Up until a few weeks ago, Gabby Daleman was Canada’s best-kept secret. We’ve hardly seen her in three years. She’s determined to change that with her straight-ahead fierce focus. Never has there been an athlete who is clearly about blood and thunder, intensity, and sheer want-to passion. She’s motivated like a wasp to a honey […]
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Ice Dance Hocus Pocus
Fifty years after ice dancing was allowed into the Olympic schedule, the discipline has become “a whole schlemozzle,” says a former dance judge and ISU officer. Nobody understands the scores issued by judges and technical panels, especially during the Grand Prix events this season. There seems to be a certain jockeying for position that doesn’t […]
Alysa Liu: Riding a Sunbeam
Alysa Liu is just cut from a different cloth. She astounded the world when she did off-the-wall things like land a triple Axel, then a triple Axel-triple toe loop when she was a 13-year-old junior. At a Junior Grand Prix in Lake Placid in August of 2019 – when she was only 14 – she […]
Jason Brown: Art Lights the Way
Jason Brown grew up feeling the magic of the Miracle on Ice, that unforgettable march of the US hockey team to win gold at the 1980 Olympics. in Lake Placid, N.Y. Never mind that the event pre-dated his birth by 14 years. It’s just something that lives forever in the heart of an athlete in […]
A Canadian Triple Axel Quest
It’s been a long time coming: that first Canadian woman to land a triple Axel in competition. Sara-Maude Dupuis, 20, of Montreal – Canada’s reigning women’s silver medalist – is leading the charge this season. In late September, Dupuis attempted the 3 ½-rotation jump for the first time in the free skate of the Nepela […]
Lauriault and Le Gac: Fast Out of the Blocks
It’s Olympic season and ice dancers Marie-Jade Lauriault and her husband, Romain Le Gac, refuse to sit still. It’s not what ice dancers do, after all. For one thing, they have some corners to turn, some catching up to do, some eyeballs to impress. After finishing second at the Canadian championships a couple of years […]
Back flipping to the Olympics
Deanna Stellato-Dudek and Maxim Deschamps make history every time they step onto the ice. It could be that – now 42 – she’s the oldest skater crazy enough to undertake this most dangerous of skating disciplines. And there was that mind-twisty forward outside death spiral that others would never tackle. And a high-risk lift with […]
Keegan Messing Unretires.
MISSISSAUGA, Ont. Keegan Messing is now 33, with a fine spiderweb of white hair among his dark locks. And he’s just caused a rumble by deciding to unretire and set his sights on the Milan Olympic Games next February. You see him on ice, slipping around an ice pad with great speed, trying out a […]
Malinin: Crazy Good
How do you defeat this guy, this Ilia Malinin kid – still only 20 – who seems to have been hatched from another planet and dropped earthward? Malinin and his mop of tawny hair and an unearthly ability to rotate his body, won his second consecutive world figure skating championship title on Saturday at the […]
Alysa Liu, and the Impossible Dream
“What the hell?” said she, who had just accomplished the impossible. Seconds before Alysa Liu finished her MacArthur Park free program at the world figure skating championships, the crowd of more than 19,000 in the TD Centre in Boston, stood up as one, screaming for her. They broke the sound barrier. “What the hell?” Liu […]