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Progress in sport is often measured in moments: a breakthrough season, a new league, a headline that signals change. What’s harder to measure is what happens after the headlines — how perspective settles once the noise fades, and whether progress feels lived-in, rather than declared.

The first thing that stands out about Anastasia Bucsis, BA’17, these days isn’t urgency. It’s composure.

More than a decade removed from the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympic Games where she publicly came out as gay amid a climate shaped by Russia’s so-called “gay propaganda” laws, Bucsis is now participating in the 2026 Milano Cortina Olympic Games with a very different kind of visibility. This time, she performs not as an athlete under pressure, but as a broadcaster, a storyteller and a voice that understands how moments become memory.

Now when she meets someone new, she doesn’t lead with a biography.

“Hey, my name’s Anastasia. I used to speed skate,” she says, matter-of-factly. Friends sometimes urge her to elaborate, but she rarely does. The restraint feels intentional; not dismissive, but complete.

Speedskating, Bucsis says, has been “the gift that’s kept on giving,” shaping her values, her resilience and her sense of belonging. “I’m a lucky human being that I got to live 24 years of my life skating around in a circle,” she reflects, crediting the sport and the community around the for much of what followed.

Before and After Sochi

“There was a part of me in my early 20s that didn’t think I’d even make it to 30,” Bucsis says, speaking candidly about years shaped by anxiety and depression, along with the slow, internal work of accepting herself. “I remember being about 20 years old, standing on the line in Vancouver (at the 2010 Games), knowing I was gay, not out, and feeling dishonest because I wasn’t telling people.”

She recalls the years when hiding part of herself felt permanent. “I never thought I’d get over that heaviness. I’m proud of that kid. But I also wish I could give her a big hug and tell her it’s all going to be okay. It does get better.” 

Those words carry particular weight coming from someone whose visibility once came at a real cost. The Sochi chapter of Bucsis’s story has been well documented. What’s less often explored is how time reshapes meaning. For her, distance has transformed survival into stewardship, an impulse to give back to a sport that, in her words, “taught her how to love herself.”

That impulse now finds expression through broadcasting.

“To still be part of the sport community now, and to feel that love from so many, it’s a real gift,” says Bucsis.

Bucsis retired from competitive speedskating in 2017, when chronic knee pain stripped the joy from the sport she had devoted her life to. The plan had been to keep going; her body decided otherwise. What followed wasn’t a dramatic pivot so much as an opportunity. The CBC took a chance on her with no guarantees and little glamour, just an invitation to work hard and learn. 

She did. 

Bucsis’s 2018 CBC podcast, Players Own Voice, explored all the taboos: fear, failure and acceptance from an athlete’s point of view, a theme that has continued to shape how she talks about sport, identity and belonging today.

Her first Olympic Games in a hosting role came during the 2024 summer games in Paris. Now, for Milano Cortina she occupies a rare space: a former athlete tasked with translating the games for millions as the Host of RBC Olympic Winter Games Primetime and the voice for her sport in Canada. Having grown up listening to Olympic veterans like Steve Armitage, Bucsis is acutely aware of both the magic and the responsibility that comes with the microphone.

“I try not to think about how many people are watching,” she admits. “If you do, it gets scary. But it’s the highest honour, and it’s a huge responsibility.”

Why Calgary?

Born in Calgary in 1989, Bucsis considers herself a product of the city’s Olympic legacy, shaped by the Oval, inspired by storytellers like Armitage who made the sport feel monumental and an environment that didn’t ask young athletes to shrink their ambitions.

“Calgary never tells you your dreams are too big,” she says of the city which saw her grow as both an athlete and a person.

It’s also why Bucsis approaches conversations about progress in sport with both optimism and caution.

By most public tallies, fewer than 10 athletes were publicly out at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, all of them women, competing under conditions that made visibility risky. A decade later, nearly 200 openly LGBTQ2S+ athletes competed at the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics, the highest number in Olympic history, including a record number of out men and non-binary athletes.

“There has absolutely been progress, especially in mental health conversations and how we define success and inclusion” she says. “But it still hurts my heart how much anger there is, especially toward trans people. I don’t know what that serves.”

The contrast is stark. But, for Bucsis, numbers alone don’t tell the whole story.

“There has absolutely been progress, especially in mental health conversations and how we define success and inclusion” she says. “But it still hurts my heart how much anger there is, especially toward trans people. I don’t know what that serves.”

