Player's Own Voice

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.

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. But he reminds everyone that TFC is the only team in the history of MLS to win the triple crown: the Supporters’ Shield, the Canadian Championship and the MLS Cup. Why wouldn’t you be optimistic ?

Nick Wammes and Sarah Orban, track Cyclists on the Canadian National Team, are doing their best to win their sport more love. The pair are partners on and off the track, and they lean hard into social media, to draw attention to their discipline for those 206 weeks of every 4 year cycle when their sport is not enjoying Olympic audiences.

Luke Prokop was only 19 years old when he made pro sports history. A year after the Nashville Predators drafted him, 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. He has now 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.

Laurence St-Germain just 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 France. The great Mikaela Shiffrin was both startled and delighted to see the friendly Canadian win her first podium on an international circuit.

Anastasia’s long-running passion project returns 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 #1. Knight dekes around all the old Can-Am rivalries talk and focusses instead on the game-changing debut of the PWHL.

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 we learn about all the ingredients that need to work together to make safe sport happen- the more we understand how easily potentially great careers can fall apart. So almost ten years after retiring from competitive wheelchair basketball, Cunnington felt the need to get back into stronger shape. Trips to the gym became mastery of all three disciplines in triathlon, and even though she didn’t really love time in the pool…great coaching and her own determination eventually made her a powerhouse in Paralympic swimming. Where did Cunnington find the drive to excel again, since swimming itself wasn’t really her thing? In part, that was about being older than the average athlete. She knew that her age was working against her, so she trained with that much more intensity. And as every successful athlete knows- there’s no substitute for hard work. Looking back on the competitive years now ( Cunnington retired after the 2021 Tokyo Paralympics) she realized that part of her enduring success was based on not being relentlessly upbeat. When she hits setbacks, she gives herself permission to be bummed out for awhile, take stock, and carry on. The flipside of that pragmatism is that she has also learned to leverage the career highs. Intentionally summoning the memory of a winning race and a cheering crowd can give Cunnington that little extra squirt of confidence that can make all the difference as she rolls into a job interview, speaking gig, or yet another of her famously intense workouts . Chatting with Anastasia today- she makes a highly persuasive case for the power of not always positive thinking.

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 years as a series of chances to learn and improve and refine her technique. And so now the Coach/Teacher/74kg wrestler has definitely got her eyes trained on Paris 2024, and it’s time to say ‘en garde!’ to every opponent she’ll meet en route. Chatting on a wide range of subjects with Anastasia, Di Stasio also shares her perspective as a proud Canadian who is half Italian and half Cree. Food for thought: as a younger wrestler she sometimes felt that her Italian last name crowded her own comfort in talking about indigenous experience in this country. With the passage of time, that feeling has evolved, but throughout her career Justina Di Stasio has delightfully, authentically never swayed from representing exactly who she has been along. One of Canada’s greatest wrestlers, who just happens to also bring two sets of cultural knowledge to the International stage

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 enriched his life. Seeking out, encouraging, and drafting new players is an ongoing passion for Madell. What's interesting to hear now is how his easy leadership is also expanding into areas beyond competition. Madell did architecture technology studies and that, plus his natural tendency to creativity, plus a long interest in better accessibility for all, leads him toward helping firms improve all manner of public structures. From little coffee shops to mondo condo, there's infinite room for truly inclusive improvement. But first, Madell has a whirlwind of wheelchair rugby teams and tournaments to attend to. Anastasia is keen to hear about Team Canada's battle plans for the upcoming Para Pan Am games in Santiago, Chile. According to Madell, Canada is up against new and better competition all the time. The country that invented Wheelchair Rugby (In Winnipeg in 1977, fyi) can no longer count on international podiums in the sport. And that's not because Canada is getting soft. Many more countries are in it to win it now, and even an ultra competitor like Madell agrees, that's a good thing.

