It's not all just fun and Games

The road to the 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympics is about to pick up steam as we near the halfway point of the quadrennial. So it's a crucial year ahead for Canadian skaters

A few days after the Canadian figure skating championships back in January in Oshawa, Ontario, I had sort of a ‘recap conversation,’ if you will, with a work colleague about what we had just witnessed at Tribute Communities Centre in the heart of the city (a fabulous little venue for that competition).

Of course, the champions were discussed, but that wasn’t the overriding feeling that we brought home from that event. Rather, it was the enthusiasm we both felt from some of the fresh new blood we saw on the ice that weekend. Young talents that gave us greater hope for what’s to come in Canadian skating than we had felt in a few years. And it was largely justified.

Now, while potential can be a wonderful thing to contemplate, at some point it becomes time to turn that promise into performance. And that might be one of things that I think about most as the 2023-24 season looms ever larger on the horizon (hey, we’re in August already!). While there are summer competitions starting up, those events have always seemed like “pre-season figure skating” to me — a nice early sneak peek at what’s ahead, but you take the results with a bit of a grain of salt (it’s an early measuring stick for the skaters in terms of performance level. A very early one). The real deal begins toward the end of this month with the launch of the Junior Grand Prix Series, with senior internationals and the Grand Prix circuit following right behind in September and October.

The season to come marks a rather important tentpole for everyone involved. By next spring, we’ll be halfway through the quadrennial leading up to the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics in 2026. It’s also a momentous time for skating in Canada, with the World Championships coming to Montreal in March 2024 (four years after the same event in the same locale was shelved by the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic).

So yes, it’s a particularly exciting season coming up for skaters in this country. We should start to have a good idea of where Canada stands on the road to Italy in 2026 by the time the lights go out on Worlds in March at Montreal’s Bell Centre (which I can only imagine will be a spectacular setting for this competition).

What follows is a quick look at all four disciplines as we head into the new season, with a thought or two on what we might see in the months to come. We’ll have a little more to say about some of the names mentioned below in this space down the road. But let’s start with this primer of sorts.

MEN

No discipline in Canada has had a longer, richer history than this one. From Donald Jackson to Patrick Chan (with a number of luminaries in between. I’m sure you know who they are), we’ve been blessed with many World champions and Olympic medallists in men’s skating. Which is why it’s a little strange to write this sentence: Canada hasn’t had a World champion in men’s skating since Chan won his third straight title in 2013 in London, Ontario. It’s a drought that his reached a full decade now, longer than in any category.

(If you’re wondering, Kaetlyn Osmond was the last World champion from Canada, back in 2018 in Milan, Italy. That ended a 45-year stretch without a global title for this country’s women. In ice dance, the incomparable Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir struck gold for the third time in 2017; in pairs, Meagan Duhamel and Eric Redford were back-to-back winners in 2015 and 2016).

Anyways, back to the men …

It will be a changing of the guard of sorts at the top of the podium when the 2024 Canadian championships come to Calgary in January. The Keegan Messing show, as entertaining as it always was, has glided off into the Alaskan sunset after back-to-back national titles, leaving a relatively wide-open field to succeed him as Canadian champion. Of the four men named to Skate Canada’s national team for 2023-24 (Roman Sadovsky, Conrad Orzel, Wesley Chiu, Stephen Gogolev), only Sadovsky is a former national champion (2020). Orzel, under the direction of Ravi Walia in Edmonton, made a giant leap forward to the silver medal spot in Oshawa. Chiu has been on the podium the past two years. Gogolev is still trying to regain the form that made him a Junior Grand Prix champion in 2018 in Vancouver.

Like we said, this is wide open. We’ll see how this plays out on the road to Calgary, where the battle for the crown should be rather fierce.

GRAND PRIX ASSIGNMENTS

Skate America: Stephen Gogolev

Skate Canada: Wesley Chiu, Conrad Orzel, Roman Sadovsky

WOMEN

That future promise we spoke about earlier? This is the discipline we were speaking about more than any other. It could make for fascinating competition at the Markin MacPhail Centre at WinSport in Calgary.

At the top, it starts with Maddie Schizas, the diminutive 20-year-old who skates out of the Milton Skating Club just west of Toronto. While Schizas blew out the field by more than 27 points in winning her first Canadian title in 2022 in Ottawa, the margin was shaved all the way down to 7.11 when she repeated as Canadian champion in Oshawa. And it’s not that Schizas’ own score came down (the difference in the two winning scores was only about two points), but rather the young talents that are charging hard to close the gap behind her.

Start with Kaiya Ruiter, the 17-year-old from Calgary who won the free skate in Oshawa with a top-notch program filled with triple jumps. Back in 2020, there was a lot of buzz around Ruiter when she turned in a breath-taking performance to win the Canadian junior title as a 13-year-old. It’s taken awhile (blame COVID-19 and injuries), but now she’s started to make her mark in the senior ranks. A silver medal in her debut at that level at nationals was especially notable.

