Skate Canada Notebook: Some early words from the home side
With the Grand Prix event coming to Vancouver next week, we checked in with some Canadian skaters aiming to dazzle the crowd with their performances.
Skate Canada held a series of conference calls with media this week as a lead-in to Skate Canada International, the Grand Prix event set for next week in Vancouver. Here’s a quick overview of some of the more interesting things this writer heard from a few of the Canadian entries in the event.
When Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier struck gold at Skate Canada International four years ago in Kelowna, B.C., it felt like a major breakthrough. They’d never stood on top of a Grand Prix podium before then and, by season’s end, the duo would be Canadian champions for the first time. A year later, they landed on the World Championships podium — also a first — claiming a bronze medal in Stockholm, Sweden.
So how big a deal was that Skate Canada gold? (they’ve won two more since then). Poirier pondered the question and came up with this rather introspective answer.
“That feels like a lifetime ago. It’s crazy to think how much has happened in that time,” he said. “At this level of competition, there are these giant accomplishments that you can achieve. Winning a Grand Prix event is probably one of them for a skater who wants to be challenging for the World podium. In that specific moment, there’s a nice feeling of validation, of feeling like you’re on track to accomplish what you want to accomplish, a feeling that the work you’re putting in and that time you have committed to your craft is paying off … It’s a nice pat yourself on the back a little bit about what you’re doing and you take that to build your self-esteem.
“But at the same time, every competition is different, every competition requires you to give as much of yourself as you can and ask more of yourself. At every competition, you’re always seeking to make improvements, to optimize, to make things bigger and better. I wouldn’t necessarily say the winning any specific event changes that process. So I don’t know if it changed much in terms of the day to day and how we approach our work and how we approach choreography and how we do things ... In the grand scheme of things, I don’t know how much it changes.”
During Skate Canada’s high-performance camp at the end of August, two-time Canadian champion Madeline Schizas spoke at length about the changes she’d made to her skating in the off-season. Most notably, she enlisted the services of coaches noted for their work with ice dancers — Scott Moir, Madison Hubbell and Adrian Diaz in the London area, and Carol Lane and Juris Razgulajevs in Toronto — to craft new programs for the season. It gave her a new way of looking at the work she needed to do.
Schizas took all of that to the Ondej Nepela Memorial in Bratislava, Slovakia, and brought home a bronze medal from the Challenger Series event. And more importantly, a feeling of early-season validation for the changes she felt were necessary to improve her standing at the world level.
“I went into that first event feeling really confident with my training. I did feel like I was going to skate well, but I wasn’t sure how my programs were going to be received and how my program components were going to be … how much I was going to score,” said the 20-year-old from Oakville, Ontario. “I was really hoping that the program components scores would go up, and they did. We good some really good feedback from the panel at that event on my performance, and especially the performance and interpretation side. I really do feel like I’ve improved on that.
“I worked a lot with the coaches in London on that, actually. They really honed in on what the performance should look like, which I had never really done before. I’d always been a natural enough performer that I hadn’t really worked on it. So I worked a lot on that this year and it paid off because I got really high scores and really good feedback from the panel at Nepela.”
Schizas feels she can contend for a medal at Skate Canada International, which is being held at the Doug Mitchell Thunderbird Sports Centre on the campus of the University of British Columbia — a venue she knows very well.
“It’s the same venue as my first Skate Canada two years and also the same venue as my first national championships (in 2018, when she finished sixth among novice women),” said Schizas. “I have lots of good memories from this venue, so I’m excited to go. I feel really well prepared, I feel like I’m coming in with a good chance for a medal. The biggest goal (this season) is I would really like to qualify for the Final. It’s a stretch but I feel prepared and I made the changes I needed to make to my skating to make it possible. So I’m really hoping to put out strong skates and see where it lands me.”
Deanna Stellato-Dudek and Maxime Deschamps got out of the gates quickly this season, not only striking gold at Autumn Classic International last month in Pierrefonds, Quebec, but also turning in personal best scores for the free skate (131.82) and overall total (203.62). Cracking 200 points had been a goal for the reigning Canadian champions this season (they were less than a point away from it at the World Championships earlier this year), and it’s a box they checked off quickly. Now they’d like to build on it.
“We have been working hard in the off-season just to improve our stuff, see what the judges were going to give us, points and everything,” said Deschamps. “Of course it was fun to see that we have passed 200 (points), now we just want to keep getting better. We have been working hard on this.”
While Deschamps has earlier experience at SCI with two previous partners (Vanessa Grenier and Sydney Kolodziej), it’s the first time they’ll get to experience their ‘home’ Grand Prix event together. And they’re looking forward to the home-town crowd boost in Vancouver.
“Skate Canada is probably going to feel similar to nationals, when you’re in front of a home crowd, so we have experienced that before,” said Stellato-Dudek. “We’re going to be in front of a home crowd a lot this year — we’re doing Skate Canada and China this year, we’re not going anywhere else — so it’ll be the first time to get out there, get our feet (wet), so to speak. It’s also been awhile since we competed, it’s been five weeks since we’ve competed, so we’re looking forward to getting back into it.”
