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 →

On Jan 29th, I did another TV interview on my mentoring and the security threat from the athletes perspective. Recently, I’ve been asked a lot by the media how athletes are dealing with the distraction of the current ‘security threat’. This makes me laugh – because it seems to me that it’s the media who are the most distracted by it.While a major threat from inside the host nation is different that any of the pre-Games news stories that I can recall – I do believe that the scale of the hype around security can be chalked up to the media’s own pre-Games freak out. At the Olympics, there will be over 10,000 media representatives with almost 100 nations around the world following the Games. Globally the Games promise to take up the lion’s share of February’s news chatter. 

Waiting to start is when we are our most uncomfortable; nobody trains for that. Right now – all those media people are waiting for something “Olympic” to happen so that they can have an opinion and talk about it. Continue reading →

Jim Cuddy, Simon Whitfield and Ed Robertson share a laugh with an emerging Cdn athlete at Future Olympians Fund press conference

Yesterday, with Jim Cuddy, Ed Robertson and Simon Whitfield,  I was part of an announcement that will hopefully effect the health of the Canadian high performance sport system. But I’m hoping that it will effect more than that – way more.

The Canadian Olympic Foundation, in partnership with Gold Medal Plates has announced the creation of the Future Olympians Fund. The target is to raise $4million in 4 years and for that money to help young emerging athletes bridge the gap that exists just below the financially supported National Team level. This gap has been getting bigger and bigger as municipalities and provinces give less and less funding to sport and activity programs. In the increased absence of funding at this level – there are fewer and fewer canadians being taught sport at much more than rudimentary and recreational levels without a significant investment by their families. To often that becomes exclusionary.

I’ve explained the existing problem – somewhat colloquially  – like this… If Own the Podium is able to support teams/athletes who are Top 10 (in the World) to become Top 3 and to win… How are athletes expected to get to that Top 10 Level? The flow of developing high performance athletes filling the pipeline from playground to podium is critically low, and with a weak base the likelihood of sustained success at the top becomes less and less foreseeable .  This Future Olympians Fund is intended to support the Canadian Sport Institutes and change that.

“Why Sport? Shouldn’t I be giving to healthcare, education or community programs?”

But there is a bigger picture… I often get asked -“Why sport?” as in “Why should I financially support a bunch of athletes who are traveling the world and chasing their dreams? Shouldn’t I be giving to healthcare, education or community programs?”  At first I didn’t know how to respond, those are really important and essential things. As I matured and listened to people telling me what my influence, and the influence of my peers, has had on them – I came to a response that I am proud of.