Photo: FloweringDagwood, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Key takeaways
- A junior prodigy, Stellato won the 1999-2000 Junior Grand Prix Final and 2000 World Junior silver, then retired at 17 after repeated hip injuries.
- She came back at 33 in 2016, switched from singles to pairs, and teamed up with Canada's Maxime Deschamps in 2019.
- At 40 she won the 2024 World Championships, making her the oldest woman to win a world title in any figure skating discipline.
- Despite a head injury about two weeks before her Olympic debut, she skated in Milan at 42 and finished 11th in pairs.
If you've ever felt like you're "too old" to be lacing up your skates, allow us to introduce you to Deanna Stellato-Dudek. She walked away from figure skating for 16 years, built an entirely different career, became the director of aesthetics at a Chicago medical practice, and then came back to win a World Championship and compete at the Olympics, at 42 years old. Her story isn't just inspirational; for those of us in the adult skating community, it's personal.
When she skated at the 2026 Games, the average age of the other women in the pairs event was around 24. Her biggest rival when she first competed, Michelle Kwan, had been retired for two decades, and most of today's top skaters hadn't been born when Deanna first stepped away. Here's how she got there.
A prodigy cut short
Deanna wasn't a casual skater who decided to try competition later in life; she was a genuine prodigy. Born June 22, 1983, in Park Ridge, Illinois, she started skating at age six. She grew up blasting Celine Dion CDs at the rink before school and making up routines while she had the ice to herself.
Her coaches were Cindy Watson-Caprel and Philip Mills in Northbrook and Buffalo Grove, Illinois, where she skated for the Wagon Wheel Figure Skating Club, and by her mid-teens she was one of the top junior singles skaters in the country. In the 1999-2000 season, Stellato won the ISU Junior Grand Prix Final in ladies' singles, a major international achievement. She followed it with silver at the 2000 World Junior Championships.
She was 16, and the path to the Olympics looked wide open. Her realistic target was the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, which, in an almost poetic twist, were also in Italy. Her body had other plans.
She injured her right hip at the 2000 Skate Canada International and was back training two weeks later, and a pulled hip flexor in the same hip forced her out of the 2001 U.S. Championships. A torn ligament in her right ankle and a fractured left ankle followed. Because of four different hip injuries alone, she skated for a total of about 24 months in four years.
In 2001, at 17, Deanna Stellato retired from competitive figure skating. The prodigy who had been aiming for Turin walked away from the sport entirely. Skating, it seemed, was over.
Sixteen years off the ice
For the next 16 years, Deanna set out to live a normal life off the ice. She went to college, moved between majors while she looked for footing without the structure skating had always provided, and eventually found her niche as a licensed aesthetician and permanent cosmetics professional. She married Michael Dudek, a consultant, on September 21, 2013.
Her career grew too, until she was director of aesthetics at the Geldner Center, a medical spa in Chicago affiliated with a prominent plastic surgeon, managing a team of practitioners. Her old skates sat in a dusty closet at her mother's house in suburban Chicago. Skating was behind her, or so she thought.
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Build a bundleThe question that changed everything
In 2016, at a work retreat, Deanna's team did one of those team-building exercises with notecards, and the question on hers read: "What would you do if you knew you couldn't fail?" She surprised even herself with her answer: win an Olympic gold medal.
Two weeks later, she asked her mother to dig her old skates out of the basement and went to a public session at a local rink. Her double jumps came back immediately. She was 33, an age when most competitive figure skaters have been retired for a decade.
The comeback begins
When Deanna started skating again, she visited her former coach Cindy Watson-Caprel, who had moved to a rink in Ellenton, Florida. Mitch Moyer, U.S. Figure Skating's high-performance director, happened to be at the same facility and suggested she try pairs instead of returning to singles. She took his advice, because she'd made a deal with herself that this time around she wouldn't pass on any opportunity.
In July 2016 she paired up with Nathan Bartholomay, a 2014 Olympian training at the same rink, and under coach Jim Peterson they trained three hours a day on the ice, five days a week. The partnership quickly proved itself: they won bronze at both the 2018 and 2019 U.S. Championships. In 2022 she and Maxime Deschamps won silver at Skate America, which made her the oldest skater to make a Grand Prix podium. For a skater just back from a long break, it was a remarkable start.
