By: Lauren Pelley Staff Reporter, Published on Fri Nov 07 2014
photo : Catherine Farquharson
Marnie McBean can still vividly recount her first gold medal Olympic win.
It was 1992, at the Barcelona Olympics, and McBean had just been through seven minutes of gruelling rowing — her heart racing at 204 beats per minute, with enough lactic acid buildup to make a normal person crumple up and cry for the rest of the day. She remembers standing on the podium alongside her rowing partner Kathleen Heddle, listening to the Canadian anthem with a gold medal for the pair event around her neck.
“It was at that moment, I was like holy crap, this is the Olympics,” says McBean. “And I just won it — we just won it.”
It’s a story the Olympic champion has told countless times — and it’s a story many Canadians remember well. But at a coffee shop near her Yonge St. and Eglinton Ave. home on Thursday, McBean told a different one: the story of how, a decade after that gold medal, she realized she was gay and started a new chapter in her life.
“It wasn’t ever part of my sports story, not because I was denying it, but I never investigated it,” McBean says.
She’ll be sharing her story in a keynote talk on Saturday at Game Changers, a one-day symposium co-hosted by the Toronto 2015 Pan Am and Parapan Am Games Organizing Committee, CIBC and the City of Toronto. Continue reading
Recently, I found myself recalling one particular evening a few years ago. I can’t remember if my friends and I were celebrating something or if it was just another night out, but we had gone downtown for a fun evening. We probably went for dinner between 8 and 10:30 and then went out for drinks and dancing. At about 3:30am we found ourselves at Fran’s Diner having – oh I don’t know – probably something like gravy laden open-faced turkey sandwiches or grilled cheese sandwiches. (That sounds about right for 3:30 in the morning!).