Camping out with some of Canada's finest
The Olympic season is now upon us, and Skate Canada's annual high performance camp is a first step toward many big moments that lie ahead for this icy crew
There were as a certain symmetry to the street sign that appeared on my route to Skate Canada’s high performance camp earlier this week. ‘Olympic Drive,’ it said, and it seemed rather appropriate given what’s at stake in the months to come.
No doubt it was front of mind, or very close to it, for many of the athletes who gathered at Paramount Fine Foods Centre in Mississauga, Ont., for the camp, with the primary objective to get some early feedback on new (or not so new) programs performed in front of a panel of judges brought in for the occasion.
It was also a time for some end-of-summer team building, but the simulation described above was the thing that produced the most valuable pieces of information to take home from this annual exercise. For many of them, it’s off to Challenger Series events first, then the Grand Prix Series to follow. Yeah, it’s truly game on now.
Wednesday was designated as media day, which gave folks like your humble correspondent time to gather some intel on what skaters have been working on since we last saw them in person. And what goals they’ll chase in the months to come.
With that in mind, a selection of what we heard and learned …
It’s definitely no joke
Aleksa Rakic admits he did a double take when he first heard the news.
“My first thought was ‘What day is it?’ I thought it was an April Fool’s joke. But I was like, ‘It’s August. It can’t be,’” he said of his initial thoughts on the return of Keegan Messing to competitive skating.
(some perspective here: you may recall that back on the actual April Fool’s Day, Skate Canada put out an ‘announcement’ on social media that four-time World champion Kurt Browning was making a comeback at age 59. Needless to say, that was far from reality).
Reigning Canadian champion Roman Sadovsky took it much more matter of factly.
“I just feel like it’s something he would do. I wasn’t even surprised a little bit,” he said of the moment when he first learned of Messing’s return, adding “it doesn’t change my plan.”
But it certainly was the real deal when Messing — sporting a few flecks of grey in his hair — stood in front of us media types and admitted that yes, this wasn’t exactly on his bingo card when he first called time on his competitive career back in 2023 (“I really did think that was it,” he says now). But something changed back in December during the holiday version of the Stars On Ice tour, when he and old rival Elladj Balde were playing around during a practice session.
“It was like, ‘what if I could still do a quad?’ And I went off and popped a quad toe. It planted the seed in my head,” said the 33-year-old Messing. “Wow, I’m skating really good. The Axels are solid. Toes are good. The only thing I don’t have is the stamina to do the multiple jumps over again.”
The seed began to blossom during SOI’s regular tour in the spring, and eventually he told longtime coach Ralph Burghart that he wanted to attempt a comeback. So it was that the duo worked diligently during the summer in Anchorage, Alaska, getting all of his jumps back in order and building up that aforementioned stamina.
“It started snowballing until man, this is plausible,” he said.
While the 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympics are the obvious target and main motivation for this return, the road to get there is a long one. So yes, that means qualifying for nationals through the Sectionals route.
As Messing put it, “when you’re retired, you have to work your way back up from the bottom. I don’t think I’ve been to Sectionals since my first year qualifying for Canada (he previously competed for the United States). That would have been in the fall of 2014 for 2015 nationals.”
There is more work to do even before that. First, he needs to record a Skate Canada benchmark score (it’s 219 overall for men) to be sent out internationally, and he’ll attempt to get that at a domestic event in Texas at the end of September. Get past that hurdle (and given that he’s scored in the 270s in the past, it’s most likely) and the next chore is earning the technical minimums that are needed to skate in Milan or the ensuing World Championships in Prague.
Grand Prix events? Even Messing knows that is highly improbable.
“There is little to zero chance of me getting a Grand Prix this year,” he admitted. “Unless the stars align and the heavens open up, I don’t think a Grand Prix is in the cards for this season.”
Messing has heard the talk that perhaps his return is unfair to other skaters who have been working for years to have a shot at Canada’s lone men’s berth for Milan. He not only gets it, he admits it weighed on him as he pondered whether to come out of retirement. But something else more powerful weighed even heavier in the end.
“I did not want to take a spot from someone who has been working for it. That was something big that was weighing on my mind,” he said. “At the end of the day, the decision came down to ‘no regrets.’ That’s what fuelled the final decision on coming back or not.
