Evan Dunfee Interview

In this special episode of Off The Podium we talk to Evan Dunfee, the Canadian Olympian whose record breaking 50k Racewalking performance in Rio made him one of the most talked about athletes of the Summer Games. In this interview Evan goes behind the scenes to tell us about how a dramatic "bump" resulted in a flip flopping of appeals over there Bronze medal. We also find out how Evan entered the sport, his memories of Rio, and just what he is doing in Australia for the second winter in a row.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Please note this is an automated transcript that may contain errors.

COLIN HILDING: Welcome back to Off The Podium. I am Colin Hilding, coming to you all the way live from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, the home country of a very special guest we're going to have on today. And in case people haven't tuned in before now, we had a great time covering the Olympics during Rio, and we're in the process right now of getting a bunch of interviews out there for you with some of these athletes from Rio. Some athletes weren't in Rio, but other Olympians, and just getting an opportunity to talk about people, about these sports. And for anybody who isn't familiar with Evan Dunfee, who's our guest today, he has one of the most interesting stories of anybody who is in Rio, at least from the Canadian athletes. And even if you're not Canadian, I mean, you can't help but deny it's such a great story. He was in the racewalking event, in the 50k racewalk, which was held on one of the last days of competition. And I just remember waking up in the morning and seeing the highlights of this, and it had already made the news. And for racewalking to make the news, I knew something was up. I'm trying to watch this and find out. And you see, there's one moment during the race where Evan gets bumped by one of the other competitors. And anybody who knows in the track and field events, like the slightest bit of touch sometimes, you know, that means you're disqualified. And basically what happens for people, before we go into the interview, we will talk about it a bit, but just to give a bit of context, basically what happens is there's this back and forth between him being awarded the bronze, being taken away, and he goes into detail on that. It really is a very interesting interview that we're about to give you here. Evan's talking to us about a lot of things, including what he's doing in Australia, which means guaranteed Ben and Jared are going to listen to this interview of nobody else. And we talked to him about the study that he's part of, some really interesting stuff there, a lot of questions that I always had about Olympic athletes and how they get into the sport and how their training is funded. I mean, we have a great conversation here, and we're happy to bring it to you. So without further ado, here's our interview with Canadian Olympian from Rio, Evan Dunfee. And welcome back to Off The Podium for another one of our interviews with Rio athletes, all these athletes that we're watching throughout the summer, and now we're bringing you all these interviews where you get to hear from them in person. And I'm very pleased to be bringing the first Canadian interview that we have here. Unusually enough, it's a Canadian who's not coming to us from Canada today, but still coming from Australia, like most of our guests and our other two co-hosts. Today we're joined by Evan Dunfee, who came in fourth place in the 50k race walk in Rio. So thanks for joining us today, Evan.

EVAN DUNFEE: Yeah, my pleasure. Happy to be on.

COLIN HILDING: So first, before we even get into, you know, what everything happened in Rio and what you're up to now, you have to tell us what you're actually doing in Australia right now. I know our co-hosts Jared and Ben, they're going to love to hear just what you're doing down there.

EVAN DUNFEE: Yeah, absolutely. So we're, I mean, I'm based in Canberra right now, so, you know, not the most exciting of places to be in Australia, but we've been training here at the AIS for the last about five weeks now, and we're part of a big breakthrough diet study. So we're looking at the effects of high-fat diets on elite endurance athletes. And so we got, there's about 28, 29 athletes from all over the globe. We got guys from the US, Canada, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Japan, South Africa, Chile. We got half a, we got a dozen countries represented here on this study of guys and girls that were, a lot of them were in Rio competing and have come together for this training camp and to do this research. So it's pretty cool. We're just wrapping up now, so we're starting, we're opening up our season in Adelaide next week, and we've had a solid four weeks of all training together and excited to see what we can do in the first race of the year.

COLIN HILDING: Is this your first time where you've been training in Australia?

EVAN DUNFEE: So this is actually, so the study we're a part of is, it's a follow up study from last year. So I was here last year for four months leading into Rio. In November, I tried out the high fat diet for the first time. For three weeks, every ounce of food you eat is weighed and accounted for and monitored by an army of nutritionists and staff that help out with this sort of study. And we had some great success last year coming off the diet and going back on the carbohydrates and racing there. And so, yeah, after the four months, this got really fit and was more than happy to come back again this year to take part again. It's actually the fourth time in the last five years I've been down to Canberra to train. I keep coming back here to avoid the Canadian winter.

COLIN HILDING: Well, especially, I mean, I'm sure you're from BC, so I'm sure you're keeping up with what's going on in BC right now. I mean, I'm in Winnipeg, and right now the BC winter is blowing us away. Like, we're looking really mild compared to them right now.

EVAN DUNFEE: Yeah, I think we're finally starting to gain some reasonable expectation of being allowed to complain with the rest of Canada.

COLIN HILDING: My aunt is actually, well, she's originally from Winnipeg, but she moved to Abbotsford. And I remember my mum used to always laugh when she moved to Abbotsford because she'd say, yeah, I had to shovel my driveway today, or I was wearing gloves today. And coming from Winnipeg, I mean, that's basically shorts weather for us. But you said you've been down there for five weeks now. So once this happens and the season's over, do you still go back to BC? Is that where you live most of the time?

EVAN DUNFEE: So still based in Richmond there, just south of Vancouver. And we'll go home and set up shop there for most of the year. Last year was being an Olympic year, we were all over the place. We did camps, you know, apart from the four months I did in Australia. I was only home from November till Rio last year. I was only home for 10 weeks total. We were just sort of travelling around doing different training camps with different groups of guys and different altitude camps and stuff like that. So we were in Flagstaff, Arizona, for a month and St. Marys in Switzerland for a month before the game. So this year is a little bit more tame when I come home. I'll be based back in Vancouver a little bit more this year, which will be nice to have a glimmer of a life, of a home life as well.

COLIN HILDING: I know with this diet thing, I wanted to ask you a little bit more about that because that's one of the first things that came to my attention. I think it was probably about a month or so ago, read an article on YouOnline where it was talking about this. And it's very similar to something that my wife, I don't know if it is the same thing, correct me if I'm wrong, but she calls it keto. Is that the same thing?

EVAN DUNFEE: It is. Yeah, precisely.

COLIN HILDING: Okay. Yeah, because as I kept telling her what my plans were for the weekend, I'm like, oh, I got a couple of interviews. And she's like, when are you doing the one with the keto guy? Like, she was all excited about to hear about this. She's been telling me this for the longest time because I got into running, not nearly at like the 50k level where you're, you're walking more than I could walk, you know, even at a slow pace. But I got into running just like 10k and half marathons, maybe about a year and a half ago. And I found it for the longest time so hard to do without carbs. And here you are, and you're doing it with, you know, just all fat for the most part, high fat. And she's been trying to sell me this thing, you know, a lot of athletes do it. And I'm like, I haven't heard of one. Is it a huge transition to make? It is.

