Canadian pair Stellato-Dudek and Deschamps win figure skating world title in Montreal
40-year-old Deanna Stellato-Dudek becomes oldest woman to win worlds gold in figure skating history.
Deanna Stellato-Dudek and Maxime Deschamps finished top of the podium on home ice in Montreal on Thursday night, winning the gold medal in the pairs event at the 2024 World Figure Skating Championships.
The Canadian duo put up a personal-best score of 144.08 in the free program on Thursday night, after a competition-best short program score of 77.48 on Wednesday.
Their combined score of 221.56 was about four points better than reigning world champions Riku Miura and Ryuichi Kihara of Japan, who finished in second with 217.88 points. Minerva Fabienne Hase and Nikita Volodin of Germany finished third with 210.40 total points.
Ontario’s Lia Pereira and Trennt Michaud finished eighth with 186.93 points, while the third Canadian pair, Quebec’s own Kelly Ann Laurin and Loucas Ethier, were 15th with 169.48 points in their world championship debut.
With the win, 40-year-old Stellato-Dudek became the oldest woman to win a gold medal in any discipline at the figure skating world championships.
She won a silver medal at the 2000 World Junior Championships in ladies’ singles, but retired at age 17 after a series of injuries. After a 16-year hiatus, she decided to attempt a comeback, and resumed skating in 2016.
She teamed up with Deschamps in 2019, and they decided to skate for Canada as she is from Chicago and Deschamps is from Vaudreuil-Dorion, Quebec. They didn’t have enough time to get Stellato-Dudek a Canadian citizenship to compete at Beijing 2022, but Milano-Cortina 2026 is in their sights if she can get one by then — which she is reportedly confident she will.
In 2021-22 the pair reached the podium at the Canadian Championships for the first time, finishing third. In 2022-23 they won the Canadian national title and finished fourth at worlds, before winning national gold again in 2023-24.
Now, together, they are the first Canadian pair to win gold at the world championships since Meagan Duhamel and Eric Radford won back-to-back in 2015 and 2016.
On Friday, the ice dance event gets underway with the rhythm dance portion of the competition, while the women’s singles event wraps up with the free skate. Madeline Schizas is Canada’s lone entrant in the women’s singles, sitting in seventeenth after the short program on Wednesday.
The men’s singles short program was on Thursday, and the free skate is scheduled for Saturday night, a few hours after the free dance wraps up the ice dancing event. Roman Sadovsky and Wesley Chiu are the two Canadians in the men’s singles, currently sitting in eleventh and eighteenth, respectively, after the short program.
Montreal is hosting the world championships for the first time since 1932. The city was supposed to host worlds in 2020, but that event was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.