By Hiro Yoshida

Last season had a fairytale ending for Deanna Stellato-Dudek and Maxime Deschamps when they were crowned World champions on home ice in Montreal, Canada. Rather than resting on their laurels, the Canadian pair are forging full speed ahead as the new season gets under way.

Back in March of this year, Stellato-Dudek and Deschamps had the weight of expectation from an entire nation when they took to the ice inside the cavernous Centre Bell. Keeping their emotions in check and staying focused, particularly during their free skating routine, was a considerable challenge.

“The warmup was not good for me,” Stellato-Dudek recalled. “Thankfully our coach Josee Picard gave me a huge pep talk in between the warmup and our skate.”

“I practiced myself at that moment staying calm because I knew I would get excited,” Deschamps said.

“We were just trying to hear the music because the crowd was so loud,” Stellato continued. “We had to make sure we were on time so I had to hurry and get down because we couldn’t hear the song anymore.

“I wasn’t feeling very good that day. I knew that programme would be harder than a normal run through. At the end, I said, ‘Oh my God’ because I couldn’t believe we got through it and that we did it. On top of not feeling great, there was just so much pressure being in your home country and having so many people you know coming and buying a ticket to watch you. I was overwhelmed and Maxime was the one doing my job at celebrating.”

Although the season had gone well for the Canadian pair in the build-up, there had been a blip along the way and their victory was not a foregone conclusion. In December 2023, they placed third at the Grand Prix Final in Beijing, China. Their disappointing showing there provided them with extra motivation in their final preparation for Worlds.

“With the Grand Prix Final, we had a difficult time with that as well the year prior when we were doing Cleopatra,” Stellato-Dudek reflected. “I think life tends to teach you the same lesson over and over again until you get it. When we had another bad competition at the Final, I said, ‘Okay, we’re supposed to learn something from this that we just didn’t learn last year and we need to figure out how to turn it around.’ I think that we really upped the ante of detail work, even technical detail work. That really helped us to kind of get us both back on the right path together and help us to continue rising the rest of the season.”

The story of Stellato-Dudek’s retrieving her old skates from her family home garage and returning to competition after a gap of sixteen years is well-chronicled at this stage. Has she ever thought about what might have happened if her mother had gotten rid of her skates at some point while her skating career was on hiatus?

“I’m not sure what I would have done because I couldn’t have gone to try to skate again in rental skates because they’re not strong enough to support a jump of any kind, so that’s a good question,” Stellato-Dudek said. “That would have been a much bigger deal if I would have had to have bought new skates and new blades and skated in those. Or I might have said, ‘Oh, you don’t have them anymore. Okay’ and then just kind of maybe forgotten about it I guess.”

Fate and coincidence have played a role in Stellato-Dudek’s journey. In 2000, her singles career came to an end when she got injured prior to competing at the Golden Spin of Zagreb. In 2016, that was the same competition where she came back with her former pairs partner Nathan Bartholomay.

“It was like I picked up where I left off,” Stellato-Dudek said. “I didn’t have a great feeling about skating when I stopped as a teenager, so I stayed away from it. When I wanted to come back and try it again, I feel like it was a really big personal win to deal with that. I didn’t realise as a teenager the reason that I didn’t want to be around it was because I felt like I wasn’t done. It gave me a bad feeling because I left it before I should have. I’m glad that I was able to climb that mountain internally as a personal gain to myself to come back in and conquer that uncomfortable feeling that I had for so long.”

As older athletes, Stellato-Dudek (41) and Deschamps (32) know that in order to compete with younger pairs they have to smart about how they prepare for competitions.

“For sure, being older, you have to be more wise about all your training,” Deschamps said. “If you’re extremely tired, you have to adapt your training. You also have to take a lot of time to recover. All of this, it’s really important. If you skip one of those things, it’s not one day you will have a hard time. It’s going to be for a full week or even more. We really need to pay attention to all the details.”

“I think recovery is the biggest difference for me,” Stellato-Dudek continued. “We actually do train with another pair team that was at Worlds. They’re 18 and 21 and they work very hard, but I don’t find that they do any more or less than we do. We were doing the same workload. But I know that when they’re done, they can go do multiple other things, go shopping, go do some fun stuff, and I have to stretch and do recovery at home. But the workload on the ice, it can’t really be any different. Otherwise, we would fall behind. We have to find a way to create the energy to be able to do it every day. That comes from diet. It comes from water intake. It comes from the recovery at night to be prepared for the next day. It even comes from real grit and determination because some days it is going to be painful and you have to figure out how to do it anyway.”

The Canadians have had a busy summer between appearing in shows while also upping the technical and artistic aspects of their skating. While it made for a hectic schedule, the pair believe it forced them to make use of their time more efficiently.

“We finished up some of the shows we were doing and then we got back and choreographed programmes, worked on a new throw and tried to work on making sure we could portray what we wanted in our new short and long programmes so that it was clear to the audience what we were going for and what we were doing,” Stellato-Dudek said. “It was a lot of work on choreography, a lot of work with our acting coach and then a lot of work on our existing elements as well as a new lift and a new throw.”

“We had way less time to prep for this season compared to last season because we finished our show season later but considering that we did put a lot of work into a shorter time and we are really proud of what we have accomplished with those new elements,” Deschamps said.

“We were very grateful for the opportunity to try doing some shows this season as we wouldn’t want to be trying that for the first time when the Olympics are coming up,” Stellato-Dudek added. “But we feel as though we got more done in less time this summer and I think that can really help us for the future.”

At last month’s Nebelhorn Trophy where they finished second, they debuted their two new routines.

“For the short programme we decided to skate to Beyonce’s ‘Crazy in Love’,” Stellato-Dudek said. “There’s a lot of focus on my age which is understandable. I know I am doing pairs skating at a unique age. We wanted to find a way to lean into that since it does make us unique and special. We thought that we could portray a man and a woman in a very sensual manner on the ice. This rendition of ‘Crazy in Love’ is from ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’. We’re really looking forward to having this programme grow over the season and show everyone a different side of us than what they saw last year in the short programme.

“For the free programme, it’s really exciting. We wanted to take a concept that was more abstract versus last year where we took something that was from a book and there were several movies made about ‘Interview with a Vampire’. This year we wanted to take something a bit more abstract that could be really exclusive to only Maxime and I. We thought of the concept of water and brainstormed from there. Our programme is that Maxime is called to the water and I represent the ocean. He’s under water and I am showing him all the beauty and all the danger of these underwater world. He wants to stay with me under water and I embrace him in this underwater world. We keep on joking that everyone needs to bring their goggles and towels because we are taking them under water with us for our free programme. We really wanted to do something different this year and we really enjoy this concept and making it come to life.”

“And also, this year nobody is dying,” Deschamps joked. “It’s a first.”

While they now have the World champion title on their resume, Stellato-Dudek and Deschamps are not going to change their approach and will keep on striving to keep themselves at the top of their discipline.

“The goals for the season are no different than for previous seasons,” Deschamps said. “It’s always to improve our own selves. We set an objective that we want to accomplish this season is a new throw, a new lift and of course increase our skating skills, choreography and our interpretation to music.”

“We always try to beat ourselves,” Stellato-Dudek said. “How much more creative can we be, how much more original can we be and how different can we be and then of course still adding technical content. We did add a new throw and a new lift as Maxime mentioned, but there’s still even more room for growth with the technical content as far as adding a second double Axel to the combination. We hope to be maybe add that later in the season as well, but we will take it one step at a time. Hopefully everyone can see the changes and hard work we have been doing and likes it.”