EVAN DUNFEE: And it's funny. So there's basically been the idea of high fat diets been around for a long time. And there was a study in 1983 by a guy, Finney, and he had five subjects. And he basically, the results of that study basically said that going on a high fat diet is no worse than being on carb. And that was kind of the end of the story for a number of years. And then the last couple of years, we've seen this proliferation of anecdotal evidence of athletes going on to the high fat diet and having quite some success. Unfortunately, there's not been much done with elite athletes. And so last year, Louise Burke, who's the head researcher here, heading up our study, she's one of the top sports nutritionists in the world, and she just thought, you know what, let's get a group together of actual elite athletes. Let's see what we can actually do and put them together. So last year, the study we did was the first of its kind, and it was absolutely groundbreaking in terms of what we were able to accomplish. Having 20-something athletes where literally every single gram of food for three weeks is weighed out, it's fascinating what they've been able to accomplish. And the results we got from that study last year were pretty groundbreaking. It basically showed that the high-fat diet for athletes of our level did not provide an advantage. The idea around the high-fat diet is that you have so many more calories worth of fat in your body. Even someone like me who's quite lean still has thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of calories worth of fat that could potentially access to use his energy, whereas with carbs, you have a very limited store, which is why you get that in the marathon, people hitting the wall because they just run out of fuel. So the idea of going on the high-fat diet is to force your body to adapt and become better at or quicker at utilising that fat as a fuel because it takes a little bit slower of a process. And the idea being, if you can adapt enough that you can then get the energy from fat just as quickly as you do from carbs. And we saw that it just simply wasn't the case last year. We just had the intensity with which we raced, how quickly we need the energy, even though we were adapted to utilising fat as a fuel, we couldn't still get that energy fast enough. But what was really interesting was about 10 days after coming back onto a high carb diet, we raced. It was either the 50K Australian National Championship or the 20K National Championship. And a lot of the guys that were on the high fat diet 10 days later raced astonishingly well. I broke the national record at the time last year by over four minutes in this race, in the 50K. And so it gave us this idea of, okay, well, what about using the high fat diet, a high fat diet, in terms of similar to altitude training, where you have a baseline, you go up to altitude, you're slower because the conditions are harder. But when you come back down to sea level, you now have these adaptations that make you better at sea level. And so the study that we're a part of this year has been looking at that. So once we come back onto a high carb diet, we're still being monitored, they're still tracking some of our blood values and doing different testing sessions to look and see if those adaptations that we gain while on fat, then can be utilised once we're back on carbs and sort of get the best of both worlds. So it's really fascinating research and it could really change the game in sports nutrition for how we prescribe different diets and the idea of periodizing different diets over a training block would be quite groundbreaking.

COLIN HILDING: And I know my wife got into it. It was more for a weight loss thing and she's at the point now where she had a baby nine months ago and she's getting back to the gym now. She was on this for the last couple of months. People used to always make fun of her calling it the I can't believe it's not butter diet because sometimes it would be like a scoop of butter or whipped cream or a lot of bacon and stuff like that. I mean, what's the typical meal plan that you have during a study like this that you go through for breakfast or dinner?

EVAN DUNFEE: It's astonishing. So the diet, the makeup of the diet is about 80% fat, 15% protein and then under 5% of your calories coming through carbs. So it's about, we were getting less than 40 grams a day of carbs, which is the equivalent of about a piece of white bread with honey on it. But of course, that's spread out over, everything has one or two grams of carbs in it. So you just sort of accumulate over the day. But that's the problem, I think, with, I could never do something like this on my own. Just how technical it is and how hard it is to keep your carbohydrates that low. And it's pretty low in protein as well. People sort of think, oh, well, you're just eating bacon all the time, but the problem with protein is that the amino acids can get then converted into glucose and then used as carbohydrates would be used. So you have to really keep the protein down as well. So it becomes really tricky. And there were days where you're just literally after a meal, just go, okay, well, your fat has been a bit lower today. Here's two little sachets of butter. And you just go put them in the microwave, heat them up, and then take a shot of butter. It was quite ridiculous, but little meals, we had zucchini pasta with a really fatty carbonara sauce. Those were the zucchini noodles. And so you get really creative, and some of the food was really quite good. But it's something I could never endeavor to do on my own.

COLIN HILDING: I mean, you're doing these huge endurance races. Have you actually done any of them? Like you said, you did the study last year, but have you completed any races where you were eating just the fat going in? How do they actually monitor what the difference was? Did you do a trial, like a 25 or a 50K, when you're doing it, and then another one when you started eating the carbs again?

EVAN DUNFEE: So we had a few testing sessions. So one of our testing blocks was a 10K. We did a 10K time trial race before the diet started, and we did another one at the end of the three weeks. We had to do 10K because of just fitting it into a proper training year, and you can't really have guys do 220Ks on the front and back end of a hard three-week training block. The 10K was sort of the sacrifice we had to make in terms of actually getting a real-world performance that people would try their hardest on. So, both times that I've done the high-fat diet, I've been slower on the post-test for the 10K time trial despite having had three really good weeks of training, and it wasn't significantly slower. It was always sort of a little bit slower, but the real telling thing was we had this other test, it was a 25K walk at or around our 50K pace, and every five kilometres, we would come in and do a kilometre on the treadmill with the gas exchange mask, so they'd measure our oxygen use and how much oxygen we're using for a kilometre, and then we'd go back out and do another 5K and then come back in. The data they got through that was fascinating. It just basically showed that while we were able to still maintain our 50K race pace for that whole 25K, it was costing us significantly more in oxygen, and there was no advantage to it. So that was probably the most telling test that we did. And then this year, we've done the same thing. So we did that 25K tempo beforehand, we did one on the fat diet, and then at the end of that week, we did one where the first time we got carbs was the morning of the test. So we hadn't had a carbohydrate meal in three and a half weeks, and then we got raisin toast for breakfast and jam and stuff, and then went and did a 25K, like right after, two hours after that. And so that was really interesting to see, you know, I basically went immediately once I got those first set of carbs, went right back to where I started on the pretest.

COLIN HILDING: Oh, wow. Now, how does your stomach feel after a meal off of it?

EVAN DUNFEE: It undid. Like, when you've been on it, yeah, it was a little bit tricky, it was a little bit tricky. A lot of us were sort of just feeling a little bit off and just something, our body sort of was going, oh, this is different, what is this? And then, again, we did a week back after carbs, we did another 25K session, and pretty much across the board. I don't know what the VGO2 data was, the oxygen uptake data was, but in terms of how fast people went and how good people were feeling, guys were just flying this last test. It was pretty cool to see how fast everyone was going, so it bodes well for Adelaide next week, that's for sure.

