Worlds 2024: 'Our best short program of the year'
Deanna Stellato-Dudek and Maxime Deschamps thrilled the home folks with a spectacular performance that has them primed for a golden finish in Montreal.
It was back in the formative months of this season — a much warmer time, to be sure — that Deanna Stellato-Dudek shared a most audacious goal for she and partner Maxime Deschamps. Or so it may have seemed at the time.
“Worlds (in 2024) are in Canada, in Montreal, where we live and where Max was born,” said Stellato-Dudek, the 40-year-old with the energy and ambition of someone half her age. “So this is a Worlds unlike any other, and we want to come out on top. We’re chasing the top.”
As it turns out, it’s not the Canadians doing the chasing this week at the Bell Centre, where a loud and enthusiastic audience showered the duo with thunderous cheers Wednesday before they even started their “Oxygene” short program. Rather, it was Stellato-Dudek and Deschamps — who placed fourth at Worlds a year ago in Saitama, Japan — setting the pace in what has already become a riveting competition.
In what is truly a home Worlds for the Montreal-based team, Stellato-Dudek and Deschamps barely put a foot wrong in the program that is meant to pay homage to the city they call home. Every one of their elements was executed crisply and with passion, and had Stellato-Dudek punching the air with a mix of fire and glee when they were done.
“I think this was our best short program of the year,” said Stellato-Dudek. “It being the program that we chose as a tribute to Montreal, I’m very happy we could give the audience a good ride.”
They blew away their previous personal best score for the short by more than four points, with their 77.48 total giving the Canadians a lead of nearly four full points over defending World champions Riku Miura and Ryuichi Kihara of Japan. It’s truly a fierce battle at the top for the medals, with the top five all in the hunt. Just check out the closeness of these scores:
Needless to say, the Canadians’ score blew the top of the Bell Centre. As for the reaction of Stellato-Dudek, Deschamps and their coaches … well, the picture at the top of this column says it all (worth a thousand words, right?).
Deschamps saw it as “definitely the most emotional performance of my career.”
“It was really special,” the 32-year-old Deschamps said of the roaring reaction from the crowd. “When we were getting prepared for this … we have been prepared for a long time that it was going to be really loud. We have a lot of friends and family here, even kids that I coach a lot. Everybody’s here, so we know it is going to be super loud.”
It was tremendous theatre, to be sure. And it began to build when Miura and Kihara, who skipped the Grand Prix season due to his back injury, reminded everyone on the building just how good they can be. They flew through their short program better than they had all season, drawing a standing ovation after they were done. It was into that noisy cauldron that Stellato-Dudek and Deschamps stepped onto the ice, with every eye in the building zeroed in on them. Pressure, just a bit? You betcha.
“I feel like it’s important to recognize that I am way more nervous for this event than I have been for others because it is a home Worlds and because I know a lot of people in the audience, including some people who never watch me skate and they’re here watching my skate. So I want them to think I’m cool,” admitted Stellato-Dudek afterward. “So I was definitely nervous, and then tried to take things down and remain calm and remember my key words for the performance.”
While this is hardly a two-horse race to the finish, it’s perhaps fitting that the Canadians will need to take down the reigning champions to earn a world title of their own. Stellato-Dudek predicted as much at Skate Canada’s high-performance camp back in August, when she spoke about what it would take for she and Deschamps to rule the world in Montreal.
“In my opinion, the Japanese, they were the fastest out of all the teams, so if we want to run with them, we have to run faster than them,” she said. “We can’t keep running at the same speed.”
The two teams met at Autumn Classic International way back in September, at a much smaller rink in the Montreal suburbs. Stellato-Dudek and Deschamps triumphed in emphatic fashion there, though their Japanese rivals were just a shell of themselves due to Kihara’s injury. But the world champs appear to be back to being their old selves at the Bell Centre. Meaning this thing is a long way from over. But the home country duo got a major step taken care of just wonderfully on Wednesday.
“I’m super happy that’s over,” Stellato-Dudek said with an element of relief. “But tomorrow’s a new day. Anything can happen in the long, there’s twice the amount of elements. So we just need to focus on what we can do in the long and what we do every day in practice to maintain that.”
‘It gave us wings’
Canada has three pairs entries at the Bell Centre and while they’re not exactly in the medal hunt, this is no doubt a Worlds week they’ll remember for quite some time. Lia Pereira and Trennt Michaud (64.83) currently stand ninth after the short program, while Worlds rookies Kelly Ann Laurin and Loucas Ethier (60.18) sit 14th.
