Teammates call Declan Farmer "the Tom Brady of sled hockey" – a nod to his leadership, longevity and ability to deliver when it matters most.
The Tampa native is again leading the favored U,S, team at the Paralympic Winter Games in Italy. Farmer, 28, powered the Americans into the semifinal round of the sled hockey tournament after a dominant preliminary performance.
A three-time Paralympian, Farmer scored 11 goals in the opening round, recording hat tricks in all three games as Team USA cruised through group play.
The Americans opened with a 13-0 rout of Germany, outshooting their opponent 41-1. Farmer scored four goals, including three in the first period.
Italy briefly grabbed momentum in the next game, scoring just 25 seconds after the opening faceoff. The lead didn’t last long. The Americans responded with 14 straight goals while outshooting the hosts 53-2.
China kept it slightly closer in the final preliminary matchup, but the U.S. still rolled to a 7-1 victory to secure first place in Group A. Team USA outshot China, 31-9.
Along the way, Farmer set another Winter Games milestone. His latest goal — a slick, top-shelf, power-play backhand that he roofed over the goaltender — gave him his 54th career Paralympic point. It took him just 17 games to reach that mark. He's up to 58 now, with 18 so far in Milan.
That adds to Farmer's lengthy list of records. He's tops in international goals (251), assists (187) and points (438), and the leader in Paralympics goals (32).
A bilateral amputee, Farmer joined the U.S. national team at just 14 years old, two years before making his Paralympic debut in 2014. He attended Berkeley Preparatory School and graduated from Princeton University in 2020 with an economics degree.
His breakthrough came early in his career. In 2014, he was named best male athlete with a disability at the ESPY Awards.
Since then, he has helped anchor one of the most successful programs in Paralympic sports. Sled hockey was introduced to the Winter Games in 1994, and the U.S. has won six medals: five gold (2022, 2018, 2014, 2010 and 2002) along with a bronze in 2006.
Farmer has been part of the last three gold-medal teams, and the U.S. is favored to win another on Sunday.
The roster is now so deep that only four spots opened between the last Paralympics and this year’s tournament.
“We’ve raised the bar so much,” Farmer said. “If this 2026 team played our 2018 gold-medal-winning team, we’d probably beat them 8-0. We have gotten so much better.”
Next up is the semifinals, where Team USA faces Group B runner-up Czechia at 9:35 a.m. Friday. Canada and China meet in the other semifinal at 2 p.m., with the winners advancing to the gold-medal game at 11 a.m. Sunday.
All games are broadcast on USA Network and Peacock.
Before leaving for Milan, Farmer spoke with WUSF’s “Florida Matters Live & Local” about his beginnings in the sport, his teammates and how sled hockey compares to the traditional game played on skates.
The interview has been slightly edited for clarity.
How long have you been playing the sport?
I started playing when I was about 8 years old. The Tampa Bay Lightning were the first NHL club to start sponsoring a local sled hockey team for disabled athletes. So I got into it that way. Without their support, I never probably would have found it when I did, and they've just kind of been paving the way for NHL support of club sled hockey, which gets youth players playing.
How would you describe sled hockey? What does it look like?
It's the same rules as stand-up ice hockey. We have five players, a goalie on each team, and the biggest difference is in equipment. We're sitting down in the sled ... but we have two shorter sticks with ice picks on the bottom. We push ourselves just using our arms, and it's kind of cross-country skiing style of pushing, and then we slide our hands down the stick to use the blade to shoot and pass and everything. Because we have two sticks, we actually have a little bit more puck possession, and there's fewer turnovers, like you would see in a Lightning game.
Is it the same size rink?
Yep, same size rink, same rules and everything. It's only the equipment differences and a couple of different rules that come with those equipment differences.
You are using your arm strength. You must be absolutely knackered at the end of the game.
Yeah, definitely tougher to use your upper body for everything. That's why it makes it a little bit more technically difficult, because you're using your arms for both skating and shooting. So you have to get pretty fluid and smooth at switching between those two. There's quite a learning curve to it, which makes it interesting to play and continue to develop.
The fact that you're on a sled, does that change in how you engage with other players?
The penalty that's different from sled hockey to stand-up hockey is called T-boating. You basically can't use your sled as a weapon to hit someone. You can't hit someone with the front of your sled. It's still full-body contact, just not sled contact in that way. And then we also have, like I mentioned, ice picks on the bottom of our sticks to dig into the ice. And those are obviously pretty dangerous because if they get up on someone's body, instead of just the ice, you can get gashed a bit. I feel like every tournament, we have a couple guys that have to get stitches just from contact with another player's ice picks.
It's such a fast sport, everything happens in the blink of the eye. So how much kind of mental gymnastics are you going through to make sure that you are kind of playing in a way that isn't going to endanger your teammates or the players in the other team, and still kind of get the job done?
I think it's like any sport where at first it feels really fast and you can't think quick enough to keep up with the game. But after enough time, you kind of get used to stuff, and a lot of the movements are automatic. Just as far as avoiding contact, you kind of know where to protect yourself along the wall, because when we hit each other along the boards, we're lower to the ice, and the boards are really stiff and don't move. So it can be pretty dangerous getting hit along the wall, where, if you watch a stand-up hockey game, a Lightning game, they're getting hit into the glass, and the glass really flexes and bends. So it's not as dangerous for them to be hit along the wall. So you just have to be careful in those areas. But as you grow up and play, you kind of get used to the speed.
Do they have fights like they do in stand-up hockey? Is there an enforcer?
There's some big hitters on the team. And really, in all Olympic and Paralympic sports, you can't fight. [You] get kicked out of the game. You'll see more scrums. We're wearing full face shields because we're so close to the ice to protect ourselves from pics and pucks and everything. So we don't necessarily drop our gloves and start punching someone in a cage. It's more of a hybrid of wrestling, kind of head-locking someone.
And is there a good kind of camaraderie in general between the different international teams?
Yeah, there is. We're pretty close. Guys on the U.S. team are pretty close with some players on Team Japan and Team Czech Republic. We've done some joint training camps with the Czech Republic, and then for Team Japan, we actually have done a little bit of an exchange where a few of us went over and helped train their team. In sled hockey and para hockey, there's a pretty big gap between some of the top teams and the bottom team. So with the U.S., Canada and Russia kind of being on top, we're trying to help some of the other countries develop to bring more parity to the game.
When you think back to your first Winter Olympics, what was that competition like? Is every Olympics a little bit different in terms of how you approach it, or the sort of feeling you get sliding out onto the ice?
Yeah, that's all different. I was in high school for my first Games, the Sochi Paralympics in 2014. I was the second youngest player on the team, then being a sophomore in high school. We won gold. We actually lost for the first time ever. We lost to Russia in the preliminary round, and that set us up for a semifinal against Canada, and we beat them and we beat Russia again in the gold-medal game. And that was pretty awesome. If anyone's seen the "Icarus" documentary about the Russian doping scandal around Sochi, we were playing players that were kind of all mixed up in that. And watching that documentary, you kind of see what the buildings were in Sochi. Players on our team, myself, were drug tested in Sochi and that was just pretty cool to see that, looking back at the Sochi Games. But it was really cool to have that experience as a sophomore in high school, and then come back, get to drop the puck at the Lightning game, and all that kind of fun stuff that comes with being a Paralympian.
This article was compiled from an interview conducted by Matthew Peddie for "Florida Matters Live & Local."