COLIN HILDING: Even just when you say 25K in these tests or whatever, that just seems insane to me. It's funny because everybody I know thinks that I'm insane for the amount of walking I do or running and everything. I basically will walk to work, which is about 10 kilometres, and then I'll walk home after work, which is 10 kilometres on the way home. People think that I'm insane for doing this, and here, just as a sport and competitively, you're doing twice the amount of that. I mean, I'm not even sure how does somebody actually get into a sport like this, because it's not like race walking is something that you have in track and field and school. How does somebody actually get into this sport?

EVAN DUNFEE: Yeah, a lot of it comes down to just opportunity. So in British Columbia, we're very lucky that it is part of our junior development program in track and field and it's part of our high school program. So there's lots of opportunity to be exposed to it. I grew up running track from the time I was nine years old and I actually started race walking when I was 11.

COLIN HILDING: Oh, wow.

EVAN DUNFEE: It was born out of my brother had had his appendix taken out. His high school track coach thought, well, there's this race walking thing. Why don't you give that a try while your stitch is healed because it might not tug on your abdomen as much. And he was kind of like, okay, yeah, that's a good way to maintain my fitness. And so he did it. But he won a few races because again, not many people are doing it. As a younger brother, I kind of naively thought, well, if he can do it, it can't be very hard. So I signed myself up for a race and showed up. I still remember my first race. When you're a kid, it's not the 20 and 50k distances. It's an 800 metre race back then. I was on the start line and there was a kid next to me who used that kid that wins all the races. And he looked at me and said, oh, you're new. What are you hoping to do? And I was like, oh, I don't know. Like, five minutes is a round number. I'd like to break five minutes. He sort of looked at me and was like, oh, you'll never do that on your first try. And I beat that kid and I walked 457. I won the race. And I was hooked. Basically, from that moment on, I was like, this is my new event. I'm going to keep doing this.

COLIN HILDING: When did it actually become an Olympic sport? Because it's not something that you get a lot of coverage of. I mean, it's something you tune into on the final days of the Olympics. Obviously, there was a lot of coverage this time in Canada, but I don't even know if many people are aware that it is an Olympic sport. But when did it start?

EVAN DUNFEE: Well, it's been part of the track and field program for a long time, so back in like 1908, I believe, it was actually, so the old Decathlon, so the old Tennoventer, used to actually end with a 1500-metre race walk. So you have, you know, you have those big, you think of someone like Ash Eaton, who goes out and does his high jump and his javelin and his long jump. And back in the day, he would have ended that with a 1500-metre race walk. So yeah, so it was, its first Olympics was 1904, as part of the all-arounder, which was sort of what became before the decathlon. And then in 1908, they had a 1500-metre and a 3000-metre individual race walk. And it's basically been in every Olympics for men since 1908, except for, I think, 1924. So it's been around, it's one of the, you know, one of the stock standard events that's been around forever. It just, yeah, you're right, in Canada, especially, it's just never had the exposure. We actually had an Olympic medal from 1992 by Guillaume LeBlanc in the men's 20K event. And so the Quebec tradition, there is quite a big tradition in Quebec of race walking. And so there, guys like Guillaume LeBlanc, Francois LaPointe, Marcel Jovan, they're all sort of got for athletic fans or sports fans that grew up 80s and 90s are sort of household names in Quebec. They were well-known athletes back then, but we just never had the proliferation across the rest of Canada, really until we're just starting to see it now a bit in BC.

COLIN HILDING: And when you were a kid, you know, and you started getting into this as your sport, were you aware that it was in the Olympics? Was this the event you'd watch and like one day I'm going to be an Olympian and I'm going to be a bronze medallist or a silver medallist in this event?

EVAN DUNFEE: Yeah, I mean, I will think back to, I kept running, like race walking and running, we sort of went hand in hand. And, you know, I was a Canadian kid, I played hockey as well. I think my first inclination I wanted to go to the Olympics was after watching Sydney in 2000, I would have been 10 years old, I remember doing a school project, it was one of those ones where you write down what you want to be when you grow up, and I sort of wanted to be an Olympian. And the teacher was sort of like, oh, that's really great, but like, you want to write something else down as well. And I was like, no, I'm going to stick with this. And it was always something that was in the back of my head, it was something that I wanted to do and achieve in my life. And really, I guess it wasn't really until I was 18 or 19 and got to university that I really started to understand what that meant and what it was going to take to get there. And really, it went from being sort of a pipe dream to an actual goal with a plan on how I was going to get there.

COLIN HILDING: See the thing that's always been most fascinating for me is because there's so many Olympic sports and it's not like, you know, hockey where people are like, I'm going to make a career out of this. I mean, most of these people are probably doing it just for the love of the sport. And at what point does somebody even realise, okay, I have a shot at making the Olympics and this is something that I could do long term?

EVAN DUNFEE: Yeah, it's funny. I mean, one of the things I love about the racewalking community and you see it in stuff like the study I'm here, like, yeah, where in what other event would you get 29 athletes from every continent agree to be poked and prodded for three weeks and some guys on a diet that they know might not help them at all, but they're willing to do it because it's going to be a good training camp and it's going to be warm and all these other reasons but to actually sacrifice that time and come and train with everyone, it's such a cool community. And I think part of that is because of what you said, nobody grows up thinking they're going to make a career out of this. It's a group of guys and girls that think that they have some sort of potential and they want to pursue that and see how far they can get. Nobody's in race walking for fame and glory. I think it makes a really interesting subset of people that you get to meet and compete against and everyone's just there to reach their own personal potential.

COLIN HILDING: It's funny, you said like, I mean, we both said it's not really like a well-known sport here in Canada, but the most interesting thing is that coming out of Rio, especially here in Canada, and we kind of joked on this show when we were doing our preview episodes that I wasn't going to have a lot to talk about when it came to Canada. It was going to be a lot of Australian. I mean, Canada just blew everything away. But you didn't win the medal in Rio, and yet somehow I think maybe next to only Penny Alexiak and André de Grasse, you came out of it with more media coverage than anybody of the Canadian medallists in Rio. I mean, was it weird for you to see so much publicity coming out of this and yet not have won the medal?

EVAN DUNFEE: It was incredibly strange for me. The afternoon of the race, I hadn't grasped what had really happened yet, or the levity. I didn't even know that CBC had shown the race. I had hoped that they would be playing it online. The night before the race, I had written on my Facebook to my friends and family. I think it was a 4 a.m. start back in Vancouver, and I said, I don't expect you guys to wake up at 4 and watch my whole race. Wake up at 6, and if I'm still in camera shot, maybe watch for a little bit. That was to my family and friends. Those were the expectations. So it wasn't really until I got back into the village that evening of the race and got a phone call from our communications manager. I thought of Canada, and he sort of said, look, you really need to say something. People want to hear from you. I kind of laughed at him. I said, what are you talking about? Who are these people you're talking about? He's like, no, people are talking about this here. That was sort of when I first realised that it had actually been picked up as a story and had become sort of what it had become. So it was fascinating for me because one of my big goals in the event and in track and field has been to leave race walking at the end of my career without having more respect than I did when I started my career. And that just leaps and bounds further than I ever imagined possible just in that one day of racing. So it was pretty cool to see. People went from thinking about the stupid sport and it looks funny to thinking, oh, it looks funny, but oh my God, does it look hard. It does look funny. It's been great to see people now being able to hold that idea that, okay, it can look funny and also be incredibly challenging at the same time has been the coolest sort of thing to see. And that 50K in Rio, not just in Canada, in Australia as well, well, Jared Talent, who ended up finishing second in the race, picked up his fourth Olympic medal and cemented himself as one of the best ever. There were so many different headlines in that race that created just a, it was just a fun race to be a part of. There was no Russians in the race to worry about. It was, I remember thinking during the race, how good of a race it was to be a part of. And so it was cool to be, yeah, it was just cool to be a part of that.

