When Deanna Stellato-Dudek attended a work retreat in 2016, she didn’t know it would set her on a path toward winning a world championship in figure skating. Then 32 years old, the Park Ridge native was the director of aesthetics for a plastic surgeon’s office in Chicago, and her teenage years as a rising figure skating star seemed in the distant past.
But that day, a team-building activity posed the question, “What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?” Immediately, Stellato-Dudek responded, “I would win the Olympic gold medal.”
“I remember on my way home that night, I thought, ‘I can’t believe I said that. I wonder if there’s something more to that,’” she told the Tribune.
Deanna Stellato-Dudek and Maxime Deschamps pose with a Canadian flag and their gold medals after finishing first in the Pairs Free Program during the ISU World Figure Skating Championships on March 21, 2024, in Montreal. (Minas Panagiotakis/Getty Images)
Indeed, there was more to it — much more.
After 16 years off the ice, Stellato-Dudek returned to the sport in the 2016-17 season, switching disciplines from women’s singles to pair skating and partnering with fellow American Nathan Bartholomay. They amicably parted ways after three seasons when Bartholomay got injured, and in 2019, Stellato-Dudek teamed up with her current partner, Canadian skater Maxime Deschamps. Representing Canada, she and Deschamps won the gold medal at the International Skating Union’s World Figure Skating Championships in March 2024, making 40-year-old Stellato-Dudek the oldest woman to win a world title in figure skating.
Stellato-Dudek grew up in Glenview and began figure skating at the local rink where her older brother played hockey. “We spent a lot of time as a family in the ice rink,” she said. “I only really have fond memories of it.”
As a teenager, she represented the United States in international competitions, taking gold at the 1999 Junior Grand Prix Final and silver at the 2000 World Junior Figure Skating Championships. When a hip injury derailed her plans to train for the 2002 Olympic trials, she decided to retire at age 17.
Stellato-Dudek built a career as an aesthetician and lived in Chicago for a decade. She enjoyed city life, but when her figure skating dreams were rekindled, she retrieved her boots and blades from her mother’s basement and formulated a plan.
“I started to skate again whenever I could. I would get up at 4 in the morning and try to be on the ice at 5 a.m. before I had to go in to work,” she said. “My goal was that every day, for three months, I had to do something toward my dream, and I had to metaphorically build a chain-link fence. If I did something toward my dream every day, I could add a link to the fence, and my goal was to never break the chain.”
After those three months, she rewarded herself with a trip to Florida to see Cindy Watson Caprel, her childhood coach. During that visit, she happened to encounter Mitch Moyer, then a senior director with U.S. Figure Skating. At his suggestion, she participated in a tryout for pair skating. “I fell in love with pairs, and the rest is history,” she said.
In her partnership with Bartholomay, Stellato-Dudek won consecutive bronze medals at the 2018 and 2019 U.S. Championships, but then she had to find a new partner due to his injury.
“In figure skating, it’s really common when you get to a certain level and you’re in the partner sport, that most of the time there’s one person who actually was not born in the country that they’re representing,” she said. “There are so few of us at a certain level, and there has to be a good match visually, there has to be a good match in a skill set, you have to have similar torso sizes, similar leg sizes, similar body makeup.”
“And so, it’s difficult to find a partner that matches you properly,” Stellato-Dudek continued. “At the time in America, there was literally nobody. Everybody was already taken, and I knew I wanted to continue. So that was when I moved across the border to Canada to start my second journey here in pairs skating.”
Deschamps recalls feeling an instant connection with Stellato-Dudek during their initial tryout in 2019. “I feel free skating with her,” he said. Deschamps also praised her “perseverance, determination and work ethic. She comes into the rink every day as if it’s an Olympic day, so she has that fire, and that’s what makes a huge difference.”
That grit would be necessary to continue training through the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic when they had to improvise by skating outdoors in the winter and practicing lifts off the ice. Their hard work soon yielded impressive results, including back-to-back Canadian championships in 2023 and 2024, a gold medal at the 2024 ISU Four Continents Figure Skating Championships and five medals — including three golds — from the ISU Grand Prix of Figure Skating series of international competitions.
But their crowning achievement thus far happened on home ice in March when they won the 2024 ISU World Figure Skating Championships in Deschamps’ native Montreal. Coming into the competition with the momentum of a strong season, Stellato-Dudek and Deschamps achieved a personal best score and were in first place after the short program — the first of two programs required in figure skating competitions. However, their gold medal seemed in jeopardy when Stellato-Dudek was fighting illness and had a rough warmup before their longer program.
That’s when she drew on her Chicago roots and channeled one of her longtime sports heroes. “Growing up in Chicago in the ’90s, I have very special memories of my mom and dad letting my brother and I stay up late to watch the Chicago Bulls when they were in all of their championships,” she said. “Michael Jordan has been a huge source of inspiration for me.”
Knowing this, her coaches said to Stellato-Dudek, “Do you remember when Michael Jordan won the (1997) championship game with a fever? You’re going to need to be like Mike right now.”
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“It really turned my head around to be like, ‘OK, this is my moment to be like him,’” she said. Skating to a song from the “Interview with the Vampire” score — with Stellato-Dudek playing the part of the vampire to thrilling effect — the pair won their first world championship.
Without any downtime to celebrate, Stellato-Dudek and Deschamps traveled from Montreal to Japan to perform in the Stars on Ice tour, and they are already preparing for the 2024-25 season. Stellato-Dudek is seeking Canadian citizenship so the pair can compete in the 2026 Olympics, and their four-year training plan is well underway.
Reflecting on her historic world title, Stellato-Dudek sees her age as an advantage.
“I gave myself permission to have this second chance at something that not everybody does. Once I decided that I was going to do this, I said I was going to do it with reckless abandon and put my foot all the way down on the pedal.”
In a sport often dominated by younger athletes, the experience that comes with age is another benefit. “Figure skating is such a unique sport in that we have all of this athleticism and these amazing jumps and spins, but then we have this artistic side that allows us to tell a story,” Stellato-Dudek said. “I feel like, as an adult, it’s so much easier to draw on my actual life experiences to try to portray these things properly. That is, I think, a positive part about hopefully seeing some athletes stay in the game longer and continue on longer.”
“If I could inspire another skater to stay in just as long as me and break my record and win a world championship at 41, that would be my ultimate dream.”
Emily McClanathan is a freelance reporter for the Chicago Tribune.
