Deanna Stellato-Dudek retired from the sport of figure skating at the age of 17, 24 years ago after winning a world junior silver medal.
But in proving that we are always learning and evolving, she became an aesthetician, got married and then attended a work retreat where she was asked to answer what she would do in her life if she knew she couldn’t fail at all. By then, in her thirties, she returned to the rink in 2016 to give pairs skating a go.
Now, at 40, she’s a world champion and the oldest female skater in history to win a world title in figure skating.
She did it over the weekend at the World Figure Skating Championships with partner Maxime Deschamps, as part of Team Canada and in front of a home audience in Montreal.
Speaking after the event, she said she’s perfectly fine with carrying the title of “oldest”.
“I carry it with pride, and I’m very proud of it,” she said. “I hope a lot of athletes stay around a lot longer.”
Further asked about her age, Stellato-Dudek laughed that “forty is the new twenty”.
“It’s not something that I ever set out to do, but I knew that if I were to accomplish my dreams [in skating] it would happen because I’m the oldest everywhere.”
Given the physical and dangerous training it takes to pull off quadruple jumps, elite figure skating is typically seen as a sport for young people. Skating in pairs requires incredible strength and the ability to stabilise yourself, enabling not only safety but the graceful landings required after being thrown metres in the air. Indeed, the pair’s key competition came from a much younger skating couple over the weekend, with 24-year-old German skater Minerva Fabienne Hase bowing down to Stellato-Dudek and Deschamps after the winning performance and declaring that Deanna has “my highest respect.”
Stellato-Dudek’s first success on returning to the sport came as she found a powerful partnership skating with Nathan Bartholomay, and won two national bronze medals as a pair before Bartholomay suffered an injury that ended their partnership
At that point, Stellato-Dudek had no intention of retiring again. She describes calling every coach she had ever met to see if they knew someone she could partner with for the pairs, which led her to meeting the Quebec native Maxime Deschamps. Eight years younger, he, too, had enjoyed a successful junior career. Stellato-Dudek moved to Montreal to train with Deschamps.
Stellato-Dudek and Deschamps are now looking toward the 2026 Winter Olympics. But first, Stellato-Dudek needs to become a Canadian citizen. “I’m doing all that I can do to make myself more attractive to Canada,” she said after the win, laughing. The pair decided it would be faster for Stellato-Dudek to get her Canadian citizenship than for her Canadian partner Deschamps to get American citizenship.
Deschamps described his partner as a “warrior”. Speaking about the extra hours of training she puts in every night, he said that, “for her, it’s the Olympics every day.”
Stellato-Dudek returned from the sport as a teenager due to injuries before going on to university and building a life outside of elite sport.
She told Oympics.com about the work retreat she attended that sparked her curiosity about what she might still be able to achieve. During a standard team-building activity, she was asked to consider, “What would you do in your life if you knew you couldn’t fail at it”.
The question saw her returning to the family home where she grew up to dust off the skates sitting in her basement.
Speaking with Reuters in December, Stellato-Dedek said that her favourite part of returning to the sport is “the day-to-day grind, improving, getting better and challenging yourself.”
She said she looks forward to going to the rink every day and that “passion has no age limit”.
On first returning to training, Stellato-Dedek said she as embarking on her “Career 2.0”. She did 4:30am skating sessions alongside 12-hour work days for the first few months before pursuing skating full-time.
She also hopes her career chance and comeback in the sport can inspire other.
“When I decided that I wanted to do this, I didn’t quit my job. I didn’t do anything irrational,” she told Reuters. “I had to prove to myself that if this was something I really wanted to do, I had to do something towards my goal every single day.”
She said the build a metaphorical “chain” that she would never break, ensuring she was doing something every day that would contribute to her dream.
The oldest skater in the 2022 Beijing Olympics was Eric Radford, who competed for Canada at the age of 37.