CHARLOTTE (Steve Goldberg's Wheel World) - With the 2015 Pan American Games drawing to a close on July 26 and the Parapan American Games yet to begin on August 7, I'm reminded of a different Canadian double, an athlete I met and interviewed half the world away in Beijing in September of 2008.

Twenty-four years earlier, Misty Thomas marched in the opening ceremony at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games as a member of the Canadian women's basketball team.

"It was a childhood dream coming true, a fantastic dream," Thomas told me and the expression on her face let me know she was seeing that moment in her head once again.

The Canadians would finish fourth in Los Angeles, losing the bronze medal to China 57-62.

Raised in Canada, Misty Thomas returned to the city of her birth as an athlete in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games. Photo courtesy of Canadian Olympic Association

At 20, she was an Olympian. At 24, she was retired, her battered and injured knees too fragile to continue.

Two decades later, she was in Beijing, marching into the Bird's Nest Stadium for the 2008 Paralympic Games as a member of another Canadian national team, one simultaneously different and the same, the women's wheelchair basketball squad.

By the time they got to China, Canada's women on wheels were at the end of a dominant era where they won four consecutive IWBF World Championships from 1994 to 2006 and three straight Paralympics from 1992 through 2000. The only bump in that road was the USA's gold medal run in Athens in 2004. The Americans would win again in 2008 and take the world title in 2010.

Though admitting that it was anything but redemption, Thomas would have her revenge from the LA Olympic loss in Beijing, beating hosts China in a placement game 53-46 after the Australians had knocked favored Canada out of medal contention the day before.

To wear the Canadian uniform again, this time in the Paralympic Games, to a full and cheering stadium made her just as proud as she was in Los Angeles. She was just as good too. In Beijing, she was averaging 13 points and 10 rebounds a game at the time we talked.

Born in Los Angeles to an American mother and Canadian father, Thomas grew up in Windsor, Ontario since she was five and came up through the Canadian basketball system. She made a number of national teams before playing college ball at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas where her No. 4 jersey has been retired. In 1998, at 34, the former point guard became the youngest individual inducted into the Canadian Basketball Hall of Fame.

Thomas only used a wheelchair to play basketball. Though she can stand and walk, nine surgeries, including three reconstructive on both knees, left her unable to play the stand-up game. Her work experience managing high performance sports programs for the Sports Medicine Council in British Columbia had made her more than familiar with Paralympic sports.

"I interact with all the athletes living in BC, both Olympic and Paralympic, so I had known the wheelchair basketball crew for years," she said at the time.

The players had invited her repeatedly to come out and join them but it took a while before her schedule let it happen in 2005. The basketball part she understood, but the chair was daunting

"It was fun to have this challenge of figuring out this really important piece of equipment alongside this game that I loved but had not been able to play for so long."

When I asked how long it took for her to get comfortable with the chair, she laughed and said her team was still working on that. She added that being ambulatory and not having to use a chair every day like many of her teammates and opponents was a disadvantage on the court.

"People will say: 'How is it fair that you as a player that can stand up gets to play in a wheelchair? How is that fair?' and I tell them, 'You're totally right, it's unfair to those of us who are ambulatory because they are so skilled in the chair.

"It's such a steep learning curve. Put Kobe Bryant in a chair and a junior girl would be able to stop him from scoring."

During her eight years on Canada's standing national team, she won bronze medals in the 1983 Pan American Games and 1986 FIBA Women's World Championship. On wheels, she won IWBF World Championship gold in 2006 and a silver medal at the 2007 Rio Parapan Games. Canada would finish fifth in Beijing.

Thomas remains the first and only Canadian to compete in both the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Steve Goldberg

FIBA

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