Joe Fornasier is a hockey wunderkind. He also happens to be blind | Canada Voices

At 10 years old, doctors told him he’d never play hockey again. Five years later, he was the youngest player ever to make the national blind hockey team. Today, fans wait to meet him at airports and ask for his autograph. Here’s the story of how 22-year-old Joe Fornasier – who boasts over 150,000 followers on TikTok – became the face of the sport.

Fornasier’s first memory is of playing hockey. During the winter months, his dad would flood the family’s backyard in St. Catharines, Ont. Starting from the age of 3, Fornasier spent every evening on the makeshift rink learning how to skate and shoot a puck.

Each morning Fornasier woke up early to check highlights and stats from across the league. At school, he and his friends would draw hundreds of pictures of NHL goalies and make Lego figurines of their favourite players. When Mats Sundin left the Toronto Maple Leafs – Fornasier’s favourite team – for the Vancouver Canucks in 2008, it felt like a personal affront.

At 10, Fornasier attended a series of tryouts, competing for a spot on the Burlington Bulldogs, a rep league hockey team in the city his family moved to. Smaller than a lot of his potential teammates, the left-winger made up the gaps with speed and agility. Everyone recognized him as one of the stronger players, but his time on the ice didn’t live up to that reputation.

“Weaving through the pylons, I felt like my body wasn’t doing what it was supposed to be doing,” said Fornasier. “After the tryout, I remember telling my dad that I needed to get my skates sharpened. He checked the bottom of my skates. They were super sharp.”

Fornasier didn’t make the team. A devastating turn of events for the young athlete. At school, he continued to blame equipment problems for his poor performance. But shortly after the tryouts, another explanation came to light. “I looked at my teacher’s head, and it was completely gone. I’d already lost a decent part of my central vision by that point, but at the time I didn’t know what was going on.” His parents quickly scheduled an emergency optometrist appointment.

The optometrist recognized that something was wrong, but Fornasier’s symptoms didn’t point to any obvious diagnosis. The 10-year-old was referred to a specialist. Then another. Over a two-month period, Fornasier saw more than a dozen different doctors, spending nearly every day running through tests.

“I remember getting an MRI because they thought I had a tumour. Maybe there was something pushing up against a nerve in my brain and that’s why I had the blind spot,” said Fornasier. “After the doctor’s appointment, my dad got me a box of doughnuts and a new video game. He never got me stuff randomly like that. I thought: This must be bad.”

Leber Hereditary Optic Neuropathy is a genetic disorder inherited through the mitochondria in your cells. It causes deterioration in the optic nerve, resulting in 95-per-cent vision loss for most patients. The disease is incurable and comes on rapidly. While the vision changes started in the summer, months passed before Fornasier was officially diagnosed. Doctors didn’t immediately pick up on the condition because he was so young.

“It was fall and I remember going outside. I looked at the leaves. I looked at the trees. Every single thing I looked at, I’d think, ‘this is probably the last time I’ll be able to see this,’” said Fornasier. By October, he was legally blind. The preteen was told he’d continue to lose vision from there.

Among all the changes, the hardest thing to accept was when doctors explained to Fornasier he’d never play hockey again. His relationship to the sport – something he loved so much – drastically changed.

“I couldn’t follow the puck on the screen any more. I would sit close to the screen and literally force myself to try and see it. The game was so important to me and I didn’t want to lose that, but it just wasn’t working.” Slowly, Fornasier stopped checking in on the NHL stats. He quit following the Maple Leafs. He didn’t even want to talk about hockey.

“The passion was gone. I felt done.”

Puberty is a challenging time for most people. For Fornasier, the extra learning curve of living with sight loss added additional stress. Guidance counsellors told him that his blindness would likely result in him doing an extra year or two at school. They didn’t see university as an option. On the social side of things, Fornasier faced nicknames such as Helen Keller and Stevie Wonder, sometimes used playfully, other times with contempt.

Attempting to play down his condition to high-school peers, Fornasier stopped using a cane and tried to make a joke of the situation.

