#SCNats25: Some early thoughts on the road to Laval
The Canadian Championships are less than two weeks away and with that in mind, let's dig into a few of the storylines we'll be following when we get to Place Bell.
The calendar has flipped over to a new year and the arrival of 2025 means it’s time to officially begin the back half of this figure skating season. And for athletes from this country, their road resumes in less than two weeks, when the Canadian Championships come to Place Bell in Laval, Quebec.
It’s a venue that was used for Skate Canada International several years back and, in the wake of the highly successful 2024 World Championships, perhaps it’s fitting to bring some of that excitement back to the Montreal area. This rink is hardly the cavernous Bell Centre, to be sure, and we’re not exactly back in the heart of this great Canadian city. But that doesn’t mean Canada’s finest can’t generate some buzz a little further north in Laval.
And hey, the long-range weather forecast suggests the temperature won’t nose dive into the -30s like it did a year ago in Calgary, so that’s a win already, right? (at least the part of my brain that has yet to thaw out thinks so).
Another difference you’ll notice this year, whether you’re in Laval or not: for the first time in a number of years, the senior events aren’t jammed into Friday and Saturday. As was done at SCI in Halifax, competition will be spread over three days, with the women’s free program and free dance moved to Sunday (they’ve also done away with the gala, as in Halifax). It also makes for a lighter Friday for the seniors, with just the men’s and pairs short program in the evening, sandwiched around the synchro free programs.
So that’s some of the basic nuts and bolts of this event covered off (it also appears this may be a streaming only event for those watching from home, which would mirror what happened a year ago in Calgary). Now, as far as what may or may not happen on the ice … here’s a bit of an early primer for that, with more to come on Canadians in this space at the end of next week.
The most interesting event in Laval will be …
So, the easy call here would be ice dance, given that two of the entries at the Grand Prix Final came from the land of the red maple leaf. But let it not be said that we’re always taking the conventional route. We’ll discuss ice dance in a bit, but the discipline that intrigues us the most isn’t that one.
Rather, it’s the women’s competition that’s been top of mind here since we began pondering what we’re most looking forward to when we get to Place Bell. And a lot of that has to do with some of the goings on that occurred throughout the fall season when it comes to the Canadian women. Let’s just say our eyes have been opened a little wider about this field.
To dive in a little bit further on that … we’ll start in Halifax, where Maddie Schizas put on her finest display of skating in at least the past two seasons. The two-time Canadian champion posted the kind of overall score (190.04) that showed she can contend for a top-10 berth at the World Championships in Boston, assuming she gets there. And she’s also established herself as a favourite to regain her national crown.
Sure, we said some of those exact same things a year ago and well, we all know what happened in Calgary. And for two straight years now, reigning Canadian champion Kaiya Ruiter has shown she knows how to get it done at this competition, especially in the long program. So it will hardly be surprising if the Ottawa-born teenager works her way into title contention again.
But it’s that third podium spot that’s up for grabs and, with one glorious weekend of skating in Poland, Katherine Medland Spence threw her hat into the ring for that — and maybe more. The 24-year-old from Ottawa posted a 181.89 overall score in Warsaw, the second-highest recorded internationally by a Canadian woman this season. If you’re looking for a wild card who could shake up this event, Medland Spence just might be the one.
And there’s more. We’ve talked previously about Canada having five women earn the technical qualifying score for Worlds. The other two, Sara-Maude Dupuis and Uliana Shiryaeva, are also in the field in Laval. So are up-and-comers Breken Brezden, Fee-Ann Landry and Hetty Shi, the bronze medallist a year ago. Like we said, lots of intriguing things to watch in this event.
Is there a battle for gold brewing in ice dance?
For those who didn’t pay close attention, seeing Marjorie Lajoie and Zachary Lagha finish one spot in front of reigning World silver medallists Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier at the Grand Prix Final in Grenoble last month was probably an eye opener. But if you watched the event, you know Poirier’s untimely fall in the rhythm dance basically scuttled their medal hopes in Grenoble. While they turned in the second-best free dance, the damage was done and Gilles and Poirier only managed to move up one spot — less than a point back of the fourth-place finishing Lajoie and Lagha.
So what can we take from this in terms of what we might see in Laval? For starters, we’ll go back to a point we made back in the fall — the competition is so fierce among the top five in the world in ice dance that one mistake (especially a big one) can make all the difference in placement. So in other words, Gilles and Poirier have to get back to skating two clean programs, at the very least, if they want to defend their national title at Place Bell. But expect Lajoie and Lagha to push them right to the finish when they meet again in about 10 days’ time. They’re a team on the rise, to be sure.
The ice dance event also has one other big storyline at Canadians. That would be the battle for third place, which is important given that Canada has three ice dance spots at Boston Worlds. It should come down to a duel between Marie-Jade Lauriault and Romain Le Gac, who were silver medallists last year in Calgary, and Alicia Fabbri and Paul Ayer, who took the bronze. The latter have parlayed a busy fall season into some serious momentum heading into 2025, so this should inject some added juice to the ice dance competition at Place Bell.