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. Friends told her that she could improve her tennis game by practising seated basketball. And so the circle closed, and Llanes, now with 30+ years of perspective on the sport she never stopped loving, brings veteran leadership to the Canadian national wheelchair basketball team. One of her most pressing challenges? Finding the balance between old school hard discipline, and newer ideas of safe sport, and making that work for a team which combines younger and older athletes, all of whom expect to win international medals at the highest level. Catching up with Anastasia, Tara also explains how uniquely inclusive wheelchair basketball can be. The rules mandate a broad mixture of ability classifications on each team. The meshing together of players with varying degrees of activity limitation brings a whole layer of strategy into play, but the real magic happens when athletes maximize one another's abilities to find that winning playmaking combo. Llanes is already rubbing her hands in anticipation of the Para Panam games this November… and Canada's national public broadcaster will be delivering comprehensive Paralympic Games coverage across television, streaming and digital platforms in English and French in 2024.

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 job too. It's impossible to separate his calls, with all their knowledge and exuberance, from memories of Toronto's early days in the NBA. Swirsky introduced countless Canadians to Vince Carter, Tracy McGrady, Damon Stoudamire, and all the brighter and lesser stars of that new team with the purple dinosaur jerseys. Swirsky became an author last year. "Always A Pleasure" details a life in love with sports and sports commentary. Commentary about commentary sounds like a meta experience, but Swirsky turns everything into a good story, and he's the first to laugh at his own inevitable missteps as a rookie reporter. Do fans need reminding that it has already been 15 years since Swirsky got the offer he couldn't refuse, and moved back to Chicago and his beloved Bulls? He is both Canadian and American, but Chicago really is home. Swirsky's strange way of celebrating a Raps win "Get out the salami and cheese!" stayed in Toronto when he moved back to the midwest. Out of respect for his fellow Canadians, as Swirsky explains to Anastasia, that peculiar custom had to remain in the place where it began.

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 pro athletes, whether the rectangles they compete in are made of grass or glass. Konrad Wasiela is uniquely suited to comment on the busy intersection of traditional and e-athletes.  Formerly a CFL cornerback, Wasiela's 'come to esports' moment was a visit to a live gaming event. He walked into a sold-out stadium, and saw 60,000 people cheering. Amazon had just paid a billion bucks for 'Twitch' the game streaming service. Wasiela added up the mega millions that Intel had poured into this tournament, and took note of Puma and Nike sponsorships in the space.   He quickly resolved to launch his own company to get in on the action. ESE Entertainment does several things in the esports space, but it's mostly about pushing new players and audiences to egames. Anastasia probes Wasiela on the many ways esports are played and promoted by real world athletes, but Wasiela flips that question: his interest lies in the ways traditional sports are starting to depend on their virtual counterparts.   Simulators from esports are already used heavily by every F1 driver and team.  As more coaches and more sports make the jump into using applications from esports in the locker room, game film might be going the way of the horse and buggy. And that's just one way esports are changing the game in real life. Esports are already spinning collossal sums of money. The consensus seems to be, they have only just begun.   

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 water polo player helped deliver the best Olympic results Canadian women have ever seen. In the years since, Horn-Miller's advocacy has effectively kept important, difficult issues on the table. Two core concerns are abuse in amateur sport, and the role of sport in truth and reconciliation. For Horn-Miller the effort begins at home, raising well-rounded and athletic daughters- and radiates out to coaching at Water Polo clubs, and further afield, to helping the Assembly of First Nations develop an Indigenous Sport, Fitness and Wellness Strategy. While those long-term causes keep Horn-Miller focussed on lasting results, she's also having a blast at this very moment, coaching contestants on Canada's Ultimate Challenge, CBC's new big ticket reality program. Horn-Miller sets the bar high for herself in this role, urging her athletes to compete according to principles that are long understood among Mohawk people- even if they may be new values for western contestants to consider. It's a challenging task, but Waneek Horn-Miller excels at it.