individuals according to the level and severity of their SCI. Currently, athletes with higher-level injury and significant autonomic function impairment compete directly with individuals with lesser impairment. Athletes have used boosting to close the gap.

During the 2010 Paralympic Winter Games, expected to draw 650 athletes from more than 40 countries, he plans to test 50 curling and sledge hockey athletes with spinal cord injury in a Cardiovascular Health Education Clinic in the Village and at ICORD. Volunteers will participate in a 90-minute assessment of autonomic functioning, complete a questionnaire and receive educational brochures about autonomic dysreflexia and risks of boosting.

Krassioukov expects it will be at least four years before his team will provide the IPC with possible guidelines on testing of autonomic functioning in paralympic athletes. Additional data from other paralympic sports must be collected and analyzed and recommendations developed and tested. He hopes research advances will ultimately eliminate the need for boosting but accepts that individuals with SCI are always looking for ways to improve their functioning.

“I am amazed by my patients’ incredible tenacity to achieve what they want to do in life — how they not only survive but fully engage in their adventure with a new body.”

Krassioukov’s work is supported by the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada; the Disability Health Research Network; the Craig H. Neilsen Foundation; and the Rick Hansen Foundation.

VCHRI is the research body of Vancouver Coastal Health Authority, which includes BC’s largest academic and teaching health sciences centres: VGH, UBC Hospital, and GF Strong Rehabilitation Centre. In academic partnership with the University of British Columbia, VCHRI brings innovation and discovery to patient care, advancing healthier lives in healthy communities across British Columbia, Canada, and beyond. www.vchri.ca.

As a Paralympic competition venue, the UBC Doug Mitchell Thunderbird Sports Centre will host 20 Paralympic sledge hockey games. The complex was built in the 1960s and is a fitting venue, considering its rich history. Canada’s National Hockey Program was born at the arena in 1963, in preparation for the Innsbruck 1964 Olympic Winter games in Austria.

The arena was redeveloped from 2006 to 2008 to rejuvenate and expand the facility in time for the Olympics, and to reflect the shared environmental, social and economic sustainability goals. Instead of demolishing the whole building, UBC and VANOC kept one ice rink that was still in good shape and upgraded its outdated mechanical and electrical systems.

The new centre has a highly-efficient floor plan inside, and the building site takes advantage of existing road and pedestrian networks and is situated close to public transportation. The centre’s designers used the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED®) green building rating system as a framework to address sustainability across all environmental performance categories. The facility achieved a LEED Silver performance standard, meeting VANOC’s progressive requirements for sustainability.

In addition to hockey and ice skating programs, the centre accommodates more than 40,000 users monthly through public programs, leagues, special events, concerts and fitness-related programs, to make the most of the facility.

Sports facilities require a significant amount of energy to operate, especially ice rinks and pools. UBC and VANOC found ways to convert the centre into a world-class winter sports facility and meet the building’s ice maintenance, ventilation, de-humidification and lighting needs in sustainable ways.

“Typically those are challenges, but we took them as positives, because we felt there was a lot of opportunity to improve the standards and also be leaders in the development of some of these facilities,” says Kavie Toor, Associate Director of Facilities and Business Development for UBC Athletics and Recreation.

One of the highlights of the redeveloped arena is the ECO CHILL® energy system. This new technology recycles all the energy used to maintain the ice surface back into the arena’s heating system, making use of waste energy that would normally be flushed out of the building.

The arena also uses electric ice resurfacers, which keep energy use to a minimum and don’t impact air quality. Often referred to as a Zamboni®, an ice resurfacer is typically fuelled by propane. “Not only is there energy wasted when they’re running sometimes three times an hour if you’re running multiple rinks, but there’s also a considerable amount of emissions that go into the playing area and into the stands,” Toor says.

To remove moist air from the building and dressing rooms, the arena uses an efficient de-humidifying system that runs about eight to 10 hours a day, compared to the centre’s old system that ran 24 hours a day. The building also uses energy-efficient lighting with sensors and control systems that turn lights off when a space is unoccupied.

The interplay of sport and sustainability is being put under the microscope at the University of British Columbia, where a new, one-of-a-kind research centre is analyzing the opportunities and effects created by sport and mega sporting events.

The UBC Centre for Sports and Sustainability tackles questions about the environmental impacts of Olympic Games, society’s perception of Paralympic athletes and how to give youth opportunities to learn through sport, among other topics.

“There’s a growing need to better understand how sport transforms people, communities and cultures to deliver lasting economic, social and health benefits,” says UBC President Stephen Toope.

“As a UBC legacy project from the 2010 Winter Olympic Games, the centre will fill an important niche as an international hub for knowledge on this very specialized area of research.”

The centre already exists — virtually. Through a joint project between UBC and the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC), the university is formalizing an existing network of researchers who are engaged in sport and sustainability research and instruction.

Researchers are considering how a large-scale sport event or infrastructure project can spur innovation in urban design, and what factors influence national pride, social cohesion and the inclusion in sport of groups such as new immigrants, indigenous populations and the economically disadvantaged.

“This is about more than sport itself,” says Robert Sparks, director of the UBC School of Human Kinetics. “This is sport as it links to economic sustainability, environmental sustainability and social development in communities.”

“How do you ‘green’ sports facilities and how do you use sport programs to foster community development and healthy lifestyles?”

Part of the centre’s mandate will be to ensure this new knowledge is made available to local, national and international event organizers and host cities so they might optimize their planning and provide an enduring legacy. Already underway is the Paralympic Games Impact Survey, which looks at how the Paralympic Games impact the social perceptions of persons with a disability. A post-Paralympic Games survey will study changes in these perceptions.

”The overall idea is to look at how society might change its views of people with disabilities upon watching the quality performances of Paralympic athletes,” says Rob VanWynsberghe, lecturer in Human Kinetics and Educational Studies and UBC lead for the project.

Researchers are also looking around the country to find programs that teach others how to coach athletes with a disability, Vanwynsberghe says. “We suspect that many Paralympic coaches are experts in a sport for athletes without disabilities. They’ll draw on these skills to teach Paralympic athletes, but the cross-over isn’t easy; sledge hockey and hockey, for example, are two very different things,” he says.

“We want to make sure there are enough programs in place to train coaches and athletes for the Paralympics, and from a research perspective, consider the social perceptions that follow.” This is baseline work for the Olympic Games Impact study, which is also being conducted at UBC and led by VanWynsberghe. The massive study was developed by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to introduce a standardized cross-Games method of monitoring, measuring and reporting on the economic, social and environmental impact of hosting the Olympic Games.

UBC and VANOC will also present a three-part think-tank series to analyze lessons learned from the 2010 Games, new precedents for large scale sport event sustainability, and the use of sustainability indicators in planning future Olympic bids.

“We want to capitalize on our research with the Olympics and Paralympics to become a knowledge hub capable of helping groups down the road who want to take on similar projects,” Sparks says.

Another project under the centre’s umbrella — the nascent Coaching Sustainability Initiative —has a local connection in Vancouver. By creating community service learning placements in the Downtown Eastside, this UBC legacy project supports leadership development and physical activity among secondary school students in Vancouver.

For more information, visit
ubc.ca/2010