Conestoga alumni Marley Gayler will be competing at the Special Olympics World Winter Games 2025 in cross-country skiing after again being named to the Special Olympics Team Canada.
Conestoga graduate Marley Gayler will be competing for Canada in the Special Olympics World Winter Games 2025.
Gayler, a 2018 graduate of the Community Integration through Cooperative Education (CICE) program, is excited to be representing Canada on the world stage, this time at the winter event. At the World Summer Games in 2023, Gayler won three gold and one silver medal in the powerlifting competition in Berlin, Germany.
Next, she will be competing in Turin, Italy, and Grenoble, France, from March 8-17, 2025.
Gayler joins 135 members of Special Olympics Team Canada, including 91 athletes, 24 coaches, five mission staff, 14 team leadership members and an honorary coach. More than 70 local training coaches from across Canada will also support the team from their hometowns.
Gayler has been a Special Olympian since she was 13, and is looking forward to her next time competing in cross-country skiing - a sport she loves.
“It’s just me and nature; Just me on the trails challenging myself,” Gayler responded to a recent Special Olympics questionnaire.
To stay in shape in the off-season, Gayler keeps busy with powerlifting four times a week, running three times, and playing basketball, hockey and boxing each once weekly.
Along with her athletic ability, Gayler is confident in what she contributes to Team Canada. “I am very supportive and I am a great team player, and I will cheer everyone with enthusiasm and I also have a great sense of humour!”
Her proud mother is Tannis Gayler, a support services co-ordinator in the School of Trades & Apprenticeship. Being told their daughter would never be able to read or write and would be unlikely to take care of herself in any capacity became a challenge for the family.
“As parents, you do your utmost to have her become what she did - a wonderful, successful person. Despite our initial struggles, we took her diagnosis as an opportunity to encourage the athletic side that we saw in her.”
Now Gayler has been a Special Olympian for 15 years.
“It's overwhelming seeing what she's accomplished, how she proved the experts wrong. With Marley, it's mind over matter. When she wants to do something, she'll do it and she sets high goals for herself and we are always amazed at what she accomplishes, in sports and in life.”
Gayler shared that both work and sports have taught her valuable, transferable skills in a profile on the Special Olympics website.
“Training for my sports with Special Olympics has taught me to be disciplined and stick to a routine, and that has helped with my daily routine at work,” she said.
Both have also reinforced the value of surrounding yourself by supportive people: “We can all achieve great things when we have a great team behind us.”
The two-year Community Integration through Co-operative Education is designed to provide individuals with exceptionalities and other significant learning challenges the opportunity to experience college life and enhance their academic and vocational skills with modified programming and support.
Throughout the program, students will participate in work placements intended to develop and enhance work skills and involvement with the community. The program will support students to be more independent members of the community, with the goal of transitioning to volunteer or paid employment or further academic studies.