UBC and the Winter Olympic Games: On and beyond the podium
From medal wins and Paralympic equity to elite training, UBC athletes and scholars are shaping the future of winter sport on the world stage.
UBC’s Winter Olympics story hit the ice with Canada’s first permanent national hockey team.
Led by UBC coach Father David Bauer and composed primarily of UBC students, this pioneering squad competed at the 1964 Winter Games in Innsbruck, Austria, finishing fourth. During the same decade, former UBC ski coach Al Fisher developed the fitness program that supported 1968 Olympic alpine champion Nancy Greene Raine.
Since then, UBC Thunderbirds have collected seven Winter Olympic medals and 68 Olympic medals overall. Reflecting the university’s global reach, UBC athletes and alumni have represented Canada, China, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, and Switzerland at the Winter Games.
As the spotlight turns from Milano Cortina 2026 to the Winter Paralympics, here’s a look at UBC’s past, present, and potential future involvement in the Games—including taking the podium, advancing gender equity, and supporting future contenders.
From campus to Olympic stage—and back
Second-year Arts student Vanessa Schaefer helped Team Switzerland secure a 2–1 victory over Sweden on February 19, capturing a Winter Olympic bronze. The podium finish marked Switzerland’s first Olympic medal in women’s hockey since Sochi 2014.
In doing so, Schaefer became the first active UBC Thunderbirds women’s hockey player to compete in the Olympic Games. She is now the second Thunderbird woman—and seventh Thunderbird overall—to earn a Winter Olympic medal. The dual Canadian-Swiss citizen from Langley, BC, previously represented Switzerland twice at the IIHF Women’s World Hockey Championship and also competed with the ZSC Lions in Zürich. Bronze in hand, she has since returned to Vancouver and rejoined the Thunderbirds for their Canada West semifinal series.
Her achievement builds upon growing success for UBC women’s hockey. In June 2025, Chanreet Bassi (BA’25) became the first T-bird—and the first South Asian player—to be drafted into the Professional Women’s Hockey League. In December, she signed with Linköping HC in the Swedish Women’s Hockey League.
Levelling the Paralympic field
The 2026 Winter Paralympic Games—running from March 6 to 15 in Italy—mark the 50th anniversary of the event. While women’s participation numbers are rising, gender equity in the Paralympic movement remains a work in progress.
At Beijing 2022, women accounted for 24.5 per cent (136 athletes) of all Paralympic competitors—only a marginal change from the 23.6 per cent (133 athletes) at PyeongChang 2018.
For Milano Cortina 2026, women are projected to comprise about 26 per cent (160 athletes) of all Paralympic athletes, with 35 women’s medal events on the program.
A UBC research team led by Kinesiology Associate Professor Andrea Bundon (MA’08, PhD’14)—who previously guided visually impaired Canadian Paralympic skiers at the 2010 and 2014 Games—has examined how women’s participation in the Paralympics is shaped by policy decisions. In a 2021 study published in Sociology of Sport Journal, Bundon and her colleagues found that growth in women’s participation has often stemmed from program changes—such as expanded quotas, gender-free classifications, and additional medal events—rather than deeper structural reform.
She notes that efforts to increase women’s representation have frequently focused on leadership roles, whether on boards, committees, or coaching rosters. These positions, however, have often been filled by able-bodied women. In mixed sports such as para ice hockey (formerly known as sledge hockey), women compete against men for roster spots, even as funding and development remain disproportionately concentrated on the men’s side.
Bundon calls for greater recognition of how gender and disability intersect, improved broadcast coverage of the Paralympics, and stronger Canadian funding and development support for women’s para sport. Canada’s team for Milano Cortina includes 46 athletes and four guides, with 12 women among them. In addition, the women’s national para hockey team is advocating for separate women’s and men’s tournaments at the 2030 Games.
UBC athletes are also contributing to the overall momentum of women in the Paralympics. At the 2024 Summer Paralympic Games, Heat women’s volleyball alum Jenn Oakes made history—her bronze with Team Canada in women’s sitting volleyball marked UBC Okanagan’s first-ever Olympic or Paralympic medal.
Where biathlon ambitions begin
In January 2025, UBC Okanagan students Ella Niedre and Liam Simons represented Canada at the FISU Winter World University Games in Turin, Italy—an international competition they described as a personal “test event” on the road to the Olympics.
Rooted in Scandinavian traditions, biathlon combines cross-country skiing with precision rifle shooting, demanding both physical endurance and focus.
“Mental resilience is everything in biathlon,” says Niedre, a health and exercise sciences undergraduate student from the Ottawa Valley. “You can’t change what happened on the range, but you can control what you do next.”
Neidre and Simons train at Vernon’s Sovereign Lake Nordic Development Centre, located approximately 40 minutes from the UBCO campus in Kelowna. Underscoring the region’s growing role in high-performance winter sport, the venue hosted the Nordiq Canada cross-country ski trials for the 2026 Olympic Winter Games in December, and Biathlon Canada designated the facilities as a national training centre in January.
For student-athletes balancing elite training with demanding academic programs, Simons, an engineering undergraduate from Prince George, BC, points out that the Okanagan offers “a unique spot” where Olympic dreams and academic ambitions can converge.
That balance has helped produce some of UBCO’s most accomplished winter sport alumni, including international ski cross racers Ian Deans (BHK’14) and Ned Ireland (BHK’22). When ski cross made its Olympic debut at Vancouver 2010, former UBC alpine ski team member Ashleigh McIvor captured gold for Canada. UBCO’s Kelsey Serwa (BHK’21, MPT’23) also competed and later won silver at Sochi 2014 and gold at PyeongChang 2018.
For the next generation of student-athletes, the road to future Winter Olympic and Paralympic podiums may begin closer to campus than many realize.