The road to multiple Olympic berths starts here
It’s been a major storyline in Canadian skating all season and now it comes to a head in Laval. As everyone who follows this sport closely in our country knows, Canada has a single berth available in both the men’s and women’s events at 2025 Worlds. But a top-10 finish there in either discipline would make available a second Canadian entry for the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan-Cortina, Italy. Meaning whoever goes to Boston has a lot on their shoulders when they get to TD Garden in March.
We’ve examined this at various points this season, but we’ll have a go at it one more time here. Based on everything we saw in the fall months, it seems more likely Canada will add a second women’s berth for the 2026 Winter Games — and that’s largely based on the Maddie Schizas we saw at Skate Canada International. From start to finish, she showed the kind of skating that can earn you a top-10 finish at Worlds. It’s just a matter of replicating that in Boston (and yes, that’s no small chore, we would certainly agree).
When it comes to the men … ah, that’s a whole other story. Any of defending champion Wesley Chiu, Roman Sadovsky, Aleksa Rakic and Stephen Gogolev might have in them to go and get a top 10 in Boston. It’s just that we haven’t seen any real proof of concept yet this season although, to be fair, injuries got in the way of that at times. So the grade is incomplete so far.
What we’d like to see in Laval is somebody go out there and lay down two great programs and grab this opportunity by the throat, so to speak. It is very possible that Skate Canada might delay its decision on who to send to Boston until after the Four Continents Championships, but nationals will offer somebody the chance to produce a compelling argument in their favour. And that’s the kind of thing I think we all hope to see when we arrive at Place Bell.
Will the world champions skate a little more freely in Laval?
For the second time in less than a year, Deanna Stellato-Dudek and Maxime Deschamps don’t have to travel far to go to a major competition. And let’s just say they’d no doubt love a repeat of the last time they found themselves in this scenario — when they electrified the Bell Centre in winning the gold medal at 2024 Worlds. It was truly a memory for a lifetime.
What’s also true is they’ve had to carry the weight of that achievement into the current season, with a target squarely on their backs. And while they initially tried to play down the effects of that scenario, Stellato-Dudek and Deschamps have admitted on a few occasions that the ‘World champion’ title has been a lot to live up to every time they stepped on the ice. They still won a pair of gold medals on the Grand Prix circuit, mind you, although illness cost them a chance for a mid-season benchmark at the Grand Prix Final.
These Canadian championships, I’d suggest, offer them a chance to skate perhaps as freely as they have all season. It’s a slim field of just six entries and the Montreal-based Stellato-Dudek and Deschamps are easily the class of this group if they just go out and let ’er rip for the home folks. They’ve also got the distraction of Stellato-Dudek waiting for her Canadian citizenship out of the way, for what that may have been worth. What better way for her to celebrate all of that than with a pair of great skates in Laval.
It’s most likely that the other two spots on the podium will go to Lia Pereira/Trennt Michaud and Kelly Ann Laurin/Loucas Ethier. But there are a couple of new entries to pay attention to: the first-year team of Fiona Bombardier and Benjamin Mimar, who earned a bronze medal in their international debut in Warsaw, and Jazmine Desrochers and Kieran Thrasher, who are fresh off a second straight bronze medal at the Junior Grand Prix Final.
Can Montreal prove again that it’s a skating city?
There was a time, back in the 1990s and early 2000s, that Skate Canada wouldn’t even consider bringing its national championships to the Montreal area. Despite the proliferation of top-level skaters from Quebec that populate this sport, this was an event that just hadn’t sold well in that city in the past. There was a concern that it was an attendance disaster waiting to happen.
If this talk sounds a little familiar … well, let’s just say it was in the air as we headed to 2024 Worlds in Montreal. Some (many?) wondered just how many empty seats we might see in the 21,000-plus seat Bell Centre, which is the biggest arena in Canada (there really isn’t a close second). But lo and behold, the seats filled up through the week, culminating with a sellout for the men’s free skate on the Saturday (the upper bowl wasn’t sold for the event).
So maybe Montreal is a skating city after all. Or at least that was the thought.
While Laval isn’t exactly downtown Montreal, the region gets another chance to show off its skating chops again in less than two weeks. While the building in Laval is significantly smaller, so, too, is the stature of Canadians when you put it up against Worlds. In other words, let’s keep our expectations in check here. We’re also reminded of the not-so-great crowds that turned out in Calgary a year ago, which led to questions about things like ticket prices and how well the event was marketed locally (undoubtedly, the -30 weather killed off some of the walk-up crowd that may have come to the competition). Here’s hoping a few lessons were learned from that, and we get good-sized crowds at Place Bell for most of the week. The Canadian championships (a personal favourite of mine) deserve that kind of big-event buzz that an enthusiastic audience can surely help deliver.