By Lori Ewing
MILAN, Feb 13 (Reuters) - Canada's Deanna Stellato-Dudek says the past two weeks have unfolded like "a nightmare" after a terrifying brush with disaster when she hit her head in training that almost obliterated her Olympic dream in a heartbeat.
While Stellato-Dudek was feeling "totally fine" on Friday as she and pairs partner Maxime Deschamps practised for the first time at the Games, the emotional whiplash of nearly missing her Olympic debut after striking her head is still fresh.
Yet
if anyone is built to withstand such a scare, it is Stellato‑Dudek, the 42‑year‑old whose comeback has already rewritten what seems possible in an elite sport built on youth.
She is set to become the oldest figure skater in nearly 100 years to compete at the Games — a woman who left skating for 16 years, built a career and a life far from the ice, then clawed her way back to the top of the world.
Simply standing on the ice with the Olympic rings splashed across the arena boards meant she had already beaten the longest odds she has ever faced.
But that does not mean the past days have been easy.
"The last week and a half has been a living nightmare that I would not wish on anybody," she said.
"But when I set out on this journey in 2016, not one person told me I would make it to the Olympics ... to know me is to know that I wasn't going down without a fight.
"It's been difficult seeing that the dream was slipping under my feet," Deschamps added. "But I still believed in Deanna the whole time. We were still hoping, and that was important to keep that."
Stellato-Dudek and Deschamps missed figure skating's team event in Milan after her January 30 training accident. She would not elaborate on the injury except to say she did not suffer a concussion.
"I'm not going to get into specifics," she said. "I myself have not processed what has happened from the moment the accident occurred. The only focus was tunnel vision on 'how can I get here?'"
Stellato‑Dudek said she passed her medical evaluations with what doctors called a "remarkable recovery."
SAFETY FIRST AND A MAJOR ELEMENT REMOVED
The Canadians confirmed, however, that they have removed the backflip from Sunday's short programme for safety's sake.
This season, they became the first pair in history to incorporate the crowd-pleasing, high-risk element into their programme - a move banned by the International Skating Union until last season and still rarely attempted.
"Obviously, we don't want to do anything that's going to hinder the rest of my life in terms of my health," Stellato-Dudek said. "And so we just wanted to take out any unnecessary risk.
"Everything else in skating is pretty much upright. That's the only thing that goes upside down.
"And it's not a required element. It was really just like the buffer of a diamond."
Her injury meant missing the opening ceremonies in Milan as well as the team event, in which Canada finished fifth.
"That stunk," she said. "This is not the Olympics that we dreamed of. That being said, we were going to take anything we could get."
TRIPLE JUMPS INTIMIDATING
While Stellato-Dudek said her injury only kept her off the ice for three days, they were cautious at Friday's training session, forgoing most of their difficult elements.
She pointed out that triple jumps are intimidating after any kind of layoff.
"If I take a 10-day vacation and then come back, I'm afraid to do everything," she said. "But there's a very famous quote by Eleanor Roosevelt that says that 'you should do something every day that scares you.' I've checked that box, no problem.
"But you have to rip off the Band-Aid," she added. "There's no other option."
Asked how she feels today, she did not hesitate.
"Totally fine. I feel like nothing happened," she said.
Stellato-Dudek will be the oldest figure skater competing at an Olympics since Finland's Ludowika Jakobsson, who skated at the 1928 Games when she was 43.
Stellato-Dudek had also dreamed of becoming the oldest female Olympic figure skating gold medallist here in Milan, after becoming the oldest woman to win a world title in 2024.
Whether or not she and Deschamps climb the podium, her comeback story is already extraordinary. She was a world junior silver medallist for the U.S. as a singles skater but quit due to injury, before launching her comeback 16 years later.
It has been an improbable journey and a reminder that reinvention is still possible.
Stellato-Dudek is grateful, she said, to stand where she does. "It's not like the ideal training before the Olympics," she added. "But it could have been a heck of a lot worse."
(Reporting by Lori Ewing; Editing by Ken Ferris)