That tension between visibility and backlash, between momentum and resistance feels familiar. It also helps explain why she sees a clear throughline between LGBTQ2S+ inclusion and the current uptick in women’s professional sport leagues like the and the , Canada’s new professional women’s soccer league.

The momentum around women’s leagues, Bucsis suggests, isn’t happening in isolation. It’s unfolding alongside a broader reckoning about who sport has historically been built for – and who it is finally beginning to make room for. She points to the atmosphere around women’s hockey as an example. 

“It feels like you’re going to a party, and a hockey game breaks out,”

Attending a PWHL game, she says, feels fundamentally different. “It feels like you’re going to a party, and a hockey game breaks out,” she laughs. 

The joy, inclusivity and atmosphere, Bucsis suggests, reflects audiences who may not have previously felt invited into traditional sports spaces. It serves as a reminder that progress isn’t just structural, but cultural. 

That difference between the leagues, in her view, isn’t a weakness. It’s a strength.

No Longer Asking for Permission

“I can’t wait for the day when we don’t need qualifiers and it’s just ‘sport,’” Bucsis says. “But I’m also proud of what women’s sport is building right now. It doesn’t need to mirror men’s sport to be legitimate.”

That belief in culture is personal, as well as professional.

Bucsis’s life is now shared with someone who understands elite sport from the inside, albeit through a different discipline, so their paths weren’t identical. “She was a much better athlete than I ever was,” Bucsis says with disarming honesty and a smile.

Her wife, Diana Matheson, represented Canada with the senior women’s national soccer team and is best known for her late-game heroics at the 2012 London Summer Olympics, scoring the decisive goal against France in the 92nd minute. A two-time Olympic medallist, she was inducted into the Canadian Soccer Hall of Fame in 2025 and is one of the founders of the NSL.

Watching that work unfold up close has only deepened Bucsis’s appreciation for what it takes to build something lasting.

“(Diana) does the hard work when people aren’t watching,” Bucsis says. “There’s a lot of love now, which is amazing. But there have also been a lot of tough moments behind the scenes.”

That shared language of sacrifice, identity and transition has been grounding. It has also sharpened how Bucsis understands the current moment in women’s sport.

For Bucsis, leagues like the PWHL and the NSL signal something deeper than popularity. Women’s sport, she believes, is no longer asking for permission. It’s building permanence. And, in doing so, it’s attracting audiences who didn’t always feel welcome in those spaces, including many LGBTQ2S+ fans.

The parallel isn’t about identity alone. It’s about access. In both cases, visibility came before normalization and backlash followed both. Calls to “just let it be sport” echo across conversations about women’s leagues and LGBTQ2S+ inclusion, alike. But Bucsis knows sport doesn’t become neutral by pretending difference doesn’t exist. It becomes neutral only after difference has been seen, absorbed and no longer treated as a disruption. Her own life reflects that evolution.

She speaks candidly about not reaching her full potential as an athlete. “That’s a bit haunting,” Bucsis admits. But she finds meaning in what followed. Broadcasting, for her, is a way to give back to the sport that shaped her. As she says it is a “love letter” written in real time, shaped by empathy, memory and perspective.

“To any little queer kid that may think they don’t belong in sport or that it won’t get better — I promise that you do and it does.”

Finding a Voice Through UCalgary 

Her gratitude extends to her time at UCalgary, where she balanced high-performance sport with a communications degree that took nine years and three Olympic cycles (2010, 2014, 2018) to complete. “I was a hanger-on,” Bucsis jokes. But the support she received from professors, and the foundation her degree provided, continue to serve her.

“I wouldn’t be here without it,” Bucsis says. 

When asked what comes next, Bucsis resists grand declarations. The future, for her, is less about milestones than alignment: being present for her partner, having a family, continuing to tell meaningful stories, and staying curious about how sport reflects the world around it.

“I’m interested in people,” she says. “Sport culture, fans, how sport shows up differently around the world.”

But perhaps the clearest articulation of where Bucsis stands did not come in a broadcast booth, but on a stage last year, when she was awarded the prestigious Bruce Kidd Leadership Award at the 48th Canadian Sport Awards, recognizing her contributions to sport.

Her message was simple, and forward-looking.

“To any little queer kid that may think they don’t belong in sport or that it won’t get better,” Bucsis said at the ceremony. “I promise that you do and it does.”

It wasn’t defiance. It wasn’t a rallying cry. It was reassurance, offered by someone who has lived long enough on both sides of uncertainty to mean it. 

And maybe that’s the quiet measure of progress: when sport stops needing qualifiers and starts sounding like belonging.