Anastasia Bucsis and Charlie were in the Sochi McDonald’s, and there were athletes everywhere — big, small, all colours, all shapes. Anastasia and Charlie had finished their Olympic events, so they were sharing a celebratory McFlurry and using one spoon, and something in Anastasia triggered. She looked around. What would happen if someone noticed? Would someone know they were a couple? Was it OK?

“(The COC) said we would be protected,” said Bucsis, a 25-year-old speed skater from Calgary who finished 28th at the 2014 Olympics in Sochi. “(But) we were very careful in how we conducted ourselves.”

Charlie was Charline Labonté, a goaltender for Canada’s women’s hockey team. They had been together for about eight months and were happy. Bucsis came out in 2011 and made it public in 2013 in advance of Sochi after Russia introduced legislation making gay propaganda — which could mean even speaking positively of homosexuality — a crime. There was an outcry, but everybody went to Sochi anyway, Canada included. Other than the U.S. Olympic Committee, which pointedly sent high-profile gay athletes and officials as part of their official delegation, there was a silence on the issue. For some people, that was hard.

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Nine months later, the Canadian Olympic Committee is poised to become a leader rather than one of the silent crowd. On Tuesday it will announce a far-reaching agreement with You Can Play and Egale, two of North America’s most respected anti-homophobia groups. There will be training for Olympians and support if Olympians want to come out. As well, some Olympians will carry the message of tolerance and equality to schools across Canada. It is the most wide-reaching such agreement by a national Olympic committee, and not by a little.

“What started as maybe a video, or a little help with LGBT issues, became something that’s never really been seen before or done before in sport in general, let alone in Olympic sports,” says Patrick Burke, co-founder of You Can Play.

“There is no other program like this. There is nothing like this when it comes to athletes taking on LGBT issues. You talk about the idea that we are going to train dozens of Olympic athletes to become experts on LGBT issues — even if they’re LGBT themselves, they still need training on how to express it — and then sending them into schools. There is nothing like that being done in the sports world. We’ve never had an organization put this type of commitment forward.”

Olympic kayaker Adam van Koeverden, who has been pushing this issue as vice-chair the COC’s athletes council, says: “The greatest part of this is the Egale arm of it, sending athletes into schools and giving them a chance to be mentors for young kids. When you do school visits — and I’ve done hundreds — you need something to talk about other than yourself.”

Olympic swimmer Mark Tewksbury, who came out in 1998 and served as Canada’s chef de mission for the 2012 Olympics in London, says he’s delighted by the initiative.

“The older I’ve gotten the more I realize that it isn’t up to the gay athletes to come out. It’s up to the organizations to create the environment where people feel safe to be themselves,” Tewksbury says. “And that’s something worth thinking about. Before something’s a non-issue, it’s an issue. Before you’re the same, you have to be different for a while.

“I think that Sochi pushed this issue. And Canada responded.”

Sochi was not Canada’s finest hour on LGBT issues. On the same day that Russian President Vladimir Putin was greeted with refined diplomacy by the Americans, he was treated like a celebrity at Canada House in Sochi, embraced by COC president Marcel Aubut and cheered by the Canadians there as though it was a rally. We weren’t just polite, we were adoring.

“The conversion around these issues was not a comfortable one for us to stand back from,” says COC chief executive Chris Overholt. “It was difficult. We thought that we were better served to focus on the mission at that time, and we promised ourselves we would come back to this when the time was right.”

“There’s always that silver lining to those difficult things,” says Tewksbury. “This is the silver lining.”

For Bucsis, that silver lining came none too soon. She struggled with coming out: she is Catholic and conservative, and she didn’t know who to talk to. She had a great family, wonderful friends, and nobody who would really understand. She felt so alone.

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She says that when she did come out she went to Cara Button, the life services manager at the Canadian Sports Institute.

“She’s like a second mom to me, and I said, ‘Cara, I’m really struggling,’ ” says Bucsis, who is now studying at McGill. “You don’t know this, no one knows this, but I’m gay. And I have no gay friends. I’m so lonely, I’m so anxious, and I need to connect with someone. Because I’m surrounded by a million friends, but the fact that all of them are straight means I didn’t have an outlet to share in this struggle.”

She recalls Button telling her: “ ‘I’ve been working here for eight or 10 years, and you’re the only person who’s come out to me.’ ”

“There is a huge, huge need for this (initiative),” says Bucsis, “and honestly if I would have gotten this help or this support I would have been much healthier off the ice, and I think faster on the ice too, because I really do believe that what happens in your personal life creeps up on your sporting life as well.

“It’s much needed, and it’s going to help a lot of people. I came 28th at the Olympics. I’m not a superstar just yet. I would never look at this for fame, or as a platform, or anything. But I know what’s right is right and what’s wrong is zero.”

Bucsis was diagnosed with clinical depression in 2013. She believes a lot of it had to do with her struggle to accept who she was. Her medication dimmed her motor skills, just a little, but the spectre of Sochi made her determined to keep going, to show up.

“It actually gave me more of a fighting spirit, because I don’t think you should live your life with fear,” she says. “Those laws — God almighty, I couldn’t imagine living every day like that.”

Tewksbury shares her sentiments. Asked if this kind of program might have helped him, he laughs.

“Are you kidding? Do you want to know? It’s hard to understand the depths of loneliness,” Tewksbury says. “I would have at least known there was a word for what I was feeling. It was that primitive.

“And now, it’s like OK, I’m not alone.”

You Can Play will use this agreement as a template to approach other Olympic committees and hopes that Canada’s leadership on the issue resonates. Now that the IOC has enshrined specific LGBT language into its anti-discrimination section of the Olympic bid contract — if a little vaguely — Tewksbury doesn’t think we will see another Sochi. We’ll see. But this is a leap forward.

“We believe in it, and when you believe in it you can live it,” says Overholt. “We’re ready.”