Pereira and Michaud have been having the time of their life basically since first teaming up in August 2022, and it was more of the same on Wednesday. They hugged each other after being introduced to the crowd, and did it again a few more times after a short program that earned them loud applause from the audience. It was happiness all the way around.
“We knew that having a home Worlds would be a different experience and a once in a lifetime experience. I think we really felt that today,” said the 20-year-old Pereira. “To skate a short program like that and to feel the energy and the atmosphere of the crowd is so amazing. We have family and friends in the stands and just for them to be able to watch us live is something we were really looking forward to as well. I think we’ve done them proud.”
Added Michaud: “We did some great things out there and we felt we skated the program really well, which is a big thing for us this year. We felt like that was a really great performance today.”
The duo seemed puzzled when it was pointed out to them that their opening triple twist had been graded as a Level 1 (“we thought it was pretty good,” said Pereira), which likely cost them a few spots in what is a tightly contested event, and will make it tougher for them to match their sixth-place finish a year ago in their Worlds debut in Saitama, Japan.
“We knew it was going to be close coming into this event. There’s so many strong teams in the world right now, which is great to see,” said Michaud, 27. “It pushes us all to be better. That’s definitely a thing, but we’re competitors and we’re excited for that. It makes us better. We’re excited for tomorrow.”
Excited doesn’t even begin to describe the reaction that greeted Laurin and Ethier, the Quebecers who were the first Canadians out of the gate. To call it an unforgettable day might be a glorious understatement, to be sure.
“Even if we described it, no one could understand. It was a very, very special feeling,” said Ethier, 23. “People were telling us how special it was going to be but there was no way we could prepare for that. It gave us wings and it really helped us get through that program.”
Added the 18-year-old Laurin: “It was a great feeling to skate like that at home. I was just very proud of us, what we did.”
Maddie’s got a mountain to climb
There is one inescapable truth about the World Championships … you pay dearly here for every mistake you make, big or small. And that pretty much summed up the women’s short program for Canada’s Maddie Schizas.
While the 21-year-old stayed upright on all of her jumps Wednesday night, two botched landings — a triple Lutz that landed “heavy,” causing her to turn the back end of her combination into a double toe, and a triple loop that went awry (“I turned out a little bit”) — left Schizas well back in 17th place with a 59.65 score (her season’s best in the short, by comparison, is 67.42). But give Schizas another three points and she’s five places higher in 12th, and within striking distance of the top 10 finish she so desires. The margin for error here is that thin, the competition that fierce. It’s how it goes.
“I wasn’t the skate I wanted, nor the one that I practised,” said a disappointed Schizas. “(The Lutz) landed heavy and I did a double toe, which wasn’t even the worst part of the program. I thought the loop was somewhat worse as a mistake. I’m just going to try to refocus for the free. It was a bit of a wasted opportunity today, for sure. But it was a learning lesson.”
Now, she plans to take a page out of Stellato-Dudek and Deschamps’ book to rebound for the free skate, which isn’t until Friday night.
“I think I’m going to just try to settle in a bit. I saw Deanna and Maxime today after they skated and they told me to just go and enjoy it, and that’s what I’m going to try to do over the next couple of days,” she explained. “I’m going to lean into that enjoyment of skating and feeling grateful to be in front of a Canadian audience. That’s clearly what they did today and it worked for them. I enjoyed skating in front of a Canadian crowd, it just didn’t go the way I wanted it to. So I’m going to lean into that on my practice day tomorrow and in my free skate.”
One thing she could smile about, though, was the presence of many family members to cheer her on (both of her parents are from Montreal).
“I saw some of them before I went out for warmup. A lot of my little cousins are here; I think four or five of them, and I could see them jumping up and down in the stands. It was really a special moment having so many people who love and care about me here today,” she said. “And I really skated for them. It wasn’t the technical skate I wanted, but I think I was really able to perform through the whole program. And I was really grateful to have everyone here.”
Meanwhile, there’s quite the battle at the top for the medals, with Kaori Sakamoto of Japan needing to climb a little bit to make it three titles in a row. The top four here, in particular, were all so, so good on Wednesday night:
What’s up on Thursday
The men’s short program gets the day going at the Bell Centre at 11:10 a.m., with the first medals of the event being handed out after the pairs free skate, a 6:10 p.m. start. Here’s the start times for all the Canadians in action:
Men: Roman Sadovsky, 1:54 p.m.; Wesley Chiu, 2:33 p.m.
Pairs: Laurin/Ethier, 7:34 p.m.; Pereira/Michaud, 7:49 p.m.; Stellato-Dudek/Deschamps, 9:37 p.m. (they skate second last).