COLIN HILDING: And it was your first Olympics of them, right?

EVAN DUNFEE: It was, yeah.

COLIN HILDING: Now you've done the Pan Am Games the year before. I mean, did that in a way prepare you for the Olympics, or like what other major events are there leading up to this?

EVAN DUNFEE: Yeah, so I mean, I've done a few World University Games, which are actually, they're the second largest multi-sport games in terms of athlete size. So they have, they actually have more athletes in the Winter Olympics. So, you know, you get a really good sense of those types of things, of how the village works, and some of the logistics around being in a games environment. Commonwealth Games in 2010 as well. And then, as you said, Pan Am Games. So you get lots of experience in those games types environments. And then in terms of the actual racing, we have a World Championships, Athletics has a World Championships every other year. And to me, the World Championships or our World Cup or the Olympics, I treat them all the same. You know, any opportunity to race against the best in the world, I just revel at the opportunity. So because of that, I was able to go into the Olympics with relatively stress free, because I just saw it as another opportunity to race the guys I race against every year. Where I know some people can get themselves so worked up, because the Olympics is in their mind made up to be this much bigger thing, even though you're just racing the same guys you raced at the World Championships last year. The actual race is still going to be the same distance, everything about the actual race is the exact same. So I think that mindset really allowed me to thrive in that environment.

COLIN HILDING: And the other thing that's interesting about this is that you mentioned how it was originally tacked on to the end of the decathlon or whatever, but it's not like 50k is the only event you competed in. I mean, in Rio, was it the 10k or 20k as well?

EVAN DUNFEE: Yeah, the 20k, yeah. They were a week apart at the Olympics, which was nice and allowed a bunch of us to do the double.

COLIN HILDING: Now, do you have one where you feel like going into Rio or World Championships or Pan Am Games or anything, is there one where you're like, this is the one where I think I have the best shot, and you want to focus on that? How many different distances are there that are competed on that level?

EVAN DUNFEE: Yeah, so Olympic and World Champs are 20 and 50k for the men, and so you only really get a handful of guys that will attempt the double. And a lot of us that do attempt it are the Commonwealth guys that are all good friends and just do it because we want to beat each other. It's fun to try to say that you had the best combined score of the two races or something like that. I definitely, almost anyone who does do the double focuses on the 50k, and then uses the 20k as sort of their secondary event. It's a lot easier to step down in distance than it is to step up in distance. The training, within 50k training, we do a lot of the same training the 20k guys do, whereas the guys that focus on the 20k don't do nearly the volumes that we do to train for the 50k, so it's a lot easier to come down. But for me in that 20k in Rio, it was really just about getting rid of some of the jitters, going through that process in the call room of understanding, okay, this is your first Olympic race, just going through those motions and getting a sense of what it's going to be like. And it really was for me just a dress rehearsal for the 50k. That's sort of how I treated it. It worked out perfectly because because I was treating the 20k like a dress rehearsal, I wasn't very stressed out about it. I stayed pretty relaxed, and I had a really good result. I finished 10th, which at the time was my best ever international finish. So then when the 50k came around, I was like, well, I already have a good finish. So it doesn't matter what I do in the 50k. I have nothing to be stressed about. And so I was able to stay quite relaxed for the 50k as well. But it ended up being sort of the perfect, the perfect opportunity to keep me sort of relaxed and keep my head in the game.

COLIN HILDING: You know, for people that aren't familiar with race walking, or maybe they only see the clips, I mean, when you get these endurance races, and you guys are out there for the 50k, probably three and a half to four hours, there's probably not a lot of people who are sitting there watching at three and a half to four hours on TV, or not even necessarily on networks that are going to cover it. I mean, I remember waking up and watching it, and they were kind of showing clips of it. This was after it had already finished. You said it started four in the morning. So first thing in the morning, I wake up and here's some clips of it. But with such a long race like that, the most interesting thing about it is that you have a crowd. I mean, you're going basically around a track. What's the distance of the track that you circle?

EVAN DUNFEE: Yeah, so because we're a judged event, so, you know, racewalking has, we have seven judges that sort of watch our technique and can give us warnings that can result in disqualification. So racewalking, just very quickly, there's two rules. You have to have one foot on the ground at all times, and you also have to have your front leg has to be straight at the knee when it comes in contact with the ground. So the judges watch for that. And because of that, we aren't like the marathon, where the marathon course can be big 10K loops or even like a point to point. You can start at one part of the city and end 42K across the other side of the city. The racewalk needs to be on a very closed tight loop because the judges need to be able to watch you constantly. So we race on either a 1K or a 2K loop. So in Rio, the 50K was on a 2K loop, which from a spectator point of view makes it an absolutely brilliant race. Because you can actually watch the race unfold in its entirety. You can watch almost the entire... You see, out of that 2K, you can probably see guys for about 1,500 metres of that 2-kilometre stretch. So you really get to see everything unfold instead of just having all these marathon guys come running by you once or twice. So from that point of view, it makes it really interesting. So in Rio, there's a bunch of bars that were set up along the course. So I had about 20 to 30 family and friends that were there watching, and 8 o'clock in the morning, and they just had a beer in their hand constantly. And it's just so much fun, because you just get... guys get so rowdy. I went to London in 2012 to watch my teammate compete, and I can just remember watching him in the 20K, 2 o'clock in the afternoon. We were standing there, about 20 of the guys I went to university with, staring at Buckingham Palace across the street. We have a bucket full of beers, and we're watching our teammate compete at the Olympics while getting drunk on the sidelines and cheering and yelling at them. It really is a fun environment, and it really is quite neat. And everyone I know that has sort of stumbled upon racewalking because they are acquaintances of mine and have come and watched the race, they all sort of go in with it going, what have I got myself into? What am I going to watch? And they all come away with it saying, that was actually really exciting. The amount of guys that I had tell me in Rio that their two must-see events in Rio were the men's 50k walk and one of the marathons. And it's just like to be, for these guys who are athletes, just fanatics to say that the race walk is one of their favourite events to watch, I think was pretty damn cool.

