Figure skating is a young woman’s sport. She wants to change that.

By VANESSA FRIEDMAN

In many ways, the story of Deanna Stellato-Dudek’s quest for a gold medal in Olympic figure skating is just like any other.

She started skating at age 5 while growing up in Chicago and dreamed of going to the Olympic Games. She traded a normal adolescence for early mornings at the rink, college preparation for nationals preparation. A hip injury seemed to end her career when she was 17. She fought her way back and will compete this month at the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics.

So far, so familiar — except for one thing. Stellato-Dudek is 42.

The Olympics she had originally aimed for were the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City, Utah. She took not six months but 16 years off, and in those 16 years she did not coach or do other skating-adjacent work. She became the director of aesthetics for a plastic surgeon.

When she returned, she did so as a pairs skater, and when she and her partner, Maxime Deschamps, won the world championship in 2024, she made history as the oldest woman to win a world title in any figure skating discipline. (They also won the Canadian national championship in 2023, 2024 and 2025 and were silver medalists this year.)

When they skate in Milan on Sunday, representing Canada, Stellato-Dudek will once again be the oldest woman on the ice. Like Tom Brady and LeBron James, she is redefining the limits of what is possible in her sport.

Amber Glenn, an American singles skater who is among the favorites for a gold medal, has called herself the “fun aunt” because at 26 she is much older than many of her peers. Though pairs skaters tend to be older, only four of the female pairs gold medalists since 1956 have even been in their 30s (and all of those were younger than 35). When social media commentators want to be mean, Stellato-Dudek said, they refer to her as “Grandma Deanna.”

“I mean, I am a whole legal human being older than almost everybody else,” she said, laughing.

Which explains why when Stellato-Dudek announced her return to skating, people thought it was “crazy,” said her coach, Josée Picard, who came out of retirement to work with Stellato-Dudek and Deschamps.

“Crazy,” Stellato-Dudek’s mother, Ann Stellato, said. “Nobody expected her to persevere and to do what she has done. Nobody.”

Defying Society’s Expectations

“The age pendulum for me swings both ways,” Stellato-Dudek said. She had just come off the ice after a four-hour practice with Deschamps at the skating complex outside Montreal, where they are based.

She is only 5 feet tall but has the muscled body of an athlete. She looked like a “Frozen” version of the Energizer bunny rather than the usual figure skating fawn.

“When I do well, I am celebrated more than my younger counterparts,” she said. “After worlds, I had, like, 20,000 messages on Instagram. But when we do poorly, there are so many trolls DMing me about my body, my face, my hair, that I’m not strong enough.”

Stellato-Dudek decided to return to skating when she was in her early 30s. She did not want to look back and regret not trying to get to a podium because she had listened to “society telling you that’s the age you should stop.”