“I would fall down the stairs. Run into walls. Walk into the wrong classroom. Barely do any work,” he recalled. “People would call me Lazy Joe. Clumsy. Unco-ordinated Joe. I was happy as long as they didn’t call me blind.”

Fornasier’s parents recognized the unique challenges facing their son. They wanted to find opportunities for him to stay active and other resources available to make things easier. At a conference, they heard about Mark DeMontis, a legally blind hockey player who rollerbladed across Canada to raise funds for blind and partially sighted athletes to participate in the sport.

While Blind Hockey was invented in 1936, Canadian Blind Hockey, the organization, was founded in 2009, helping to standardize the rules of the game (previously, blind hockey had different rules and even different equipment, depending on where the game was being played). Canadian Blind Hockey also founded the Canadian National Blind Hockey Tournament, which has been held annually since 2013.

“I remember getting an e-mail from Joe’s mom that said, ‘My son is 10 and he just lost his eyesight,’” said DeMontis. He tried to offer words of encouragement, but at the time there weren’t a lot of opportunities for children to try out the sport.

DeMontis worried how Fornasier would navigate his condition, losing sight at such a young age. But he was encouraged by the fact the young athlete had such a great support system. “Joe’s parents, they could have given up. They could have let their son give up. But they didn’t. They were persistent in trying to do the best for their kid.”

There were four years between Fornasier losing his sight and his first opportunity to try out blind hockey. He remembers it as a particularly hard period.

“I went to school Grade 5, Grade 6, Grade 7, Grade 8. I put a smile on my face during the day, but every night, I’d sit in my room crying,” said Fornasier. “‘How come I’m the one that has to go blind?’” When the time came to try things out at a youth blind hockey meet, Fornasier wasn’t in the headspace to feel excited. Walking to the arena, he still wanted to back out.

“I thought being blind meant being bad. I was so brainwashed by my peers making fun of my disability, I didn’t want to associate with it,” said Fornasier. But once he was on the ice, everything changed.

“It was almost euphoric. I thought to myself, ‘I want to do this as much as possible for as long as I can.’”

Fornasier immediately took to blind hockey. It was a positive physical outlet for a lot of anger and mixed feelings he’d felt at school. It was also something he excelled at.

Blind hockey adapts the game to help athletes with vision loss participate. Players must make a clear pass before they’re allowed to shoot on net. The size of the puck is approximately three times bigger than regulation size. It has ball bearings inside that make a rattling sound as the puck moves. At three feet (0.91 metres) tall, the nets are smaller than standard and goalies are fully blind or blindfolded. Sound plays a huge component, with audience members encouraged to stay silent while the game is in play.

At 15, Fornasier was selected as a member for the national Canadian Blind Hockey team. Since that time, he’s won five gold medals. In the 2022/2023 season and subsequent tournament, he had the most points of any player that has 5-per-cent vision or less. This past March, he helped Canada take first place in the 2026 International Blind Ice Hockey Series. He also skates with local team the Toronto Ice Owls.

Fornasier’s social following has arguably made him the most recognizable face of the sport. Fans have nicknamed him “Blind Bedsy,” comparing the player with hockey prodigy Connor Bedard of the Chicago Blackhawks, owing to their shared wunderkind status and a vague resemblance between the two athletes. Fornasier hopes to collaborate online with Bedard one day.

He also hopes to bring enough attention to blind hockey that it will one day be included in the Paralympic Games.

“He went from being a kid who was in some ways being bullied about his vision to somebody who’s inspiring kids to not be bullies and using his platform to think about blindness differently,” said DeMontis. He’s proud to see the attention Fornasier brings to the sport. “There’s times where he and I are flying, and there are people waiting for him when I get off the plane. Families and kids that want [his] autograph and to take photos with him.”

“Learning to embrace this thing I was scared of is what ultimately brought me any of the success I’ve had today,” Fornasier added. This summer, he intends to spend six days a week in the gym and one day on the ice, staying ready for what the next season brings.