Health committee  Hello, Mr. Chair and honourable committee members. I'm here to share the athlete's voice, and specifically the realities of Canadian athletes today. I grew up in Stittsville, Ontario, just down Highway 417 from here, and I relocated to Calgary, Alberta, to train with the Canadia

Health committee  To clarify, I had finished my first degree from the University of Calgary, and I was proceeding part time with a second degree as well as pursuing qualifying for the Rio 2016 Olympic Games. I was pulling back a little from my studies in pursuing a second degree and focusing my ti

Health committee  Yes. It was two years out from our Olympic qualifier which was in December 2015. A private sponsor—their son was a varsity team member of mine—reached out and offered to support me as I pursued the Olympic dream. I have told this individual, and I'll tell you today, that without

Health committee  Teammates is a loose term. It's more like other athletes across other sport domains. I'm in the sport of wrestling in Canada, so there's not a lot of marketability, I guess, on my sport in particular. I guess that would be the issue there.

Health committee  I think it's interesting to be an amateur athlete in Canada today. I think the landscape is changing in terms of the quadrennials. We just finished the Pyeongchang games, so a lot of the sponsorship dollars and advertisements were focused on winter athletes. It will be interestin

Health committee  I think everyone wants to be on a Cheerios box. What I try to do in terms of my athlete brand and what I support is to look for authentic partnerships in what I believe in. I believe in healthy living, and I believe in a balanced lifestyle. In the future, if I'm involved in sup

Health committee  That's correct. Hockey Canada is definitely a different beast from Wrestling Canada. Currently, Wrestling Canada is the most successful Olympic summer sport program in Canada. We've won Olympic medals at every games since 1988, I believe, but we currently don't have a single priv