UBC Okanagan biathlon athlete Liam Simons poses with a group of Italian schoolkids after competing for Team Canada at the 2025 FISU World University Winter Games in Torino, Italy.
Watching the 2026 Olympic Winter Games in Cortina, Italy, was slightly surreal for UBC Okanagan students Ella Niedre and Liam Simons. In one way, it was like watching their past, but in another, it was one possible future.
A year earlier, they represented Canada in biathlon at the FISU Winter World University Games in Torino, Italy, racing alongside athletes from around the world in their first real taste of international competition.
Simons, an undergraduate in the School of Engineering, even received a special introduction from a group of Italian schoolchildren after one of his races. It made him feel like a gold medallist, even if he finished off the podium.
“It felt like a mini-Olympic moment,” says Simons, from Prince George, BC. “They just swarmed around me. I took a picture with them and said ‘hi’. That was really special.”
The athletes described the student games as their own personal test event. They embraced the chance of measuring themselves on the world stage and returned home with a clearer sense of what might be academically and athletically possible.
Ella Niedre competes in biathlon at the FISU Winter World University Games in Torino, Italy.
A sport built on pressure
Biathlon is one of the more demanding sports in the Winter Games: athletes ski as hard as their legs and lungs allow before schussing to a stop at a shooting range and pulling a .22 rifle off their shoulders.
At the range, they must slow their breathing and hit targets the size of mandarin oranges 50 metres away before shouldering their rifles and skiing more laps. Missing their targets sends skiers on penalty loops.
The sport is a constant battle between physical exhaustion and mental control.
Niedre, an undergraduate health and exercise sciences student, says the sport demands durability. The sport forces athletes to forget their mistakes immediately, a good metaphor for school and life.
“Mental resilience is everything in biathlon. One bad shooting bout can completely change your race, but you still have to go back out and ski hard,” says Niedre, who grew up in the Ottawa Valley.
“You can’t change what happened on the range, but you can control what you do next. That mindset carries over into everyday life, too. Not everything goes your way, but you focus on what you can control and move forward.”
Liam Simons is pursuing a career in biathlon while attending UBC Okanagan’s engineering program.
The Okanagan’s advantage
The athletes can pursue their biathlon and academic dreams in the Okanagan Valley. They train at Sovereign Lake Nordic Centre about 40 minutes away from the UBC Okanagan campus.
Sovereign Lake is one of Canada’s top training environments and routinely hosts championship competitions and clubs.
Simons says getting away from campus to ski is something that balances the demands of university.
“I love it when it’s all grey down in the valley,” he says, “and then you peek above the clouds; it’s just a sea of clouds across the valley and then open blue sky.”
Niedre is following the tracks of Team Canada’s Shilo Rousseau, herself a University of Ottawa student competing at the Olympics in Milan. They were teammates at the Chelsea Nordiq club as youths before competing at the World University Games—Rousseau in 2023, and Niedre in 2025.
But not every world-class university has world-class Nordic training facilities nearby.
“It’s so beautiful, so amazing here,” Niedre says. “It’s great how close the training facilities are to UBCO.”
“Once you get out of high school, you usually have to make the decision between the two—academics and athletics,” says Simons. “The Okanagan is a unique spot for that.”
Ella Niedre, right, and her Team Canada teammates pose for a photo at the 2025 FISU Winter World University Games in Torino, Italy.