But when Bartholomay's knee problems forced him to stop, she was left searching for a new partner. She found Maxime Deschamps, a Canadian pairs skater from Vaudreuil-Dorion, Québec. The Globe and Mail later counted her as Deschamps's ninth partner, so neither of them was new to starting over.
The two formed a partnership in 2019, and Deanna moved from Chicago to Montreal. They chose to compete for Canada, and the math was simple: Deschamps probably couldn't get American citizenship in time for the 2026 Olympics, but Stellato-Dudek probably could get Canadian citizenship.
Rising to the top
The results came fast. Under coaches Josée Picard, Shawn Winter, and Stéphane Yvars in Sainte-Julie, Québec, Stellato-Dudek and Deschamps climbed the international ranks, and in 2022 they won the Nebelhorn Trophy, Deanna's first international title in 22 years. The table below tracks what came next.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 2022-23 | Won the Nebelhorn Trophy and became the oldest Grand Prix medalist in history. Took bronze at the 2023 Four Continents Championships, Deanna's first ISU championship medal in 23 years, and finished fourth at their first World Championships. |
| 2023-24 | Won bronze at the Grand Prix Final and gold at the 2024 Four Continents Championships. Then the big one: gold at the 2024 World Championships in Montreal, in front of a home crowd. |
| March 2024 | At 40, Deanna became the oldest woman to win a world title in any figure skating discipline. Germany's Minerva Fabienne Hase, one of their rivals, bowed to them after the winning skate; Hase had been a baby when Deanna first retired. |
| 2024-25 | In 2024-25 they won Skate Canada International and finished fifth at the 2025 World Championships. In 2025-26 they won Skate Canada International again and finished sixth at the Grand Prix Final. Her backflip off Deschamps's chest was, according to the ISU, the first assisted backflip of its kind by a pair in international competition. |
| December 11, 2024 | Deanna took the Canadian oath of citizenship in Montreal, clearing the final hurdle for Olympic eligibility. |
| January 2026 | At the Canadian Championships, after three straight national titles, Deanna fell ill with a stomach bug. They won the short program by nine points, but errors in the free let Lia Pereira and Trennt Michaud take the title, and they were named to the Olympic team as Canada's second pair. |
The nightmare before the dream
And then, just days before the Games, disaster struck again. On January 30, 2026, Deanna hit her head on the ice during a training session in Québec, an injury she said was "not a concussion" but declined to describe further. It forced her and Deschamps to withdraw from the team event, and for more than a week it was unclear whether she'd compete at all.
"The last week and a half has been a living nightmare that I would not wish on anybody," she told Team Canada as she took her first skate on Olympic ice. "The only focus was tunnel vision on how can I get here." After waiting 25 years for an Olympic moment, she was suddenly fighting just to get there.
On February 10, Skate Canada announced she had been cleared to compete. She and Deschamps left Montreal on Wednesday, February 11, and arrived in Milan on Thursday, February 12, three days before the pairs short program. "To know me is to know that I wasn't going down without a fight," she said.
They made one change to their program, removing the assisted backflip from their short program because they saw no need to risk her health. The backflip isn't a scored element, so dropping it didn't affect their technical score.
An Olympian at last
On February 15, 2026, Deanna Stellato-Dudek stepped onto Olympic ice for the first time, at 42, twenty-five years after she retired as a teenage prodigy. She was skating in Italy, the same country that hosted the 2006 Turin Games she'd once dreamed of as a singles skater. Their short program to Carmina Burana started strong, with a throw triple loop, a triple twist, and side-by-side triple toe loops, although Deschamps touched a hand down on the landing.
Then came the penultimate element, a group 5 reverse lasso lift, in which he lifts her overhead on one hand as they rotate before she returns to the ice on one blade. The lift itself, one of their best elements, went perfectly, but on the exit she came down too close to Deschamps' blade and was knocked off her feet. The fall cost them at least five points and left them 14th, with 66.04 points, about eight below their season's best.
