Player's Own Voice podcast: Nick Wammes and Sarah Orban are thoroughly social cyclists
Canadian track cyclists bring fans, followers deep inside the intricacies of their sport
In sports, as in high school, there's the popular crowd and there's everyone else, and crossing between those two worlds is not easy.
Nick Wammes and Sarah Orban, track cyclists on the Canadian national team, are doing their best to rig the vote in that popularity contest.
The pair — partners on and off the track — lean hard into social media to draw attention to their discipline for those 206 weeks of every four-year cycle when their sport is not enjoying Olympic audiences.
It's a blurry line, showing the world as much as they can from inside the velodrome, the gym, and their personal life, without actually giving away any tactical secrets within their daily training environment.
Talking with Anastasia Bucsis, host of Player's Own Voice podcast, Nick and Sarah unpack the gruelling ordeal that is Olympic qualifying in their sport. It's an unusually long 18-month process with seven mandatory race events —one world championship, two continental championships, and four Nations Cups.
Recent races have been strong. Wammes, along with James Hedgcock and Tyler Rorke, won gold in the men's team sprint at the recent Santiago Pan Am Games, while Orban helped her teammates Jackie Boyle and Emy Savard to bronze medals for the women's sprint team.
The multi-sport games experience in Chile was excellent prep for the Olympics, even if the Pan Ams were not qualifiers for Paris. And while it is still not a certainty that either or both of them will be representing Canada in Paris next summer, fans and followers can at least be sure of inside access to their process.
There are transcripts of our podcasts for a hard-of-hearing audience. To listen to Wammes and Orban, Luke Prokop, Laurence St-Germain, Hilary Knight or any of the guests from earlier seasons, go to CBC Listen or wherever else you get your podcasts.