COLIN HILDING: I mean, having a crowd has to make the biggest difference as well. Here's my moment where I can pretend like I understand Olympic athletes, but doing like 5 and 10K races, most of the time it's going around a park or something like that, and you might make one lap, and I'll see my wife and my baby one time during the race, waving or whatever, and doing a half marathon during streets. What was most interesting to me is that people would sometimes just sit on their driveway and sit there and clap and just cheer you on. They don't even know you. I mean, it made a huge difference for me even doing something like that. So I can't imagine if you have a crowd and you can see the same people over and over again. It's got to make a huge boost. Do you find that your times are better, not just because you're competing at a level like that, but is it better because you have a cheering section?

EVAN DUNFEE: I think so. For me in Rio, and I think I saw that at Pan Am, but I think at Pan Am Games I had a huge home field advantage because I was just... Pan Am was an interesting race. I went off the front of the field at 2 km into the race. They were just going at a pace that was too slow for me, and I knew if it came to a sprint finish, so to say, which in race walking is still like a 5 km. But I knew that I didn't have a chance against some of these guys because it was a 20 km. So I made a decision very early on in the race to go off the front of the field. I remember thinking afterwards, I never felt like I was alone because I just had this huge relative in race walk terms, would have been a couple thousand people, but a couple thousand people around the course there just cheering for me the whole time. It just never felt like I was by myself, and I really think that that spurred me on to victory. Rio felt like a home race. Rio felt exactly like Toronto did because we had so many family and friends there, and because the community is so close, all the Aussie parents and cheering section was cheering for the Aussies, and also cheering for the Kiwis and Canadians and all that stuff. So everyone was just cheering for everyone. I remember about 4K into the race, 3 or 4K into the 50K race, I had to actually yell at my brother just to calm down a little bit, to pace himself on his screaming because there's still three hours left. He needed to pace himself at his yelling, otherwise he wasn't going to make it to the finish.

COLIN HILDING: Look, you got time to take a nap first if you want to.

EVAN DUNFEE: Exactly, yeah. Go get a coffee and come back. I think that really does help, especially for me, having my brother and my mum and dad there really was quite special.

COLIN HILDING: I think anybody from Canada is probably already familiar with the story of everything that happened in Rio with you in that race. Our Australian listeners, if they've listened to our show, obviously we talked about it a lot. But for those that aren't aware, basically the infamy of this race or what made the news came down to the fact that there was a bump. This is something like in track and field. If you're seeing a regular 800-metre race or something like that, it almost doesn't seem like that big a deal. They talk about, well, you cross the lines or whatever. But basically what happened, I guess, is that one of the Japanese runners, he had bumped you. Is this something that's like, can you explain the rule behind this or what the issue is with that?

EVAN DUNFEE: Yeah, so I'll set it up a little bit. And so it was interesting that I had gone off the front of the field. I had gotten way too cocky. I thought I could win the race from 25K. I burnt my biscuit a little early, and by 40K I had had the first three guys come flying past me. From 40 to 45K, I kind of felt, I was feeling sorry for myself. I had a good effort, but those guys, they got away from me, and I can't catch back up. At 45K, I was like, wait, no, what are you doing? It's the Olympics. Shut up. So I put my head down, and the lactic was just coursing through my legs at that point. Really the only thing getting me through, the mental focus I had at that point was just on getting through one more step. I just kept telling myself, one more step, one more step, one more step. So I did that about 4,000 times, and at 49K, so we're 49K, and we're three and a half hours into the race, or three hours and 36 minutes into the race, and we got a little bit over four minutes to go, and I'd just gone onto the heels of the Japanese athlete who was in third, and I made the decision, I was okay, I'm going to try and go right straight past him. So I passed him, and then he tried to respond, and for some reason, and I don't think you need an explanation when you're 49K into a race for why he did this, but he decided to cross from my outside to my inside, and then try to pass me on the inside. And we ended up both getting too close to each other, because neither of us could walk in a straight line at this point. And so we got tangled up. And from my point of view, what ended up happening was that, if you watch the video, we get tangled up. I take about ten more steps before I actually knees buckle. And it's so funny, because I watched that moment, whatever it is, two seconds, two and a half seconds, but I can remember each process that was going through my head in that time, and it feels like in my head, it was more like two and a half minutes. Because that process of, okay, thinking about next step, next step, next step, was a very internal, just sort of thinking about what my legs were doing. And when we bumped, my perception, my awareness, sort of became more external. I kind of like tuned back in to what was going on around me. I was like, oh, what just happened? And the second I did that, my legs sort of took that as an excuse to say, hey, we don't need to work anymore. We're done. And so it's funny to break how, in my head, I can break that down and see exactly why it was that there was like ten steps in there before my knees buckle. It was really funny, because after the race on social media, when Heroki, the Japanese athlete, was initially disqualified for that, but then reinstated on appeal from the Japanese. So when he was initially disqualified, having all these messages from Japanese people on social media telling me, you know, calling me a cheater and how I faked it and how I took a dive and all that stuff, even a lot of Canadians saying the same thing. And it was funny, because I should have probably been quite upset by that, but the second I saw the video, I went, oh, I can totally see why it looks like that. The sort of messed up way my brain works went, oh, yeah, I can totally see why people thought I was faking it.

COLIN HILDING: There's this moment in the video, too, where you, I don't know if this was frustration or whatever, or if it was maybe, like you said, your knees are buckling, your panicking. There's a moment where you throw your arms up in the air, like panic or frustration or something. Do you remember that?

EVAN DUNFEE: Yeah, so it was more of a, I think it was, I directed my hands down as if I was sort of, I was pleading with my legs. I was like, no, like, come on legs, I need you. Like, we can do this. We got four and a half more minutes. Just give me four and a half more minutes. I think it was more of a pleading with the legs. We can do this. We can get through this. Sort of feeling it was going through my head at that point.

COLIN HILDING: And ultimately, I mean, what happened was, when the decision was overturned, the news media, I mean, it's so hard to follow all these rules and everything, but the news media was saying almost like there was another chance to appeal it again. Like, was there an opportunity where you could say, you know, I want to fight for this bronze again?

EVAN DUNFEE: Yeah, so we could have, because the initial disqualification of the Japanese athlete was done by the track referee, so we never actually filed an appeal in the first place. So the Japanese appeal had been the first appeal. So we had right of second appeal, which I could have taken to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. And so basically, after the race, I basically said, I am not making any decisions. I am in no condition to make decisions. I am going to delegate that role to somebody else for now, but once I recover and get some food in me and all that stuff, I will come back in and take over the decision making process. And so when I got back to the village a few hours later, we had just found out that the Japanese Appeal had been successful, and I had the Canadian team lawyers and all these people telling me how to file the next appeal and all this stuff. I just sort of said, look, let me go get some food. Let me think about this. I will call you back. I went to the dining hall with my coach, and I just sort of sat down. I said, look, I don't think he did anything wrong. I don't think any of the guys in that race think he did anything wrong. I don't want to pursue this anymore. I don't feel comfortable continuing on to fight for a medal that I think would have been ill-gotten. And my coach said, good, I agree. I wasn't going to say it, but I agree with you. Okay, call the guys up and tell them. So I called the lawyers up, and they begrudgingly accepted, because they were pretty confident they could win the case. I think they were excited for it. It was one of those things. It was not worth it. I had to think about 20, 30 years from now, if I had that medal, would I look at it with the same sense of achievement and accomplishment as I would any other medal? I couldn't constantly say yes to myself, and I think that was sort of the big point that I used in my final decision.

