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 understand ...
Jul 18, 2024•39 min
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.
Feb 27, 2024•45 min•Season 7Ep. 8
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.
Feb 20, 2024•27 min•Season 7Ep. 7
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.
Jan 02, 2024•25 min•Season 7Ep. 6
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 ?
Dec 12, 2023•24 min•Season 7Ep. 5
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.
Dec 05, 2023•24 min•Season 7Ep. 4
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.
Nov 28, 2023•24 min•Season 7Ep. 3
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.
Nov 21, 2023•22 min•Season 7Ep. 2
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.
Nov 14, 2023•34 min•Season 7Ep. 1
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 l...
May 02, 2023•32 min•Season 6Ep. 21
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...
Apr 25, 2023•29 min•Season 6Ep. 20
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 enriche...
Apr 18, 2023•26 min•Season 6Ep. 19
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...
Mar 28, 2023•30 min•Season 6Ep. 18
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 to...
Mar 21, 2023•41 min•Season 6Ep. 17
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 at...
Mar 14, 2023•20 min•Season 6Ep. 16
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 pol...
Feb 28, 2023•25 min•Season 6Ep. 15
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 has ...
Feb 21, 2023•32 min•Season 6Ep. 14
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 playing a ...
Feb 07, 2023•34 min•Season 6Ep. 13
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 behaviour, a...
Jan 31, 2023•26 min•Season 6Ep. 12
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 cheat a...
Jan 24, 2023•19 min•Season 6Ep. 11
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 seems l...
Jan 17, 2023•34 min•Season 6Ep. 10
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 form...
Jan 10, 2023•25 min•Season 6Ep. 9
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 reboundi...
Dec 20, 2022•27 min•Season 6Ep. 8
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 consequent...
Dec 06, 2022•25 min•Season 6Ep. 7
Canadian Sprinter Aaron Brown is a quick thinker. Not just in the literal sense- he has perfected physical speed, as befits a World champion 4x 100 relay racer. But every track and field athlete tries to do that. What sets Brown apart is how he analyzes and dissects the entire economic model of high performance sport. For someone who is so ready to reassure that he isn't a radical- a lot of Brown's questions might rattle nerves among the money managers at the peak of the Olympic pyramid. Brown d...
Nov 22, 2022•34 min•Season 6Ep. 6
Kaylyn Kyle has parlayed years of soccer with the Canadian national team and in pro leagues, into a bustling career as a broadcast soccer analyst. What sets Kyle apart isn’t just her deep knowledge of the game and tactics, but her willingness to speak plainly about the issues and players before her. Kyle is not afraid to court controversy, nor to call out poor behaviour when she sees it. She’s brutally honest about the economics of being an NWSL player. And when she argues in favour of a Canadia...
Nov 08, 2022•43 min•Season 6Ep. 5
Here’s the thing that Patrick Chan wants to understand about his fellow figure skater, Kurt Browning… after 45 years on ice, how has Browning managed to stay in love with his sport? Not just stay active in it- because hey, a job’s a job, but stay enamoured with it all? Browning has a one-word answer to the question: Curiosity. Browning can’t help himself, he’s still curious about the next solo, the potential to make an audience feel something, the process of getting tuned up for performances…Tha...
Oct 25, 2022•29 min•Season 6Ep. 4
People always say Sport teaches valuable life lessons. If true, Rugby Sevens stalwart Bianca Farella has earned a doctorate in the last 18 months. Just before the Tokyo Olympics- something like 55% of players and alumni agreed that there were culture and coaching problems at Rugby Canada. Tackling that messy situation was necessary, and a great long-term project, but the timing was awful for the women's team as they prepared for the games. Undergoing cultural upheaval comes at the cost of short ...
Oct 18, 2022•27 min•Season 6Ep. 3
Summer and Brooke McIntosh’s parents have a good problem brewing. October 28 to 30th, Skate Canada International will likely see Brooke figure skating on one side of the Greater Toronto Area, and on the exact same days, Summer will likely be tearing up the pool in World Cup races on the opposite side of town. Scheduling headaches are part of the price to be paid when raising two high performance athletes. Luckily- as Summer makes clear, sibling rivalry will not add fuel to a fraught parental wee...
Oct 11, 2022•21 min•Season 6Ep. 2
In the ever-expanding universe of Women's Soccer- very few stars shine brighter than the Captain of USA's national team, Becky Sauerbrunn. With more than 200 caps and counting, her contributions on the pitch have filled scores of highlight reels. So it seems strange to say her biggest impact, and likely her most lasting legacy, will be Sauerbrunn's work off the field, largely behind the scenes. Sauerbrunn was one of the original five women who summoned the determination to put their livelihood o...
Oct 04, 2022•25 min•Season 6Ep. 1