“It got to the point where I felt like if I did not go for this, I would live the rest of my life feeling like: ‘What if I did this.’ That is honestly the bottom line, honestly why I came back. But I honestly did not want to look back on this moment and have regrets about not taking the chance.”
Messing is bringing two new programs into the season, crafted by his longtime choreographer Lance Vipond (he stayed with Vipond, who is based in Brantford, Ont., while he trained for two weeks at the nearby Hamilton Skating Club before coming to this week’s camp). The short is being skated to “On The Dark Side,” by Corey Taylor, while the music for the free is “The Mountain Song,” by TopHouse.
(you may recall he skated to that music during Browning’s farewell Stars On Ice tour back in 2023. Give it a listen and you’ll think it’s kinda perfect for him).
As we wrote last week, all of this changes the dynamic for the men’s event at Canadian nationals in January in Gatineau, Que. It’s the kind of thing that leaves someone like Rakic with mixed feelings.
“Now the Olympic spot is even harder to get. I would definitely consider him a front-runner. But also, I’m happy to see him back,” he said. “He has such a great energy … It’s definitely a positive for the sport. So that’s nice.”
Added Stephen Gogolev: “It’s just going to be more competitive this season. I think we’re all going to push each other to do our best.”
We’ve always assumed this is a one-year thing, but …
“When I came back, yeah, it’s only (for) one year. But what if it is not?” said Messing, leaving that question unanswered, at least for now.
Saskatoon calling
One of the hotter discussion topics during these sizzling summer months has surrounded those TBD spots for Canadian skaters at Skate Canada International, which runs Oct. 31-Nov. 2 at SaskTel Centre in Saskatoon, Sask. More specifically, it is what is going to be done about the women’s berth that sits vacant at the moment (Maddie Schizas and Sara-Maude Dupuis are already in the field).
A few thoughts to hopefully clarify all of this:
There are some wondering why certain women not on the national team (Kaiya Ruiter, Uliana Shiryaeva and Fee-Ann Landry) were invited to HP camp and others (most notably Gabrielle Daleman and Breken Brezden) were not. Here is the word on that from Skate Canada: Only skaters currently on the alternate list for Grand Prix events were invited, and that is based on achieving a top 75 score internationally last season. However …
We’ve also been told that the score criteria mentioned above doesn’t necessarily apply for filling a spot at a home Grand Prix. Meaning skaters such as Daleman and Brezden are still in the running for consideration for that spot.
Finally, nothing is that area is being decided this week. The expectation is that we won’t hear an announcement about who is getting that coveted berth until later on in September.
In ice dance, meanwhile, that TBD for Skate Canada is going to be determined rather simply. Three teams — Alicia Fabbri/Paul Ayer, Marie-Jade Lauriault/Romain Le Gac and Lily Hensen/Nathan Lickers — are being sent to Kinoshita Group Cup, a Challenger Series event set for Sept. 5-7 in Osaka, Japan. The highest finisher there goes to Saskatoon.
“It’s an exciting little competition within the competition,” said Ayer.
Fabbri and Ayer are already slated to do NHK Trophy in Japan, which falls the week after SCI. Lauriault and Le Gac have the Series opening Grand Prix de France on their docket. This year, Skate Canada is the circuit’s third event.
A leap into history?
The list of women who have landed the triple Axel in competition is a rather exclusive one — just 27 in total, beginning with Japan’s Midori Ito landing the first one way back in 1988 (that’s 37 years ago, if you don’t want to do the math).
Sara-Maude Dupuis says she wants to be the next one to join that club. And the first Canadian woman to do it at an international event.
The 20-year-old Montrealer says that big jump will be the big upgrade to her free program, which is the same one she used last season, skated to music from the “Human” soundtrack. And she’s sounds confident about pulling off the “riskiest element” in that routine.
“I’m trying it for the first time this week (at high performance camp) and then hopefully it goes well and we can include it for the rest of the season,” she said. “It’s doing okay (in practice), I can do it every day. It’s still not as (consistent) as my other jumps, which I think is normal, and we’re working on getting it there.”
(UPDATE: This video shows she’s closer to it than that suggests).