COLIN HILDING: It's funny because that was what made all the news, was the fact that you chose not to do it. It's interesting to think that maybe if you had filed that appeal, you go down as a bronze medallist, but you go down as just one of the other bronze medallists. And instead, as I said before, you come out of this, maybe next only Penny Alexiak and Andre de Grasse is the one with the most media coverage and the one that everybody was talking about. We, in a way, almost joked about it on the show. It's such a Canadian thing to do. You say, no, it's okay. You take the medal. But I feel like at least here in Canada, people viewed it differently, and this is why you got so much attention. It's what you said where you're like, I don't believe that that cost me the race. And that's your real opinion. You believe that I could have won a bronze, but did this one bump necessarily cost me the bronze? Maybe not necessarily. You still hold to that, that you probably were destined to be fourth place in this race, one way or the other?

EVAN DUNFEE: Yeah, you just never know. Taroki looked like he had a bunch left in the tank. He did pass me again. That's the other thing. It wasn't that we bumped while I was passing him. We bumped while he was coming past me. So you never know what's going to happen. And the other problem with it, the other thing is that, my goodness, if he had nice guy. You know, he would never, having met him and talked to him and gotten to know him, it was so abundantly clear that he would never have done anything like that on purpose. You know, if it was a Russian athlete, let's say, different story. You know, completely different story. But the telling, you know, one of the big telling things for me was we were in doping control after the race, getting ready to do our urine test. You know, it's a good environment because there's no media in there. There's just you and your coach, so you can sort of relax a little bit. Kuroky came up to me and threw his translator, and this is at the point when he had been disqualified. So I'm currently sitting in third. He's currently disqualified, and he approached me and said how sorry he was for what had happened and all this stuff. That was pretty clear to me that he hadn't done anything on purpose and it was not intentional. He really helped make the decision quite easy.

COLIN HILDING: That's the other thing that's interesting because Canada was on the other end of this right around the same time with the men's 4x100 relay where we came in fourth. Yeah, that's right. It was the same day. And it's interesting because we were on the receiving end of getting the bronze because the United States was disqualified. And I don't know. I kind of have mixed feelings on even that too because I understand what you're saying about 30 years from now. How are you going to feel about winning that one? Would Canada have won that? I think it was Justin Gatlin whose foot crossed the lane or something like that. And would we still have won? It's such a technicality. Does that actually mean we were the third best? And in a way, I feel like maybe Canadians accepted that because Justin Gatlin is not exactly the most popular athlete in that sport. So maybe being the nice guy does make a difference in this case.

EVAN DUNFEE: I think it also comes down to having objective or subjective rules in that 4x1 relay. It's very objective. You step on the line. It's a rule you can't step on the line. It's very clear cut. And the other thing that makes it a lot easier is that we were on the opposite end of that 4 years ago in London when we came third and were disqualified for having stepped on the line. So that event is just such a crapshoot. And I think that part and parcel is just there's going to be teams that get disqualified. It was funny that actually those last two days of athletics, Canada had, well, we ended up getting third there, but we had fourth for myself, fourth for Alyssa Bishop, fourth for Mohamed Ahmed, fourth for our women's 4x4 relay. And I remember joking with some of the athletes like, we need to get, you know, Tokyo 2020, we're going to have a fourth place medal. We're going to call it the maple medal. We're going to give it all our, because it's such a Canadian place to finish.

COLIN HILDING: Yeah, it is.

EVAN DUNFEE: It's just, you know, right, you know, kind of like really close, but just not quite there. So I think, yeah, come Tokyo, we're going to have the maple medal for all our Canadian fourth place finishes.

COLIN HILDING: You know, all the fourth place finishes on our show during Rio, every single day, if we finish fourth, I was basically saying, hey, this is like a Canadian bronze. You know, it's still something. Same thing happened even in the Winter Olympics. What I was actually interested about was, like with this media coverage and everything that happened, I'm guessing if you're like the top athlete in the world, you're probably going to be interviewed afterwards. Like, did you have any expectations going in that even if you did finish this and you did get a bronze, that you were going to be talking to Ron McLean or whatever a day later or a few hours later? Or are there any expectations about the media coverage you're going to get off of this?

EVAN DUNFEE: Absolutely not. You know, we never... I prepared for the three hours and 40 minutes that I was going to spend racing, and then naively never really had a second thought after that. But I think it's really easy to do... for myself at least, I find it really easy to do media stuff because I don't really have a narrative that I'm trying to sell. I'm just happy to come on and just talk about whatever people want to talk about. I really don't have any topics that are off-limits. I find it really easy when you never have to sustain anything, when you never have to be pushing an agenda, which I find a lot of athletes try to do, it becomes very simple and easy to do media stuff because you just have to talk about yourself, and you should know yourself pretty well.

COLIN HILDING: Well, there's the evidence that in no way did you take a dive, too, because then you have to do something to spin there.

EVAN DUNFEE: Yeah, exactly. Then you have to keep your story straight and remember what you said to who and all that stuff. It becomes easier if you are full-blown honesty from the get-go. It makes it quite easy.

COLIN HILDING: So what's the typical training season like? When Rio is done, obviously, every single year, you still have a season, you're competing. What's the competition season like? What's the training season like? What type of months does this cover and what type of hours a day does this take for you?

EVAN DUNFEE: Yeah, it's a 12-month-a-year thing. After Rio, I took a few months off to decompress. I actually did some running, so I actually went and ran a half marathon, and we ran our BC Cross Country Championships and just stayed active doing something different to have a little bit of fun. But typically, our training schedule, I was training 10, 11 months of the year. Big, big, heavy weeks, so if I'm on a training camp, for example, before Rio, when we were in St. Moritz, 180 to 200K a week. Part of that will be, so Wednesday, Wednesday and Saturday, we'll usually do 40 to 45K walks in the morning, and then sometimes another 5 to 10K in the afternoon. Very similar marathon training in terms of how you sort of schedule it, so we usually have one or two speed sessions where we're doing either 2K intervals or some fart licks with some 2 or 3Ks worth of hard work and some longer tempo stuff where you're doing 12 to 15Ks a little bit harder, and then everything else around that is easy walking. And our easy walking is still around 5 to 5.10 per kilometre. So you're always moving at a fairly brisk pace.

