'This is exactly where they need to be'
Lia Pereira and Trennt Michaud's season of 'firsts' provided the Canadian pair team with more key building blocks on the road to the 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympics.
The end game is always the World Championships, at least for the top figure skaters in this country — and beyond. That chance to put your best performances up against the planet’s best and see where you stand. Outside of an Olympic year, Worlds is the ultimate test, the moment when you hope to be at your absolute best. At least that’s the plan.
It was an especially momentous occasion this year for Canada’s best competitors, who got to finish out their season at a Worlds in Montreal that most won’t soon forget. For all of them, a home Worlds was the ultimate high — even if you weren’t among the fortunate ones to glide away with some hard-earned and much deserved hardware (we’re looking at you, World pairs champions Deanna Stellato-Dudek and Maxime Deschamps, and World silver medalists Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier)
But soon enough, that high fades away. And after a few weeks of well-earned downtime to decompress and perhaps take a vacation, one three-word question pops very clearly into view.
So what’s next?
The plan here is to pose that query to a number of Canadian skaters in the weeks and months ahead because, before you know it, the 2024-25 season will be upon us all. And before that, months of work getting just the right programs ready to do this competition thing all over again (maybe sooner than you think).
Actually, that particular question started to be asked (at least by moi) before we even left Montreal. Today, we’ll share some thoughts we gathered from Alison Purkiss, who coaches rising Canadian pair team Lia Pereira and Trennt Michaud in Brantford and Milton, Ontario (the coaching team also includes Nancy Lemaire, Derek Schmidt and Michael Marinaro).
Purkiss watched her team grow rapidly in the season that just ended, as Pereira and Michaud — in just their first real full season together — earned medals at both their Grand Prix events (including a gold in France), qualified for the Grand Prix Final and wound up eighth at Worlds in Montreal. While it was a drop of two spots from their Worlds debut a year earlier in Japan, Purkiss saw some important building blocks fall into place along the way.
“For Lia and Trennt, their big takeaway is confidence,” she said when asked what the duo’s biggest gains were in the past season. “They medalled at both their Grand Prixs, which were their first ones. They qualified for Grand Prix Final, and that was a huge boost for their confidence. Now they’ve had a the taste of a whole season, and carrying that confidence through and pacing themselves through the year is really what it’s all about.
“Those teams at the top have figured out how to balance the whole season and to be able to peak and do it when it counts. Balance and confidence are going to be their big takeaways from this season.”
Both skaters will tell you that all their successes along the way — they were also silver medalists at the Canadian Championships in Calgary in January — has been so very invigorating, and it has them eager to get started all over again. In Montreal, they shared a plan to work with some new choreographers next season (they kept the names secret).
“We’re already very excited about some choreographers that we’ve chosen to work with and really looking forward to pushing the boundaries again with music choices and choreography.,” Pereira said after their long program skate at the Bell Centre. “We’re going to use the off-season as even more time together and building our synchronicity and just more creativity in our programs. So we’re already really excited about doing so.”
She and Michaud did explore one new avenue last season, working with ice dancers Madison Hubbell, Adrian Diaz and Scott Moir (who operate out of the Ice Academy of Montreal’s satellite school in southwestern Ontario, near London) to craft their long program. Purkiss saw the benefits all season long.
“They loved it. Dance is (a part of) figure skating, but it feels like a different world sometimes,” she said. “Definitely, when you go there, you really appreciate the subtle nuances of the sport and they came back every single time with renewed inspiration and a commitment to being better skaters. That’s a bonus for Nancy and I, too, every time they go.”
One of the behind-the-scenes rumblings of late has been the prospect of major rule changes coming to the pairs discipline in the season ahead (it’s on the agenda for the International Skating Union’s Congress in June). It’s something any coach or choreographer will need to keep in mind as they begin to dream up ideas for new programs in the next month. There are some, however, who wonder whether the ISU will go through with such drastic changes one year out from the Olympic season that leads up to the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Games.
“That makes all of us a little leery as to whether they’ll actually pass these (changes) in June. It’s definitely something for us to stay calm and think about when we are building next season’s spins and lifts and jumping passes and things like that so that at least we’ve got a bit of a head start on it either way. So that’s helpful,” said Purkiss, who understands why such changes are being considered.
“It is a performance sport, we want it to be exciting for the audience and if people are feeling that’s not the case, we definitely want to do something about that. We’ll have to wait and see what Congress actually decides and if all of these changes — or some of them — work, then they’ll end up in place. It’s interesting for sure. Lots of changes in the mix, so we’ll see what happens.”