Dupuis first landed the 3 1/2-revolution jump at 16 years old, “which was a big surprise. I was training it for fun, and I didn’t think I would land it, and I did. But then I tried to make it consistent and I couldn’t, so I lost it for four years.”
But over this off-season, she decided to take another run at it.
“I was like, okay, let’s try to get it back, give it a go. I tried it on the harness a few times, it was feeling really great and I told my harness coach ‘I think I can do it on my own.’ And I gave it a go, like 10 or 20 tries, and within two days it was back clean. I was really surprised that I could do this … I’m happy now that it’s good enough to compete.”
During a summer competition, Dupuis tested it out during a warmup “as kind of a test to see how I would react to it under pressure, and I landed it both times. So I was like, why not? Why not put it in the program.”
The other big “new” for Dupuis will be her short program, which will be skated to Madonna’s “Ray of Light.” It might be suggested those three words perfectly match her upbeat personality, which is kinda the thought behind it.
“I've always wanted to do a more upbeat program, because I’ve had two dark programs the last two years. And I feel like I need something that matches my personality,” she said. “I have a friend, an ice dancer, and she saw my show program to Madonna and she was like, why don’t you skate to something like this?
“I pitched it to my choreographer David (Wilson), who sent me the song ‘Ray of Light’ and he said you always wanted to do a program to that song. I loved it right away, and I’m really excited for this. It’s a fun change, really fun.”
Right where they want to be
We hit on this thought a little bit way back during 2025 Worlds in Boston, and we brought the subject up again with Deanna Stellato-Dudek and Maxime Deschamps. The idea that, after a season carrying the burden of being World champions, they’re much more comfortable being back in that hunter mode.
The ageless Stellato-Dudek (she’s 42 now) hardly disagreed with that sentiment, grinning at first and then chuckling a bit over it all.
“The amount you get asked (about defending a title) and the amount that it’s talked about … it’s very hard to tune it out,” she said of the weight she and Deschamps carried throughout the season, which ended with a fifth-place finish in Boston. “You know, our long (program) was really not too bad; it was our short that really took us out of it.
“So I think coming from behind and having our competitors think that we’re not going to be trouble this year pleases me to no end, because I love to shock people.”
Added Deschamps: “It’s a great position for us, particularly.”
For the coming season, Stellato-Dudek and Deschamps turned to renowned Canadian choreographer Lori Nichol to create two new programs. The short will be skated to “Carmina Burana,” the long will be accompanied by what Stellato-Dudek calls “the magical Spanish music of Vicente Amigo.”
“(Nichol) made two magical masterpieces,” Stellato-Dudek said.
The duo aren’t waiting long to get the new programs in front of international judges. They are entered in the John Nicks Pairs Challenge International, a Challenger Series event that runs Tuesday and Wednesday in New York.
Here we go again
You knew we couldn’t get through a morning of interviews without the subject of music clearance rights — one of the off-season’s hottest topics — rearing its head once again.
Here’s the latest one, this involving Lauriault and Le Gac. They talked enthusiastically about a new rhythm dance, built around two tunes (“Thunder” and “Cream”) by the late and oh so great Prince (yeah, I was a big fan back in the day). Or, as Lauriault put it, this is their rhythm dance “for now.”
They know it will eventually have to change, and that’s the rub.
“Prince’s music is amazing and I feel like everybody knows that, but this feels really special. When we first heard ‘Thunder,’ it was really like ‘oh my God, we have to skate to that music,’” said Lauriault. “So we were really happy, we were happy with the choreography we did with Romain (Haguenauer) in Montreal, happy with the costumes. It was just music rights.
“We got the message two weeks before Lake Placid (a summer competition in July where they earned a silver medal) that it would not work for Prince at the Games. Not surely, but there is a high probability (it won’t).”
It’ll mean switching to a new rhythm dance sometime later in the fall, but Lauriault and Le Gac are trying to see the bright side of that.
“We will be kind of sad to let (Prince) go, but at the same time, we need to take it as a refresher,” said Lauriault. “Sometimes the year can be long, especially if we have good goals for this year. We want the year to be as long as it can and having that new short dance maybe in the middle of the year gives it something new.
“So we’re going to try to take it like this. We have a couple of Plan Bs that we have to check with Skate Canada, but we’re getting there.”