COLIN HILDING: And for the competition, how many major events a year do you compete in for this?

EVAN DUNFEE: Yeah, so 50Ks, guys will typically do one or two a year. Don't really see much more than that. So for this year, I'm doing a 50K in Mexico on March 19th. And then I will do our World Championships, which are in London in August. So 250Ks, typically guys will maybe do around 4 to 5, 20Ks in a year. So I think this year I have only three scheduled, just because our World Championships, they have all the race walks on the same day, so I won't be able to do the double like I was able to do in Rio. So I've had to just do the 50. So it's a very light racing schedule. Similar, again, similar to the marathon, because the recovery time from a 50K is so long that you can't be going out every week and racing one full out. So it makes every time you step up to race quite important and quite a big deal.

COLIN HILDING: I mean, there's so much going on with your training and the events and everything. I've always had a hard time wrapping my head around how somebody does this, because obviously you're not doing this out of your own pocket. I mean, I don't think anybody can make it to the Olympics doing that. There's been so much talk, especially in Canada, over the last decade or so about the support that athletes receive. But I don't think many people even realise what that support is. So how does training get supported for an athlete like yourself?

EVAN DUNFEE: Yeah, you know, at this point in the game, I'm very lucky to have what I have. So we have the carding system. So we're... Athletics has about 65 athletes who are supported through government athlete assistance, which is $1,500 a month, which goes a long way towards living and training expenses. Obviously, it's not enough to live off of, but it really takes the burden off people having to work full-time jobs. And then in addition to that, I'm lucky enough to get some additional support through On The Podium. So they help cover training-related expenses like training camps, airfare, hotels, accommodation, stuff like that. I'm very lucky now at the point where I'm not having to do too much out of pocket. I have a good sponsor in tech resources, the mining company, who helps support me as well. It's great to have a few sponsors that believe in aligning themselves with my passion both on and off the track. I think athletes, when you're given money from the government, the government does not give people money for no reason. So I do feel like as amateur athletes in Canada, we have a duty to give back in some way. So I try to be very active in the community and go and do a lot of school talks and just try to use my story and use what came out of Rio for some good to try to get more kids into sport and sort of learn the amazing values and life lessons that I got to learn through sport. Because I think sport has this amazing ability to sort of mimic real life in a very safe environment where you can kind of mess up and it doesn't really matter, but you still have to have all these skills that you need in the real world, like teamwork and dedication and commitment and time management and goal setting and all these things that pay so many dividends when you're an adult and in the real world, sport kind of forces you to learn those things at a young age. So I really think there's some power there. So I'd love to get into the schools and try to convince a few kids that sport's the place to be.

COLIN HILDING: One thing that I think we have to ask all these athletes, and we're definitely going to, is the experience in Rio because I think we talk so much about the good publicity that you receive as an athlete and the same thing obviously for people like Andre Degrasse or Rosie McLennan. But there seems to be so much negative press around not just the Canadian, but like American, every country, just around the conditions in Rio. People looked at situations like the color of the water in the pool and maybe a few stories floating around that Ryan Lochte may not have started. It almost seemed like Rio got this bad reputation, but I'd love to hear from somebody who was actually there what Rio was really like as far as the conditions that you experienced.

EVAN DUNFEE: Yeah, I mean, I think the general consensus really was that Rio did an amazing job for the resources they had. Of all the friends I had that went to London, the consensus was like, you know, look, this isn't London, we can't compare it to London, but it's where the Olympics needs to go. We need to find a way to make this model sustainable. I think it's starting to get out of hand. I think Rio could be that subtle little turning point to start scaling back on some things, start making everything a little bit more about the sport and bring back some of the Olympic values and cut down on this whole corporate show type of thing. And it will be interesting to see where Tokyo is going to be astonishing. We can only imagine what the technology that's going to be involved in Tokyo is going to be like. But Rio, for all the scaremongering that went on in the buildup, I think I saw one mosquito the entire time I was there, and it was dead. The media needs negative stories before there's actual events to talk about because they need something to talk about. I think once the event actually started, at least from the athlete's point of view, all that negative stuff went away. We were just focused on competing and cheering on our teammates.

COLIN HILDING: Yeah, and I'm so glad to hear that, man. I spent 16 days straight arguing this with people when they're talking about, oh, but I heard this story, I heard this story. And the media is going to tell you stuff like that. And it also is, I mean, I love what you said about Rio, the bar set so high with London. But you look at like the last 20 years of the Olympics, and we're in places like Sydney, Beijing, London, Vancouver. I mean, how long has it been since we've been in a country that's not exactly at that level as far as our richness and everything? People had these expectations, like it was always going to be like this first world country. And I like that we have a country like or we have a city like Rio hosting it because it can be more about the sport. And you also get to see something different. I mean, if we're always seeing London, Atlanta, Vancouver, I mean, there's no variety there.

EVAN DUNFEE: Exactly. And I think, yeah, we definitely need to scale it back to make it something that that can, you know, that these other countries can can successfully pull off. I think we've made some good progress there with allowing sort of joint bids and, you know, starting to get multiple cities bidding for things to help out, spread the cost and, you know, a whole range of things there. So hopefully in the future, we can find a model that's more sustainable and really does focus more on the actual sporting side of things and see where we can go with that.

COLIN HILDING: I'm hoping because we spent 16 days pitching Flynn Flawn, Manitoba for Olympics in the future, which I doubt will ever happen unless people's opinions change. Just as we're wrapping up here, we're going to go through some quickfire questions. One of our favourite things that we did during the Rio Games was the bios that they had up on the Team Canada website. I don't know if you're familiar with the Hi My Name Is ones that they had. You didn't have one of those. So I mean, we might as well just do a quickfire one here for your game.

EVAN DUNFEE: Sure.

COLIN HILDING: All right. So let's start here. I mean, My Name Is, we know your name. We'll skip that one. By the way, if anybody wants to follow along, I'm following Rosie McLennan's one here. Everybody got different questions, but there's some fun question here. The greatest Olympian of all time is?

EVAN DUNFEE: Oh, goodness. Greatest Olympian of all time. This is going to be hard to click fire. Oh, see, Rosie probably did these through email and got to like think about them. You know, I'm going to save my good friend, Jerry Talent, four time Olympic race walking medallist, and the reason why I strive for medals in my sport.

COLIN HILDING: The first Olympics I remember watching was?

EVAN DUNFEE: Sydney.

COLIN HILDING: If I could be any superhero, I would be?

EVAN DUNFEE: Batman.

COLIN HILDING: Nice one. My favourite ice cream flavor is?

EVAN DUNFEE: Salted caramel.

COLIN HILDING: If I were a baseball player, my walk up music would be?

EVAN DUNFEE: 500 miles by the Pro-Famers.

COLIN HILDING: Oh, nice one. Probably the next race you're going to compete is the level you're at. The best nickname I've ever been called is?