Regardless of that outcome, Purkiss believes her team is well set up to start the serious run-up to Milan and a debut for both at the Winter Games.
“This is exactly where they need to be. Building and getting stronger and learning the hard lessons. We’re 24 months out and this is now the beginning of the build. I think they’re in a great position for that. It’s exciting.”
Skating with the stars
You win the title, you get some perks.
For the two newest Canadian champions, another one of those bonuses will come along in the next month, when they get to join the cast of the Canadian Stars On Ice tour for a night.
Kaiya Ruiter, who lived a dream in her home city in January in winning her first Canadian women’s title, has been added to the tour cast for the Ottawa show, which plays April 28 at Canadian Tire Centre in Kanata. While Ruiter has called Calgary home for a number of years, her roots in figure skating go all the way back to the nation’s capital. Ruiter was born in Ottawa and, like so many in that city, first gained an appreciation for the sport by skating on the famed Rideau Canal. She still has plenty of family there, so this show will represent a homecoming of sorts for her.
The same opportunity also awaits new Canadian men’s champion Wesley Chiu, who will appear as a guest skater at the tour’s Vancouver stop, which is set for May 14 at Rogers Arena. It’s also a close to home affair for Chiu, who resides in the Vancouver suburb of Richmond and trains in that city at the Connaught Skating Club.
Here’s the full list of dates for the Stars on Ice tour, which begins next week:
April 25 — Halifax (Scotiabank Centre), 7 p.m.
April 26 — Moncton, N.B. (Avenir Centre), 7:30 p.m.
April 28 — Ottawa (Canadian Tire Centre), 4 p.m.
April 30 — Laval, Que. (Place Bell), 7 p.m.
May 3 — Toronto (Scotiabank Arena), 7:30 p.m.
May 4 — St. Catharines, Ont. (Meridian Centre), 7:30 p.m.
May 5 — London, Ont. (Budweiser Gardens), 4 p.m.
May 9 — Regina (Brandt Centre), 7 p.m.
May 10 — Calgary (Scotiabank Saddledome), 7:30 p.m.
May 12 — Edmonton (Rogers Place), 4 p.m.
May 14 — Vancouver (Rogers Arena), 7 p.m.
May 16 — Victoria (Save-On-Foods Memorial Centre), 7 p.m.
Tickets for all shows can be purchased here.
100 days and counting …
We mentioned the Olympics earlier in this column and, while winter sport athletes are just halfway to achieving that goal, there is a Summer Games on the horizon in Paris. Earlier this week, France marked the 100-day countdown toward those Olympics, which were last held in Paris exactly a century ago. Let’s just say they’ve had a few years to get fired up about it.
Now, we’ll have plenty more to say about Paris 2024 in the months ahead, but the old sports TV columnist in me wanted to touch on some of the preliminary broadcast details for the Summer Games released by the CBC, which will again be Olympics Central for Canadian television viewers (the public broadcaster will also be using TSN and Sportsnet as broadcast partners for their exhaustive coverage, which the CBC says will span 22 hours per day. That’s both on TV and via streaming).
Here are the programming blocks for each day of coverage …
Olympic Morning: 6 a.m.-noon ET. Hosts: Anastasia Bucsis, Rob Pizzo.
Paris Prime Live: Noon-6 p.m. ET. Hosts: Scott Russell, Julie Stewart-Binks.
Olympic Games Prime Time: 7 p.m.-2 a.m. ET. Hosts: Andi Petrillo, Waneek Horn-Miller, Perdita Felicien, Craig McMorris.
Olympic Games Overnight: 2-6 a.m. (highlights of day)
From what I’ve been able to gather, Russell, Bucsis and reporter Devin Heroux will be on the ground in Paris, while the rest of the hosts will work from a Toronto studio (no word yet on play-by-play teams).
“As we mark our 24th Olympic Games as Canada’s official broadcaster, we look forward to providing audiences with unparalleled live and on-demand coverage of the world’s top athletes on their pursuit of the podium across all of our platforms,” Chris Wilson, CBC’s general manager of Olympics for Paris 2024, said in a release. “Thanks to our talented and tireless CBC/Radio-Canada teams, audiences across the country will never miss a moment of the action as they cheer on and celebrate the world’s top athletes.”
The biggest bonus for the TV folks — and us as viewers, for that matter — is that this is the first Olympics since 2016 not being held in Asia (the last three were in Korea, Japan and China, respectively), meaning it should be easier to keep up with the live action, which should generally fall between 4 a.m. and 6 p.m. ET. Mind you, that encompasses work hours for most people, so count on the streaming numbers for these Games being large again.