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By Keiran Gorsky
Ottawa’s Leonarda Andric didn’t go exploring much, out and away from the 2025 FISU Summer World University Games in Rhine-Ruhr, Germany. The 22-year-old didn’t venture to Essen’s towering Zollverein Industrial Complex, a beautiful UNESCO monument to the rise and fall of European heavy industry, and she didn’t skip over the border to the Netherlands.
“I wanted to stay within the village and have that full experience,” Andric explains. “Every sport was there, every country was there.”
For Andric, the community aspect of this, her first ever multi-sport event, meant everything. Athletes from 113 federations, competing in 18 different sports, filled seven separate athletes’ neighbourhoods modeled closely off Olympic villages.
Around the dining hall, Andric describes, university athletes exchanged commemorative delegation pins like trading cards, where our metallic maple leaf was an oddly hot commodity. She estimates that she collected more than 30 from around the world.
“I saved one Canadian one for the memories,” she promises.
There was something terribly official about that bustling neighbourhood with everyone proudly sporting their credentials around their necks. It made these Games — where Andric won one of Canada’s 11 medals — feel extra special.
“You feel like an athlete first and foremost,” explains the competitor from Phoenix Taekwondo.
Over the course of the nine-day event, Andric only fought three times over the span of about five hours. International taekwondo scorecards, where scores are awarded by round, have a way of obscuring the true competitiveness of fights, signals the recent University of Ottawa biomedical health science graduate.
She won both her rounds against Kazakhstan’s Nuray Khussainova in the quarter-finals, for example, even though it was just a single point that seperated them. In that fight, Khussainova was content to settle for a low-scoring affair, hoping to catch Andric off her guard with a series of crescent kicks aimed at the head.
A younger, more hotheaded Andric might’ve resigned herself to something like a slugfest, hoping to end the fight as soon as possible. Having moved up a weight class, being forced to contend with bigger fighters, she has learned to be a little more conservative. Andric did well to avoid those kicks, worth three points per blow, and to make use of her speed at key junctures.
“It doesn’t matter that I beat her by so much or so little. What matters is that I’m beating her,” underlines Andric, who ensured her place on the podium with the quarter-final win following an earlier decisive win over Italy’s Giulia Maggiore.
Things didn’t get any easier in the semi-finals, where Andric faced off against a considerably taller fighter in China’s Jiani Xing. Andric immediately got the impression Xing had studied her highlight tape. She used her reach to effectively hem Andric to the outside, striking safely from a distance.
Another relatively low-scoring bout, it was Andric’s only fight at FISU that was live streamed to an audience. Xing, the eventual gold medalist in the 67kg category, managed to blank her through two rounds.
“When I got into the ring with her, I lost a bit of confidence,” Andric admits. “Being live streamed, on stage, under the lights… it was just more pressure.”
That was Andric’s final match of the individual competition, with both athletes defeated in the semi-finals awarded bronze medals. Her time at FISU shouldn’t have been over yet, however. Three days later, Andric was supposed to join Sofie Nicholson and Josipa Kafadar in Team Kyrougi – a tag team event where teammates in different weight classes go toe-to-toe against other federations.
It would have been a pleasant symbolic reconciliation between Andric and Kafadar, old acquaintances who unhappily found themselves on opposite sides of an arbitration hearing in a decision that ultimately held Andric back from the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.
A hamstring injury Andric sustained during the 67kg tournament got gradually worse and worse, forcing Canada to withdraw. Working actively with her physio, Andric is hoping for a speedy recovery before heading to North Carolina next week for a joint training camp with USA Taekwondo.
“When I’m fighting, my adrenaline is up, so the pain is a lot lower,” she explains. “If my leg isn’t broken or something then yeah, I will fight.”
Andric maintains she has a ways to go before she’ll feel genuinely comfortable in her adopted weight class. Still, she’s pleased with how she did. Representing Canada wasn’t new for her, but in Essen, something felt fundamentally different.
The moment Andric stepped onto the podium to don her bronze medal, everything faded away. There’s a strange clarity brought upon by unbridled climactic joy. Gold, silver, bronze or zinc alloy pins hanging on a wall – little hunks of metal might encapsulate everything you’ve been fighting for.
Andric was holding back tears.
“It felt like everything I worked for over the years came together in that moment,” she highlights. “A lot of people after were telling me to soak up [these] moments because those are the moments you remember.”
Swimmer Ashley McMillan wins bronze in women’s 200 m IM
Andric was one of seven Ottawa athletes who represented Canada at the July 16-27 FISU Games, and one of two medallists.
Greater Ottawa Kingfish product Ashley McMillan of the University of Southern California won the bronze medal in the women’s 200-metre individual medley competition.
McMillan was in fourth place after the opening 50 m of butterfly, before jumping ahead into second thanks to a strong backstroke leg. McMillan kept pace with the two Americans in the lead, holding off Italian Chiara Della Corte for the final spot on the podium.
“It was amazing. It’s just a culmination of the whole team’s efforts, and I’m super excited I got to be on the podium today,” McMillan said via U Sports. “I took some risks and tried something new today, and went out a little bit faster. It was great to be out there competing, everyone in that field is amazing.”
Her bronze was Canada’s first FISU medal in the pool since 2019.
“Getting to represent Canada as well as my university is super special,” added McMillan, who also placed fifth in the 100 m backstroke, sixth in the 4×100 m freestyle relay, ninth in the 4×100 m medley relay and 19th in the 50 m breaststroke.
Also in women’s swimming, the University of Florida’s Julie Brousseau reached five finals, placing fourth in the 400 m freestyle, fifth in the 4×200 m free relay, sixth in the 4×100 m free relay, seventh in the 200 m free, and eighth in the 800 m free.
Three uOttawa Gee-Gees competed in athletics. David Moulongou helped the Canadian men’s 4×400 m relay team to a sixth-place performance and just missed the men’s 400 m hurdles semi-finals by one to finish 17th overall, while Doyin Ogunremi was 31st overall in the women’s 200 m and Jessica Gyamfi was 14th in the women’s shot put and did not register a distance in the discus.
In badminton, Humber College’s Sherry Wu was knocked out of the mixed doubles competition in the first round as she and partner Kiran Miraj lost to Poland 15-8, 15-7.