EVAN DUNFEE: Oh, I haven't had very many nicknames. Usually it's Ginger. Ginger or Dunfee.

COLIN HILDING: If I weren't an athlete, then I would be?

EVAN DUNFEE: A lot less happy.

COLIN HILDING: Oh, that's a good one. My guilty pleasure snack is?

EVAN DUNFEE: Oh, I have a giant chocolate frog that I was just given yesterday that is going to be demolished. By the end of the day, so, yeah, milk chocolate.

COLIN HILDING: I think you'd like Rosie's answer here too because she put dark chocolate with sea salt and caramel.

EVAN DUNFEE: That's much healthier than dark chocolate.

COLIN HILDING: My favourite song lyric?

EVAN DUNFEE: That's the reason why she has two Olympic golds.

COLIN HILDING: Yeah, that's right. Switch to Rosie's diet if you want to win gold in the next Olympics. My favourite song lyric is? Go back to the Proclaimers?

EVAN DUNFEE: Yeah, I would walk 500 miles and I would walk 500 more just to be the man who walks a thousand miles and fall down at your door.

COLIN HILDING: The most recent TV show that I binge watched is?

EVAN DUNFEE: Oh, I've been going back and watching some Seinfeld.

COLIN HILDING: The other host on our show, we have a project we're starting here. We're going to be going through some old TV shows, and our other host on the show has never seen Seinfeld. How is there a person on the planet that hasn't seen Seinfeld?

EVAN DUNFEE: I remember growing up, dad, putting that on, and just not understanding it, but knowing it was good.

COLIN HILDING: Yeah, exactly.

EVAN DUNFEE: Now being able to understand it and go, ah, I was right, it was good.

COLIN HILDING: I'm going to have a backup question for this one, but my favourite place in the world to compete is?

EVAN DUNFEE: Japan.

COLIN HILDING: See, I couldn't help but notice when you look on Wikipedia and you see all the major races you've done, that you did compete in Hobart in Tasmania, which is where our co-host Ben is from, which he endlessly mocks. Can you tell us about any experiences in competing in Hobart?

EVAN DUNFEE: Oh, my goodness. So it was the 2012 Olympic trial for the Australians. It was the hottest day on record in Hobart. We started our race in 38 degrees. It was the most treacherous experience of my life. It was a, I guess it was a Saturday night. We started the race at 6 p.m. right down the main street there with all the pubs. So you have the guys going into the pubs to start their night, and then you have a bunch of race walkers. So as you can probably imagine, the comments that would start to fly, it was definitely an interesting race, to say the least. And we had, I think, in a race of 50 people, I think 40 of them ended up dropping out because it was so hot. Oh, wow. It was a war of attrition. It was definitely not a fun one to be a part of.

COLIN HILDING: Well, the next time that you're in Hobart, make sure to hit up our co-host, Ben Waterworth, and get him into race walking with you.

EVAN DUNFEE: Absolutely. We'll go for a walk on the Main Strip.

COLIN HILDING: Final question here. My biggest fear in life is...

EVAN DUNFEE: Popular to sport.

COLIN HILDING: I have to say, Rosie McLennan, the most bizarre answer for this, where she answered, train tracks and being around trains.

EVAN DUNFEE: Interesting.

COLIN HILDING: Have you ever met Rosie?

EVAN DUNFEE: I have. I have. And that seems out of character, even for Rosie.

COLIN HILDING: Some type of fear of train tracks there.

EVAN DUNFEE: I'll have to keep that in my back pocket if I ever need to use that.

COLIN HILDING: The most unfortunate thing is that we can't get you to draw a picture here, because some of the most fun we had was that these athletes were able to draw a picture of themselves. I remember Gavin Schmidt, the volleyball player, drew a picture of himself in a bunny suit for some reason, and we had no idea why. If you did draw a picture of yourself, what would it look like if you could describe it to us?

EVAN DUNFEE: My artistic skills are so lacking. It would probably be a stick man. I mean, a stick man these days isn't far off what it actually looks like, so I feel like that's fairly apt.

COLIN HILDING: I can't throw one more question out here. This is a good one, just looking at some of the other ones. My favourite sports movie is?

EVAN DUNFEE: Oh, favourite sports movie? Um, Prefontaine.

COLIN HILDING: Oh, that's one of those movies that most people don't even know of. Like, it's such a great movie and such a great story, but I mean, is that like about 20 years old now?

EVAN DUNFEE: Yeah, it must be, yeah. It's just, yeah, any runner will have seen it. Yeah, it's classic.

COLIN HILDING: One day, maybe we could be watching the Evan Dunfee story. I wonder what would be a good name for the Evan Dunfee story.

EVAN DUNFEE: Oh, I had a friend told me yesterday, her autobiography, and I feel like this is, I want to steal this. So there's 27 single servings in a jar of Nutella. And so her autobiography was going to be 27 servings at once. And I feel like that was, I love that. You know, I'm going to commandeer that and steal it for myself.

COLIN HILDING: And you know, again, it fits in with the high fat, I feel, too, as well.

EVAN DUNFEE: Yeah.

COLIN HILDING: Well, it was great to have you on the show here today, Evan. We're going to have a few more Canadian athletes coming up, some more Australian ones, who are going to be on a good run here as we kill some time before the 2018 Winter Olympics. But so good to have you on the show here today. And if you're ever in Winnipeg, make sure to stop by, and maybe you could show some nice high fat recipes to my wife, and we can go out for a run.

EVAN DUNFEE: Perfect, sounds great. Thanks so much for having me on, Colin.

COLIN HILDING: Thanks again to Evan Dunfee for being our first Canadian guest that we've had on. Obviously, it was a huge following of the Olympics, and Evan Dunfee was a story I remember of Ben and Jared, all the way in Australia, and them watching the Australian coverage, and as they kind of admitted, Australian media being very similar to the American media, as we mentioned on the show, were very one-sided towards their own country, and even they knew of this story going in. It was a huge story during Rio, and it's great to hear it from his point of view in a long-form interview. We do have more coming up. I'm not going to give away the names just yet. Going forward, just keep checking it periodically, because we're going to have more interviews coming. Ben has a few Australians that he's lining up. I've got some more Canadian athletes. We're going to bring you as much of this as possible. We had so much fun covering the Rio Olympics during Rio. Off The Podium really just started as a side project from some of our other podcasts, and we probably had more fun doing it than any of our other shows, and we've been looking for an Australian newsroom this past, and we hope to have a lot of content for you. And we're going to be getting ready for the 2018 Winter Olympics as well, and hopefully we'll be able to bring you some interviews leading into that. Also just me, Ben, and Jared sitting down again and talking about our expectations coming into that. Interviews, episodes, lots of stuff. Off The Podium, madness, insanity, hilarity, comic geniuses like we are on all of our podcasts. But thanks again to Evan Dunfee for the interview today, and stay tuned for more Off The Podium.