Tested is a new podcast series from CBC and NPR that asks the question, who gets to compete?  Since the beginning of women’s sports, there has been a struggle over who qualifies for the women’s category. Tested follows the unfolding story of elite female runners who have been told they can no longer race as women, because of their biology. As the Olympics approach, they face hard choices: take drugs to lower their natural testosterone levels, give up their sport entirely, or fight. To...

A funny thing about great athletes. They tend to keep on surprising us, even after their competitive careers wind down. And so, catching up with Tessa Virtue again, five years after she unlaced the skates and five years after she last came on the podcast, we learn that she has combined her high performance sport experience, a masters in applied psychology, and an MBA to build a unique business advisory role for herself at Deloitte.

At just 25, Jessie Fleming has already enjoyed a full decade of being named player of the year, top college player, Top Canadian, CONCACAF All Star, and enough adulation to convince a less modest midfielder of her own greatness. But Fleming has a ‘do the work, and do it well’ attitude that has carried her to the apex of soccer, and helped her become a well-rounded, highly-educated, self-aware young leader.

Swimming is notoriously practise-heavy. The daily accumulation of laps and dryland workouts can nudge elite swimmers toward becoming mono-focus athletes. So it’s delightful to meet Canada’s male swimmer of the year, Josh Liendo, and find a well-rounded young man tearing up the record books. He is now a world champion and an NCAA champion, but the move from meters and long courses to yards and shorter laps can throw young swimmers off. Anastasia wants to know, how does Liendo account for his...

John Herdman, the most successful head coach in the history of Canada soccer, came to Toronto FC at the tail end of a miserable season for the club. When great athletes rack up terrible results, he diagnoses Sports trauma. Herdman has been there before. He works with a team of people and trusted methods to break that bad spiral. The worst thing about trauma for Herdman, is that it brings laxity, teammates giving each other permission to deliver less-than-best efforts. There are many ways to...

In sports, as in High School, there’s the popular crowd and there’s everyone else, and crossing between those two worlds is not easy. Nick Wammes and Sarah Orban, track Cyclists on the Canadian National Team, are doing their best to rig the vote in that popularity contest. The pair of them, partners on and off the track, lean hard into social media, to draw attention to their discipline for those 206 weeks of every four year cycle when their sport is not enjoying Olympic audiences. It’s a...

Luke Prokop was only 19 years old when he made pro sports history. A year after the Nashville Predators picked him in the 2020 NHL Draft, Prokop told his team, his sport, and the wider world that he was gay. He is the first player under NHL contract to do so. This season, he has also bumped up to playing plenty of AHL games, making him the first out gay player at that level, one step away from the top team. So- how’s it going, in a sport that has never been at the forefront of inclusion? So...

In February of this year, Laurence St-Germain delivered a fantastic wake up call to the world’s best skiers. She won the slalom gold medal at the 2023 FIS Alpine World Ski Championships in Courchevel and Méribel, France. Established greats like Mikaela Shiffrin were both startled and delighted to see the friendly Canadian win her first podium on an international circuit. Other nations can be forgiven for not seeing this one coming: it has been 63 years since the last Canadian woman won...

Season seven of Anastasia’s long-running passion project kicks off with Hilary Knight, captain of the US national hockey team, world and olympic champion, the face of the American women’s game, and from a Canadian perspective, public frenemy number one. Knight dekes around all the old Can-Am rivalries talk and focusses instead on the game-changing debut of the Professional Women’s Hockey League. She was instrumental in the process that finally landed a truly professional environment for the...

Tammy Cunnington has made the most of a roller coaster experience in para sport. As the child of a very active Red Deer AB family, she just barely survived a freak accident at an airshow in 1982. By the time she rehabbed sufficiently to get back into sport, at 8 or 9 years of age, wheelchair basketball became her passion. She was a big part of successful national teams, but by the time she was 19- the team culture drove her away. Bullying, being othered, it just added up to no fun. The more...

Justina Di Stasio has to be one of the greatest wrestlers that Canada has not yet seen at an Olympic Games. She’s excelled at major international tournaments, time and time again, but when it comes to getting on the Canadian Olympic team, the BC veteran has hit a roadblock in the form of her Gold medallist teammate Erica Wiebe. Canada can only send one wrestler in their weight class…so that explains the history. But Di Stasio is not one to brood on the past. She’s taken the last eight...

When a team athlete is named MVP over and over again, that's saying something about their ability to lift everyone's game around them. Zak Madell, one of the world's best wheelchair rugby players, has owned that MVP distinction almost since the day -a dozen years ago- he first got into his notoriously rock 'em sock 'em sport. Madell is as effective an advocate for the power of sport as you'll ever meet, loud and clear and persuasive on the many ways that sport, adaptive or otherwise, has...