There are no issues with the free dance, which is a Cleopatra-themed program. That’s good news for the duo, who shifted their training base this summer from their longtime home at the Ice Academy of Montreal to its satellite club in the London, Ont., area, where they work with Scott Moir, Madison Hubbell and Adrian Diaz.
Load management
It’s a term that originally came from another sport, but one might suggest “load management” has been the story of the summer so far from Katherine Medland Spence.
The 2025 national bronze medallist has been dealing with some nagging injuries that kept her out of planned competitions in the summer months (Skate Ontario Sectional Series events and Cranberry Cup in the Boston area). It’s the kind of maintenance that helped lead to her highly successful 2024-25 season, highlighted by a gold medal at Warsaw Cup in her international debut, that came into play again.
“They’re just overuse injuries from previous seasons that were kind of exacerbated through the show season last year and then through summer, we just tried to get training going, but just couldn’t really build and training was kind of inconsistent,” said the 25-year-old from Ottawa. “So we looked at how we were doing things, made a plan to prioritize recovery and rehab and physio(therapy), and now I’m getting a little bit more progress going, so that’s good.”
Medland Spence is on the entry list for Nebelhorn Trophy, a Challenger Series event set for Sept. 25-27 in Oberstdorf, Germany. She and her coaching team of Ken and Danielle Rose believe their current summer strategy — a lesson from last season — will pay off in better competitive efforts down the road.
“Summer training wasn’t working, and we thought it was better to give myself more time instead of trying to rush to get prepared (for summer events),” she explained. “Last season was all about following a plan, and the season so far is all about adapting a plan and just rolling with the punches and not trying to get too caught up with what I can’t do, and focusing on where I’m at and doing the best I can with what I’m able to do in the moment.”
Medland Spence is keeping her long program from last season, skated to “Clair de Lune/Photograph” by Cody Fry. Her new short program is set to “With One Look,” from the “Sunset Boulevard” soundtrack (which started out as a show program).
They’re golden again
We haven’t yet reached the end of August, but the Canadian pair team of Ava Kemp and Yohnatan Elizarov have already booked their tickets to the Junior Grand Prix Final in December in Nagoya, Japan (they’re the first skaters in any discipline to do so).
Back-to-back gold medals will surely do that for you.
And it was the same script for the second straight week: trail by a bit after the short program, win by a lot after the free program was skated. This time, the final margin in Ankara, Turkey, was 13.29 points for the Winnipeg natives.
“We are obviously very happy!” said Elizarov, per a Skate Canada news release. “We worked hard to get to this level, and even though it’s mentally difficult to compete two weekends in a row, we were able to overcome the stress to win a second gold medal.”
Added Kemp: “We had the same mindset as last week (in Riga). We knew what we had to do to repeat our accomplishment. We really like our programs, and I think we’re learning a lot by doing them.”
Once again, Kemp and Elizarov — who train at the Granite Club in Toronto under the direction of Kevin Dawe and Jeff Buttle — put together a string of personal best scores in earning the victory. Those new highs are now 63.94 for the short program (skated to “Succession,” by Nicholas Britell), 115.49 for the free skate (to the familiar strains of Claude Debussy’s “Clair de Lune”) and 179.43 overall.
The one difference this week? Kemp and Elizarov had some Canadian company on the podium. That’s because Julia Quattrocchi and Etienne Lacasse skated to a bronze medal (146.67) in their international debut as a pair team.
Around the boards
There was more hardware for Canadian skaters at the JGP event in Ankara. Charlie Anderson and Cayden Dawson, who train at the I.AM satellite campus near London, Ont., under the direction of Scott Moir and his team, produced a silver medal in ice dance in their first overseas assignment. Their 149.79 overall total was 5.35 points back of Ukrainian gold medallists Iryna Pidgaina and Artem Koval, who were fourth at last season’s Junior Grand Prix Final. Just missing the podium, by less than two points, were Quebec-based Aurea Cincon-Debout and Earl Jesse Celestino, who wound up fourth … The JGP Series heads to Varese, Italy, next week. Canadian entries include David Bondar (men), Ksenia Krouzkevitch (women), and Summer Homick and Nicholas Buelow (ice dance) … Besides the ice dancers referenced above, Canadians you’ll see at Kinoshita Cup include Aleksa Rakic and national women’s champion Maddie Schizas.