Deanna Stellato-Dudek, Canada’s 42-year-old Olympian, has noticed one key difference between herself and the majority of fellow figure skaters.
“Sometimes I see the girls at the break have an ice-cream cone on a Wednesday,” Stellato-Dudek said in a telephone interview last month. “I’m like, ‘That must be nice, I don’t know what that’s like.’ That’s called retirement for me. That’s not a current option.”
But while the teenagers and 20-somethings might be able to enjoy an extra chocolate or vanilla scoop without thinking twice, Stellato-Dudek is just fine laying off the calories to get where she needs to be.
Twenty years after an Olympics in Italy she originally hoped to compete in as a singles skater for the U.S., Stellato-Dudek is now in the country preparing to represent Canada in pairs with 34-year-old Maxime Deschamps. The Milano Cortina 2026 short program is Sunday (1:45 p.m. ET / 10:45 a.m. PT, CBC Gem, Sportsnet+) with the free skate Monday.
Stellato-Dudek’s roller-coaster journey included an unexpected — potentially horrible — twist late last month, when she suffered a head injury during a fall in training in Quebec. The duo dropped out of the team event to start the Olympics, but Stellato-Dudek and Deschamps were cleared to compete in pairs earlier this week.
As a teenager climbing the singles ranks in the Chicago area, Stellato-Dudek couldn’t have even imagined something like what occurred in the last few weeks. Life experience can be beneficial in pressure-packed situations, however.
“You have to be more disciplined to be able to do this (at 42),” said Stellato-Dudek, who will become the oldest woman to compete in Olympic figure skating since Ethel Muckelt, also 42, represented Great Britain in 1928.
“But being smart and having ideas and being creative, that’s a gigantic asset. Being able to self-diagnose certain things, watch videos, go back and compare and contrast, stuff like that — that’s a huge asset to have as an adult. Whereas as a kid, you’re used to having somebody else say it for you.”
That Stellato-Dudek is on Olympic ice in 2026 is a great triumph in itself, regardless of the final result.
A series of hip injuries in her teens derailed her singles career in 2000, erasing any thoughts of a run to the 2006 Turin Olympics. Instead of building off a silver medal at the 1999 junior worlds, Stellato-Dudek entered the working world as an aesthetician.
Sixteen years after her last competitive jump on ice, Stellato-Dudek was at a workplace retreat in 2016 when a seemingly low-stakes team-building activity changed her world.
“There were notecards on the table (where each person would pick one up and have to) answer a question,” she said. “Some of the notecards were really benign, like ‘what’s your favourite colour?’ or something like that. But for whatever reason, the card I picked up was, ‘what would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?’ I was so tired from my (workplace) presentation (earlier at the retreat) that I just blurted out ‘Oh, I’d win an Olympic gold medal.’ But I hadn’t skated in 16 years. I kind of said it and learned back in my chair in disbelief at myself
“I thought about it for two weeks before I asked my mom if she had kept my 16-year-old boots and blades in the basement.”
After dusting off the skates and going for a whirl, Stellato-Dudek had three seasons of moderate success in the pairs division with an American partner before looking for a new teammate. It wasn’t easy. She said she contacted all the coaches she knew before finally getting a recommendation to go to Montreal to hit the ice for a tryout with Deschamps. Sure, he skated for a different country, but changing nations isn’t a huge rarity in some Olympic sports.
“It was pretty clear from the beginning there was something special there,” Stellato-Dudek said. “We were not a team that came together and was perfect right away. We’ve always had to work. It’s been part of mine and Max’s journey. We’ve always had to work, we feel, twice as hard as everybody else to get the same result. It was pretty kismet from the start.”
The breakthrough came in 2022-23, when they won the Canadian championships and finished fourth at worlds. In 2024, Stellato-Dudek and Deschamps were on top of the world championship podium in Montreal.
“We are really hard workers,” Deschamps said. “We are also, I always say, the yin and the yang. I always try to bring the positive to the team, the fun. Deanna is always more like the serious one. It’s a good balance toward each other. That’s what makes us good. You always need balance.”
It hasn’t been smooth sailing since the worlds triumph. After Stellato-Dudek was granted Canadian citizenship in December 2024, making her eligible for the Olympics, the pair’s results took a downward turn.
A fifth-place finish at 2025 worlds was followed by a last-place letdown (sixth) at the 2025 Grand Prix final. After a runner-up showing to Lia Pereira and Trennt Michaud at the Canadian championships last month, Stellato-Dudek suffered the head injury.
As such, Stellato-Dudek and Deschamps no longer are considered podium favourites.
“For sure, we’re actually underdogs,” Deschamps said before the injury. “At the same time, we can just go there and really just enjoy ourselves and do our best and try to put the pressure on the others instead of put pressure on us.”
While Deschamps has announced he’ll retire from competition after this season, Stellato-Dudek is keeping her options open.
Maybe she’ll keep competing, maybe she won’t, but one way or another she wants to stay involved in the sport.
“I don’t think there are any limits in life,” she said. “The only limits you have are the ones you set on yourself.”
It’s an attitude that has led Stellato-Dudek to the biggest stage of her sport, two decades later than originally planned.
“I’ve always kept the video of my first ever long program with my first partner, just to kind of have a memory of how far I’ve come on this Olympic journey and how I never gave up,” she said. “I’m going to continue to not give up as the Olympics draw closer and closer. I hope other people take strength from it to know that if you really persevere and if you go through hard times but you continue through them, you can do this amazing thing that has been a lifelong dream of yours, which for me has been always been going to the Olympics.
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