If Tara Llanes was in the branding business, her personal motto might be "Once a baller, always a baller". As a kid in California she loved basketball, and she played a high level game until BMX caught her attention. And then a professional Mountain Biking career took hold. But just when Llanes began to feel like she had done all she could in cycling sport, a crash left her paralyzed from the waist down. As her rehabilitation work continued, she developed a passion for wheelchair tennis....

Here's an odd factoid about one of the best voices in basketball. Chuck Swirsky does not care for his own name. He was 'Charlie' til his very first day in college radio, when the anchor struck him temporarily speechless with the intro 'Sports, with Chuck Swirsky'. To his enduring regret, 'Chuck' stuck. Forty years later, Mr. Swirsky is still setting the record straight, and still delighting basketball fans. 'The Swirsk' was the Raptors' first radio play by play guy. By 2001, he had the TV...

Like the game titles themselves, esports athletes can generate shocking income and audiences. At the highest level, it's gaming in name only. Everything else about the pursuit of esports mastery is hard-nosed, serious business. Elite esports players' training regimens certainly rival those of "real world" athletes. Strength and balance work, hand-eye conditioning,  nutritionists,  psych coaches,  esports stars make use of all the above. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that pro athletes are...

Excellence was always expected of Waneek Horn-Miller, and her three sisters. Their single mom led by example in committing to activism, feminism, and indigenous rights. From childhood, the message was: whatever you do in life, be great at it, and don't just do it for yourself, do it for the next generation. More than thirty years after she first came to international attention on the front lines of the 1990 Oka Crisis, Horn-Miller continues to honour her mother's teaching. In 2000, the...

From day one of her athletic career, Camryn Rogers has bucked expectations. As a pre-teen, the first event she tried was Hammer throwing, and it was love at first hurl. Adolescence is when many girls leave sport, sadly, but a 12-year-old Rogers became enthralled with throwing "this thing that looked like a murder weapon," and she committed there and then to becoming as skilled and powerful as possible at the discipline. Eleven years later, it is hard to keep track of how many records Rogers...

The Coach of the Canadian National Women’s Soccer Team is not one to rest on her laurels. While the rest of the country was still celebrating the team’s historic Gold Medal at the Tokyo Olympics, Bev Priestman was looking ahead to a couple of hard years of coaching work. In her mind- a huge win doesn’t teach players very much… but a single loss in a hard-fought series of games, like the CONCACAF World Cup qualifying tournament, that’s where the improvements happen. Priestman says that...

These are trying times for athletes, coaches and national sporting organizations in Canada. The incidents of abuse and maltreatment in amateur sport seem to be neverending.  Hockey dominates the horrible headlines, but very few sports can claim a problem-free record. Olympian Alpine Skier Allison Forsyth has turned her own experience of sexual abuse at the hands of a coach into a positive movement for change. Her career is dedicated to educating all involved, correcting transgressive...

He has been a well-respected, hard working film and television director for thirty years now, so it’s probably time to stop asking ‘Beverley Hills 90210’ questions in conversation with Jason Priestley. Luckily, the lifelong hockey buff is more than happy to chat about another 30 year old bit of business, everyone’s favourite Toronto Hockey gargoyle- Harold Ballard. Priestley has just released ‘Offside’ his documentary about the man who literally lived in Maple Leaf Gardens...and tried to...

Mimi Rahneva is having a wild ride this world cup season. The Canadian Skeleton racer has won, been on the podium, or just barely missed a top three in almost every race so far. What makes that truly special is that this is the Bulgarian-born Canadian athlete's ninth year on the circuit. Gone are the days of blowing away the competition with explosive starting power. So why are career-best results, coming to an absolutely slower athlete? Chalk one up to experience. It turns out that what...

It pays to keep your wits about you in conversation with Cito Gaston. The two time Blue Jays world series winning manager is a relaxing presence, even- tempered and genial. But that soothing voice belies sharply independent opinions, formed over a long career of hard-won experience. He will ease you along, sharing memories of his years as Hank Aaron’s roommate and friend, and that will slide into talk about Hank’s record, and then to Aaron Judge, and then Barry Bonds, and then suddenly, the...

Robert Parish is a big man like no other in the history of the NBA. And not just because the hall of famer has four championship rings, and an incredibly long career. Parish retired in 2003 with 1611 games played. That total game record might NEVER be broken. But no big centre has ever covered the court the way Parish did. He finished fast breaks, and showed speed and shooting accuracy that is beyond rare for the tallest players. His fellow Hall of Famer, Bill Walton says "There was the...

There’s a lot of talk about ‘Quiet Quitting’ these days… which is one luxury that athletes can seldom enjoy. For moguls skier Chloé Dufour-Lapointe, luckily, there was never any plan or desire to simply run down the clock. Like her equally famous sisters, Chloé was determined to make every competition count. Easier said than done, when the pandemic years threw a clunky wrench in her plans. Her training was curtailed by covid restrictions, which led to a loss of competition points, and...