Another SPIN

After retiring from skating at 17, Deanna Stellato-Dudek scored a record-breaking win last month, at 40. She reflects on her mid-life career shift and what it takes to keep up with the teenagers

- LEANNE DELAP

Deanna Stellato-Dudek had to make a "110 per cent" leap back into skating to get the results she hoped for.

In late March, Deanna Stellato-Dudek became the oldest figure skater to win a world title. At age 40, skating pairs for Canada with Maxime Deschamps, she won at the ISU World Championships in Montreal.

Perhaps more remarkably, she accomplished this feat after retiring from the sport at age 17 and spending 16 years working off-ice before making her return to the rink.

“I did it with reckless abandon,” said Stellato-Dudek over video call from Japan where she and Deschamps were performing in the Stars on Ice tour. “Whether I succeeded or failed, when I’m 80 I could say, ‘I have no regrets.’ ”

Originally from the outskirts of Chicago, Stellato-Dudek won the 1999 ISU junior Grand Prix finals and the 2000 junior U.S. nationals as a singles figure skater. Then, she said, she just stopped.

“I had a nagging injury and it just wouldn’t go away. In my 17-year-old brain I thought, I guess I can’t do this anymore, so I will go be normal. Go back to school and live a normal life.”

She was happy enough in that life, and enjoyed her job running the esthetics department for a plastic surgeon, “beauty guru stuff,” she said. “But the passion I have for skating is so much greater than I felt about the beauty industry.”

Remarkably, she didn’t lace up her skates once in those 16 years. “The universe kept giving me signs,” Stellato-Dudek said. She’d come across ice rinks in unlikely places, figure skater stickers on street signs. “I ignored all of them.”

Stellato-Dudek and Maxime Deschamps perform their free skate during the ISU Grand Prix of figure skating in 2023.