Covering Olympics highlight of Mark Connolly’s long career

Edmonton's Mark Connolly lived out an Olympic dream of his own by covering dozens of games over the past three decades.

“The advice I give to everybody about their career is to work really, really hard at being the best you can be. You never know when you’re going to get the opportunity,” Mark Connolly says.

The CBC Edmonton journalist of 37 years spent his first 22 years at the public broadcaster reporting on sports, then 12 years hosting the local morning radio program before retiring last year.

Over the decades, he covered 12 Olympic games – 10 in person – all because he was ready to meet a single moment.

In 1996, he was sitting in the news room when he got a call from the network.

“‘Do you want to go to Atlanta?’” he remembers being asked.

The answer was yes, obviously.

“I’m looking around like, doesn’t anybody realize my life just changed?” he told CTV News Edmonton in a recent interview during the 2026 Winter Olympics.

He cried telling the news to his wife, Alyson, over the phone.

“I dreamed that I would get to go to the Olympics and I thought, ‘OK, if I get to go to the Olympics, at least I’ve done it once in my life.’”

He didn’t go to Georgia to provide play-by-play commentary, but that is what he ended up doing for a few tennis matches.

“I didn’t know that much about tennis. I mean, I played tennis. But I hadn’t researched it,” he admitted.

As the tournament progressed, producers tapped Canadian tennis legend Pierre Lamarche to join Connolly and together they commentated underdog Lindsay Davenport’s historic gold medal.

“It was pretty exciting to do that unexpected. Something had happened at the stadium so they threw to us and said, ‘You need to fill.’ And we just kept going and going.”

The first Canadian gold medal Connolly called was Edmonton bobsleigher Pierre Lueders’ and Dave MacEachern’s in 1998 when the pair tied with Italy.

“I was so in my head, I kind of stumbled a bit. But I did say, ‘They both get the gold. Canada wins the gold.’ And it was amazing,” Connolly laughed.

Twenty years later in Pyeongchang, South Korea, the same thing would happen with Canada and Germany – but Connolly knew what to do.

Unlike many viewers, he suspects, Connolly pays as much attention to the broadcasters as he does the competitors.

“Because I have an insight into what happens, what they go through, and the kind of things they are preparing for – when things happen, when things don’t go well, when they do go well – I’m cheering for the commentators as well as the athletes,” he said.

Connolly remembers the medals he called for Edmontonians the best, such as cyclist Lori-Ann Muenzer’s 2004 gold.

“We thought she’d be a medallist, but we didn’t know she’d win gold. It was super exciting because I covered her coming up the ranks and having a good chance, and it was such an exciting medal,” Connolly said.

“Then in Tokyo (2020), I get to call it again. It’s Kelsey Mitchell…. So that’s a pretty cool bookend for my career.”

While covering the 2024 Olympics in Paris from Toronto, which has become the industry standard, Connolly knew there was a good chance those games would be his last as a commentator.

Although he is considering applying for the Olympic Broadcasting Services, he feels grateful and lucky to have had the opportunities he did.

“Like a lot of athletes say, preparation means opportunity. Work, work, work, work hard as you can to be the best you can be. And then when that opportunity happens, it can happen for you…. Take care at being excellent at what you do and hopefully things will happen for you.”

With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Nicole Lampa