Behind the scenes at the Olympic Games

It takes all kinds of helping hands to make the Olympic Games run smoothly, including alumni from the University of Waterloo. According to Statista, the Paris 2024 Olympics have created approximately 150,000 jobs across the globe.

Recreation and Leisure Studies alum Tanya Casole-Gouveia (BA ’09), a digital producer at CBC Sports, is currently producing a daily show on CBC Gem for this summer’s Games.

In 2004 — the same year that Facebook launched — Casole-Gouveia took on a social media role through a co-op placement with BlackBerry. After graduating from Waterloo, she became a social media pioneer at CBC, starting her career at a time before it was something that could be studied at school.

With this being her sixth Olympics, and having covered many storylines throughout the years, Casole-Gouveia shares that it’s not just the sport aspect she enjoys about her career, but the culture around the Games.

“I find sport is this microcosm of society, and that everything that’s happening in the world is happening in sports too, like equity issues, economics, the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter protests moving to the court,” she says. “Sport is a unifier; it brings people together.”

Touching on the matter of gender equality in sports, one of the goals of the International Olympic Committee, Casole-Gouveia shares that even though women are excelling and breaking Olympic records in swimming, soccer and many more, there’s still a long way to go in terms of covering their stories.

“There are women's stories in the big four games — soccer, hockey, football and basketball — you just have to look a little deeper to find them,” she says. “Every athlete has a story with challenges and barriers, and just being able to tell those stories, shining a light on their failures and successes, is rewarding.”

Another Waterloo alum, Amarah Epp-Stobbe (BSc ’14), took her passion for sports down a different path, but it has ultimately led to the Olympics as well. Currently in Paris, she’s volunteering with the Canadian Olympic Committee (COC), supporting 337 Canadian athletes through performance analysis.

Epp-Stobbe is also currently pursuing her PhD at the University of Victoria, with research focused on predictive modelling of female athlete load in contact sports. She has supported countless athletes and coaches across several Olympic Games.

This year, she’s gathering key performance data to be analysed during and after the Games to improve athlete performance.

“As an undergrad at Waterloo, I remember watching the Vancouver 2010 Games and learning about the development of the Own the Podium program, which supported the growth of the Canadian Olympic and Paralympic Sport Institute Network,” she says. “I remember thinking that it sounded like such a cutting-edge environment, and I could easily make the connection about how the applied fieldwork would enhance performance.”

As one of 191 COC Mission Team members, Epp-Stobbe’s role includes identifying and analyzing critical patterns relating to the strategies athletes use in training and competition. The Team uses video and tagging software to share data with the coaches and practitioners.

“Our support could range from providing live footage for use in appeals or race protests, to tactical analysis of team formation and player positioning,” she says.

Year-round, Epp-Stobbe works at the Canadian Sport Institute Pacific, supporting sport partners to collect, store, analyze and share data across sport science disciplines, like strength, conditioning and physiology. She believes data science is crucial in all fields of sport to produce high-quality analyses and translate complex information into applicable solutions.

From the science of body movement to storytelling and news sharing, the Olympic Games bring people from all disciplines together for the love of competition, camaraderie and entertainment.

“The nature of the games changes from year to year,” Epp-Stobbe says, “but the excitement and buzz of what could happen is always there.”