"It was a complete surprise because that has never even happened in practice," she told Reuters afterward. "We're one of the best lifters in the world, so that was like so unfortunate for us in particular to have that error because that's usually where we rack up points, not lose them." She added that she was really proud of the performance, considering everything they'd been through before that mistake.
The next night, in the free skate, they scored 126.57 and climbed to 11th overall with 192.61, while Pereira and Michaud finished eighth for Canada. Deanna had become the oldest woman to compete in Olympic figure skating since 1928, and the third oldest in history. Our roundup of figure skating at the 2026 Olympics covers how the rest of the pairs event played out.
Her Team Canada profile lists her favorite quote as "The only limits you have are the ones you set on yourself." Her first Olympic skate wasn't perfect, and she was proud of it anyway.
A 42-year-old woman who hadn't skated competitively for 16 years refused to accept that her window had closed. She dug her skates out of a basement, moved to another country, learned an entirely new discipline, won a World Championship, and survived a head injury two weeks before the biggest moment of her life. And she still walked into the Olympic arena.
Why her story matters to us
At Adults Skate Too, we hear it all the time: "I'm too old to start skating." "I'm too old to come back." "My body can't handle it anymore." Deanna has heard plenty about her age too, and after her Olympic debut she told reporters she was proud to be the oldest person to compete in figure skating at a Games in nearly a century.
"I'm always really happy to represent for the Millennials and the women in their 40s," she told Reuters. "We're constantly underestimated and we're always told no. There's not one person that told me that I could achieve this when I started. So the fact that I persevered and was able to be here, I hope gives other people courage to do something else in their lives when people are fighting against them."
Her story isn't just about elite competition. It's about the audacity to believe the best chapter might still be ahead of you, even when the world says your window has closed, and about deciding that unfinished business is worth finishing. Whether you're working on crossovers, finally landing that waltz jump, or just getting back on the ice after years away, Deanna Stellato-Dudek is proof that adults belong on the ice, at any age and any level.
She was asked what she'd do if she knew she couldn't fail, and she answered honestly. Then she went and did it, even though she absolutely could fail, and sometimes did, which is what makes it real. If her story has you eyeing your own skates, our guide to starting figure skating as an adult is a good first step, and our guide to every Olympic figure skating event explains how pairs works.
Sources
This story draws on contemporary reporting and official results. Quotes are attributed to the outlet that first published them.
- ISU results, Olympic Winter Games 2026: pairs result, short program and free skating.
- ISU results, pairs: Skate Canada International 2024, World Championships 2025, Skate Canada International 2025 and Grand Prix Final 2025.
- ISU skater biographies: Stellato-Dudek and Deschamps, Stellato and Bartholomay, and the other pairs teams at the 2026 Olympics.
- ISU, Yes, she can backflip.
- Team Canada, Deanna Stellato-Dudek athlete profile and Stellato-Dudek & Deschamps take first skate on Olympic ice after pre-Games injury (February 2026).
- Skate Canada, Canada opens ISU Grand Prix season with two medals in pairs (October 2022), Pairs world champions open new door for the Winter Olympic Games (December 2024) and Meet Team Canada's figure skating rookies (January 2026).
- CBC Sports, Pereira, Michaud pull off upset to win Canadian pairs title, Stellato-Dudek, Deschamps will compete at Olympics and Stellato-Dudek and Deschamps make Olympic debut (2026).
- CP24, Former world champions Stellato-Dudek, Deschamps to compete at Olympics; TSN, World champion figure skater Stellato-Dudek to become Canadian citizen; Reuters, via the New Straits Times, Stellato-Dudek proud after making long-awaited Olympic debut.
- NBC Sports, Stellato-Dudek, the oldest Grand Prix medalist, and NBC Olympics, Stellato-Dudek succeeds in a 10-year quest.
- U.S. Figure Skating, Deanna Stellato and Nathan Bartholomay (national team roster), SKATING magazine, Giving it all they've got (December 2017), and World Champion Deanna Stellato-Dudek Returns to U.S. Figure Skating (August 2026).
- The Globe and Mail, Canada's Deanna Stellato-Dudek, Maxime Deschamps the team to beat (2024).
- Associated Press via ESPN.com, World Junior runner-up withdraws from nationals (January 10, 2001).