Gilles startled skating fans everywhere back in the spring when she revealed an ovarian cancer diagnosis, which required her to undergo surgery in December 2022. She has a clean bill of health now, but the scare has had an effect on her preparations for this season.
“Any time you go through loss or illness or anything like that, there’s always a reflection period and truthfully, I feel like I really didn’t reflect on everything that I had been through until we both stopped (skating last season) and I felt like I really started to digest that severity of everything that I had been through,” she said. “You kind of have this mindset of ‘I’ve got to get back to competition, I’ve got to get back to competition’ but once it stops, you kind of go ‘oh god, that was hard.’ I even find that this off-season, I had to re-prioritize some of my strengths. I wasn’t really capable of doing workouts or a lot of core exercises again because I could reinjure my abs that had been opened up (for the surgery). I had to prioritize how to get my body ready for a competitive season again. I can’t say that it was easy. It took a lot longer than other seasons, I would say. The work has been rewarding and I can finally see and I can feel my body coming back to me.”
It’s still a part of her life every day, she admitted.
“My whole life is different now with extra doctor’s appointments and all this kind of stuff. But again, it does make me stop and realize that I’m still so lucky to be able to skate every single day, I’m still so lucky to be with my husband and walk my dog,” said Gilles. “You look at life a bit differently, which is also great. I feel like I enjoy the small things a little bit more, so coming back to competition is going to be like a celebration. Crazy, crazy, crazy ride, but super thankful for Paul and my team who has always been there for me. It’ll be nice to continue the journey with them after all the support they gave me.”
As if preparing for Skate Canada isn’t enough work, Schizas has plenty of cramming to do in the classroom. The third-year student at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, has a couple of mid-term exams to write before the plane carrying her to Vancouver departs on Wednesday night. She’ll write a Transportation Planning mid-term today, then a Research Methods mid-term on Tuesday (she is aiming to major in Environment and Society by the end of this school year).
While it’s made for a hectic life — balancing school and travel in two directions for skating — Schizas wouldn’t have it any other way.
“It’s a big task and it’s not something that’s easy, that’s for sure. I’m writing two mid-terms in the next week, so it’s going to be busy. I really do rely on my support system to make the trips to London and Scarborough happen, for sure,” she said. “I don’t know how I do it. People are always surprised, but it just takes a lot of time management. I get home from the rink and I do really have to sit down and work for awhile … work on school, work on whatever. I just use my time very effectively. But I like being in school. I think it gives me a little bit of necessary balance. I would lose my mind if I was just skating all the time. I think it would be too much, so I enjoy doing both.”
She also leans heavily on family to make the trips for training work.
“It’s been a lot of driving, let me tell you, every week. I really had to rely on my network of people,” said Schizas. “I’ve been staying with my aunt one night a week to skate in Scarborough, and I stayed with family in London to make this happen. So I’m really grateful to my support network for making this happen. It was a big effort but I think that it’s paid off.”
Schizas wouldn’t mind spending time with more family in Montreal at the end of the season, when the figure skating world comes to the city.
“I’m looking forward to the World Championships in Montreal,” said Schizas. “A lot of my family is from Montreal, both of my parents are from Montreal, so I’m really hoping to qualify. I think it would be a great experience to compete for a home crowd.”
Virtue and Moir join Canadian legends
The most accomplished ice dancers in the sport’s history received another major honour on Thursday in Gatineau, Quebec. Two-time Olympic champions Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir were among the group of inductees into Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame. They also received the Order of Sport, the country's highest sporting honour.
In addition to the gold medals in Vancouver (2010) and PyeongChang, South Korea (2018), Virtue and Moir also added a silver in Sochi, Russia (2014), and team silver (2014) and gold medals (2018). That, along with three World titles and eight Canadian championships.
But beyond all that was a remarkable level of collaboration, friendship and drive for success over 22 years that made it so memorable for the duo, as they expressed in their induction speech.
“It was about more than just results and what we created on the ice. It was about two young people using sport to try to become the best version of themselves for each other,” Moir said. “It was truly was a beautiful journey.”
You can watch their full induction speech here.
Skate America hits the Lone Star State
The Grand Prix Series season launches this weekend at Skate America in Allen, Texas. The event also marks the Grand Prix debut for the Canadian pair team of Lia Pereira and Trennt Michaud, who opened their season last month at Nebelhorn Trophy, a Challenger Series event, with a fourth-place finish, missing the podium by a mere .07 points.
(here’s a backgrounder on them I wrote a while back).
Other Canadian entries at Skate America include Stephen Gogolev, in the men’s event, and Marjorie Lajoie and Zachary Lagha, in ice dance.
Here’s the CBC streaming schedule for the competition: