Worlds 2025: A roaring start for the Canadian lion
Maddie Schizas delivered the short program of her life on the big stage in Boston. And she's on the verge of giving women's skating in Canada a mighty leap toward the Olympics
It’s all right in front of Maddie Schizas now. And by extension, every women’s skater in Canada with Olympic dreams and aspirations.
The 22-year-old from Oakville, Ontario, came to the 2025 World Figure Skating Championships with a job to do. And boy, did the three-time Canadian champion ever get it done in a big way Wednesday at TD Garden.
So it is that Schizas stands a stunning sixth after the short program, in absolute prime position to get the top-10 finish that will earn Canada a second provisional quota spot in the women’s event for the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan-Cortina, Italy. That’s huge news, indeed.
And yeah, you can see now why a whole bunch of skaters from coast-to-coast will be watching Friday night’s free program with much more than a passing interest. And the cheers might well reverberate all the way across the border to the heart of the New England states if Schizas finishes the job Friday.
“I’m happy that we have one spot qualified now and I’m hoping to make it two after the free skate,” Schizas said after her marvellous effort on Wednesday (in truth, it would have taken an absolute disaster for her to not nail down one spot; she would have had to finish outside the top 24 after the short).
But first, let’s talk about how she made “The Lion King” roar in such a major way. Schizas got the ball rolling with a crisp triple Lutz-triple toe combination, and that had her positively beaming the rest of the way. Check off a double Axel and a triple loop, and everything in between, and by the time the strains of “The Circle of Life” filled the building, Schizas was home free and rocketing up the standings.
Given what was on the line Wednesday, it may well have been the short program skate of her young life. And you betcha she was thrilled by it.
“I was really happy as soon as I landed the combo. I was like ‘yes!’ because I know from that point on, I have it I have it covered,” she said afterward. “So as soon as that happened, I was really excited and I knew that if I focused, I was going to be able to get through the skate the way I wanted.”
She was rewarded with a 69.18 score, a massive season’s best internationally and nearly 12 points better than what she produced a month ago at Four Continents. Some more perspective: she’s just 4.15 points out of a medal spot, and 1.85 in arrears of three-time World champion Kaori Sakamoto of Japan, who stands fifth. And her technical scores were right up there with the top four.
In other words, a whole lot of goodness all the way around.
Contrast this to a year ago in Montreal, when a bunch of little mistakes added up to just a 59.85 score that buried her in 17th place, and she never truly recovered. Amazing what a healthy dose of confidence can do, though, to turn the tables in a major way at the biggest event of the year.
“I came in really confident and I felt a little bit nervous because I had a kind of a weird fall on the one of the jumps in my short program in my run through (in practice) yesterday here,” said Schizas. “So I was a little bit nervous from that but I knew if I just focused, I was gonna be able to pull it out”
That, she most surely did. And now Schizas has earned herself this possibility — she’ll skate first in the final flight on Friday night. It’s an ideal spot to be in; not too much time to think, and in position to lay down the tone-setting score for the final group. It’s remindful, in a way, of the 2018 World Championships in Milan, Italy, when Kaetlyn Osmond produced what turned out to be an unbeatable score to open the last group of the free skate, watched five other skaters after her fail to match it, and skated off with the first World title for a Canadian woman in 45 years.
Even a year ago, Sakamoto did the same thing, skating early in the final flight, then watching nobody match it. This isn’t to suggest in any way that we’re about to see Schizas wearing a medal of some colour on Friday night, but it’s just to illustrate why that’s an advantageous position in which to skate.
Anyways, mark down the time 9:04 p.m. That’s when Schizas skates on Friday night. Eight minutes later, we should know if she’s done enough to land that precious second Olympic spot. And whether a nation’s worth of women’s skaters will truly have reason to cheer loudly about the door that will have been opened for them.
(a reminder: we refer to the second spot as “provisional” because, should Schizas land in the top 10, it still has to be confirmed at the Olympic last-chance qualifier in September, which will be held in China. And it can’t be Schizas doing the confirming, it has to be someone else. You might recall a similar situation at 2021 Worlds, when Keegan Messing placed sixth to open up a second Olympic men’s spot for the Beijing 2022 Winter Games, but it was Roman Sadovsky who ended up confirming it at Nebelhorn).
Champs face an uphill climb
Remember all that talk about mountains that we referenced last week in relation to the kind of season it’s been for defending World pairs champions Deanna Stellato-Dudek and Maxime Deschamps? Let’s just say the biggest one of them all might just have landed right in front of them in Boston.
The Canadians face a steep climb to even get to the podium — let alone think about another global crown — after a short program skate Wednesday night that wasn’t bad, but wasn’t great, either. Just a little off might be the best way to put it. And in a high quality field like this one, that’s enough to put you in a most precarious position.
As in, the seventh place position that Stellato-Dudek and Deschamps find themselves heading into Thursday night’s free skate final. That’s one position shy of being able to perform in the last group of four. It’s not exactly an ideal spot from which to make a serious move upward in the standings.
“It just felt a little off, but not like that bad. But everything’s pretty tight here, so you’ve got to be on your game,” said Stellato-Dudek, 41. “It’s a learning experience. It’s not going to go right all the time. We’ve seen it happen to a bunch of other teams. We’re not the first and we won’t be the last.
“But all of it’s a learning experience to prepare ourselves for next year.”
It’s not something either of them saw coming, based on their training coming into Boston and then their practices after they arrived there.
“Everything was going so well, up until the performance,” said Deschamps.
Now, there’s a lot of climbing to do Thursday. Stellato-Dudek and the 33-year-old Deschamps are 6.27 points out of a medal spot and 9.25 back of Japan’s Riku Miura and Ryuichi Kihara, the 2023 World champions who finished second behind the Canadians a year ago in Montreal. But their breathlessly good short program Wednesday has them leading the pack into the free skate at TD Garden, but it’s tight at the top, to be sure.
The Canadian champions will hope to draw off the long program they skated at Four Continents last month, which was the best of their season to date.
“I thought we were going to start better here because of Four Continents. We did such a better job (there) in the long and we’re going to have the same kind of mentality here,” said Stellato-Dudek. “Sometimes you win and sometimes you learn.”
Meanwhile, it wasn’t anything close to the kind of night that Canada’s No. 2 team, Lia Pereira and Trennt Michaud, hoped to have. Thanks in large part to a fall on the throw-triple loop, they’re all the way down in 10th place. The 63.28 score they earned was more than six points below the personal best of 69.79 they produced at Four Continents — a number which would have landed them in the top five on Wednesday, had they been able to duplicate it.
“We were really confident at the beginning of the program today. The twist was great, the side-by-side jumps were great, and we could feel the energy from the crowd,” said Pereira, 21. “I think that little bit of excitement maybe had us jump the gun a bit on the timing of the throw. Unfortunate mistake, because we’ve had that mistake in the past.
“So it’s not ideal to repeat mistakes like that, but good reminder for tomorrow. We’re still proud of the other elements we put out, but the fall definitely puts us back further than we were hoping to be.”
Pereira and Michaud placed eighth a year ago in Montreal, and were sixth in their Worlds debut a year earlier in Saitama, Japan. Now they’ve got work to do to get back there again, but believe they’ve got vehicle to get there.
“We’re still in the mix for things and we have a really strong long program,” said Michaud, 28. “We can push ourselves up points-wise in the long … It’s a feather in our cap from Four Continents (where they won a bronze medal) that we did have a good result with that, so we’re excited for tomorrow.”
Here’s the other bad news: Canada is only in danger of losing one of its pair spots for the 2026 Olympics. The magic number to keep it is 13, between the top two teams, and right now Stellato-Dudek/Deschamps and Pereira/Michaud’s placement total is 17. Meaning between the two of them, they’ve got to elevate by four spots on Thursday.
Again, another mountain to navigate.
It’s a tense spot for teams such as Kelly Ann Laurin and Loucas Ethier, Canada’s third entry in Boston, who stand 12th after the short program.
Watching the Worlds
It’ll be a mix of (largely) streaming and television coverage, but CBC Sports will be Canadians’ eyes and ears on the World Championships in Boston. Things get started on Wednesday with the women’s and pairs short program. Here’s the streaming schedule for Day 2 at TD Garden.
Eye on Canadians
Canada has one entry in the men’s event and three in pairs. Here’s when they’ll hit the ice in Boston on Thursday (all times ET) …
Men’s short program: Roman Sadovsky, 1:57 p.m.
Pairs free program: Kelly Ann Laurin/Loucas Ethier, 7:51 p.m.; Lia Pereira/Trennt Michaud, 8:07 p.m.; Deanna Stellato-Dudek/Maxime Deschamps, 8:52 p.m.
Maddie was amazing and we’ll be watching tomorrow for sure. Her Lion King is so “her”.