Terry Leibel is retiring from sportscasting, ending a 28-year career that has spanned seven Olympic Games on CBC, NBC and TSN. Liebel — the first woman to win a sportscasting Gemini Award — announced this week that she will retire this summer, filing her final report from the Spruce Meadows equestrian center in Calgary in June.

‘We are losing a great talent,’ said Scott Moore, executive director of CBC Sports, in a statement. ‘Terry was the complete package — not only is she a former athlete, she hosted our Olympic broadcasts, called play by play for a variety of sports and provided analysis for equestrian. She brought a diversity to her broadcasting work that is rare in the business today.’

A member of Canada’s national equestrian team in the 1970s, Leibel joined CBC in 1980, later moving to TSN where she was the first woman to host a national sports program, Sportsdesk. She later returned to the Ceeb, working with Brian Williams, and also delivered play-by-play for NBC from the 1992 Summer Games in Barcelona. She also covered Summer and Winter Games in Atlanta, Nagano, Sydney, Salt Lake City, Athens and Torino.

‘I was afforded an opportunity that had never been afforded to another woman at the time, and I am proud of doing something that had never been done before,’ says Leibel. ‘It took male TV executives with a vision to say ‘It’s time for a woman.”