Olympic Games Vancouver 2010 – Sochi 2014

Medical profession lures former Olympians

Burnaby’s Lise Leveille, a gymnast at the Sydney Games, joins a growing number of B.C. athletes who became doctors

The skills Lise Leveille required as an Olympic gymnast — hand-eye coordination, flexibility, limb dexterity–will serve her well in the next phase of her professional life: orthopedic surgeon.

Such doctors, after all, make their living hammering, sawing, chiselling and drilling. It’s why they’re known in medical circles as the “carpenters” of the profession. Their work in the operating room is physically demanding, often exhausting and always precise.

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