But wait, there’s more. Fiona Bombardier surely has the genes to be a top-level skater — her mother (Josie Chouinard) and father (Jean-Michel Bombardier) are both former Canadian champions — and the bronze medal she earned in Oshawa was a start in showing she’ll be a player at the senior level. Sara-Maude Dupuis is another skater on the rise worth tracking.

Yeah, this could be verrrry interesting when we get to Calgary in January.

GRAND PRIX ASSIGNMENTS

Skate Canada: Sara-Maude Dupuis, Kaiya Ruiter, Madeline Schizas

Cup of China: Madeline Schizas

ICE DANCE

Men’s skating has the much longer lineage in Canada, but there is no doubt which has been the country’s power discipline in recent times. That would be ice dance, in which Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier are the reigning World bronze medallists (and also stood on the third step of the podium in 2021). Since 2003, when Shae-Lynn Bourne and Victor Kraatz became the first Canadians ever to win a World ice dance crown, the red maple leaf has risen above the podium on 15 occasions at the global event (including three World titles by the magnificent Virtue and Moir, who were also two-time Olympic gold medallists). That’s a pretty stellar track record over the last two decades.

Odds are, that run of medals will continue next March in Montreal. Gilles and Poirier are back for another go, as are Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Nikolaj Soerensen, who claimed their first Canadian title in Oshawa (an event that Gilles and Poirier missed because of a health issue). The good news is, those teams placed third and fifth at last season’s World Championships in Saitama, Japan, meaning Canada is back up three ice dance spots for 2024 Worlds in Montreal.

That should by music to the ears of Marjorie Lajoie and Zachary Lagha, the Quebec-based team which came within a whisker of being Canadian champions in Oshawa (the margin of victory in the event was 0.60 points). They were 11th at Worlds two years ago and certainly have the potential to crack the top 10 this season.

Canada has a fourth solid ice dance entry in French transplants Marie-Jade Lariault and Romain Le Gac, who will be aiming to represent this country at Worlds for the first time (they have previous World and Olympic experience for their homeland). And there is still plenty of depth below them.

Perhaps the most intriguing arrivals to the mix are Nadiia Bashynska and Peter Beaumont, who had their finest season a year ago, claiming their first Canadian junior title and a gold medal at the Junior Grand Prix Final. No doubt Skate Canada sees them as big hopes for the future, and it’ll be interesting to see how much of an impact these two — who train alongside Gilles and Poirier — can make in the first season at the senior level.

GRAND PRIX ASSIGNMENTS

Skate America: Marjoie Lajoie/Zachary Lagha

Skate Canada: Alicia Fabbri/Paul Ayer; Piper Gilles/Paul Poirier; Molly Lanaghan/Dmitre Razgulajevs

Grand Prix de France: Laurence Fournier Beaudry/Nikolaj Soerensen; Marie-Jade Lauriault/Romain Le Gac

Cup of China: Piper Gilles/Paul Poirier; Marjoie Lajoie/Zachary Lagha

Grand Prix Espoo: Nadiia Bashynska/Peter Beaumont; Laurence Fournier Beaudry/Nikolaj Soerensen

NHK Trophy: Marie-Jade Lauriault/Romain Le Gac

PAIRS

Deanna Stellato-Dudek celebrated her 40th birthday back in June, but she and Maxime Deschamps enter another season as reigning Canadian pairs champions and fully intending to defend their title. It was part of a stellar breakout season by the duo, who won a pair of medals on the Grand Prix circuit (including gold in France; Stellato-Dudek became the oldest Grand Prix medallist ever along the way) and placed fourth at both the Grand Prix Final and World Championships. No reason to think there isn’t more to come from them next season.

No first-year team created more buzz than Lia Pereira and Trennt Michaud, who didn’t get together until near the end of last summer, but improved rapidly enough to finish sixth at the World Championships (where they also had the fourth-best free skate). The sky might just be the limit for this duo.

There are three Canadian pair spots on the line at Worlds, and Brooke McIntosh and Benjamin Mimar are squarely in the mix for one of them. In their first year as seniors, they claimed a bronze medal at NHK Trophy, earned the silver medal at Canadians and placed 11th in their Worlds debut. There’s lots to like here with this team, which is just getting started.

Another team to keep an eye on: Kelly Ann Laurin and Loucas Ethier, a Quebec duo who made a solid first impression at nationals in Oshawa, where they placed fourth.

GRAND PRIX ASSIGNMENTS

Skate America: Lia Pereira/Trennt Michaud

Skate Canada: Kelly Ann Laurin/Loucas Ethier; Brooke McIntosh/Benjamin Mimar; Deanna Stellato-Dudek/Maxime Deschamps

Grand Prix de France: Lia Pereira/Trennt Michaud

Cup of China: Deanna Stellato-Dudek/Maxime Deschamps

Grand Prix Espoo: Brooke McIntosh/Benjamin Mimar

NHK Trophy: Kelly Ann Laurin/Loucas Ethier

(ALL PHOTOS: Danielle Earl/Skate Canada)