‘A mission and a purpose:’ Team Canada announced for Invictus Games
HALIFAX — Dave Innes was a strapping 18-year-old gunner with the Canadian Airborne Regiment when he broke his back in five places.
Training for a deployment to war-torn Bosnia in April 1990, the young paratrooper from North Bay, Ont., was travelling in a 2.5-tonne truck with about two dozen members of his artillery battery when the vehicle hit black ice, veered off a 10-metre cliff and flipped twice — end-over-end.
“It was bad,” the 47-year-old veteran says. “They had told my family that I had a 50-50 chance … I’m lucky to be here, period.”
In a ceremony on the Halifax waterfront on Wednesday, Innes was officially named as one of 40 athletes who will compete for Canada this fall at the 2018 Invictus Games in Sydney, Australia.