Review of the 2024 Canadian National Skating Championships

Calgary, Alberta was the host for the 2024 National Skating Championships which concluded over the weekend after a week of action. While figure skating is a little niche when it comes to playing on the betting sites, there are plenty of bookmakers who will offer odds on it when it comes to the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy.

Figure skating is one of the most popular sports in Canada and the National Skating Championship is always strongly contested. Let’s be honest, anything on ice is a great sport to watch! 

The 2024 World Championships are being held in Montreal from March 18-24 so the action in Calgary had more meaning to it with the chance of being selected for the team to represent Canada up for grabs.

Beyond that, all eyes will be on the opportunity to be selected for the 2026 Winter Olympics which will be held in Milan Cortina, Italy from February 6-22. It will only be 20 years since Italy last had a Winter Olympics with Turin as the previous host city. Milan Cortina won the vote over Stockholm for the honour of hosting the games.

Each skater, pair of skaters or team performs two routines in front of the judges. The first is the short program which lasts for two minutes and 40 seconds. The second is the free skate which lasts for four minutes.

For the single skaters, there is a list of seven elements that each routine must contain but each skater is free to pick their own music and to design a routine to perform what is asked of them in whatever order they wish.

To score the skaters, each element has a set degree of difficulty with the judges adding or taking away from that depending on how it was performed, this is the technical score. There are then three parts of a presentation score which are composition, presentation and skating skills. Nine judges will score with the highest and lowest scores discarded, the final score an average across the remaining seven.

In the Men’s singles, the gold medal went the way of Wesley Chiu. As is often the case with figure skating, it is the most precocious of talents who rise to the top, Chiu winning the National Skating Championship at the age of just 18.

Chiu won the bronze in this event in both 2022 and 2023 so he was not winning out of turn, securing the gold with an excellent score in the free skate having got himself the early lead with a solid short routine. 

Aleksa Rakic took the silver medal, second in the short routine, his free skate was the top score but it was not enough to overcome Chiu who had enough in hand at the end of the short routine to hold off the challenge. 

Bronze went to Anthony Paradis despite his free skate only being the fifth best. His short routine just gave him enough of a cushion over Conrad Orzel who finished fourth but produced the second-biggest score in the free skate, a performance that saw him miss out on the bronze medal by just 0.26 of a point.

Orzel was the silver medalist in the National Skating Championship last year but his short routine was only good enough for tenth place at the halfway mark, a score that cost him any chance of a medal.

Madeline Schizas was looking for a third consecutive win at the National Skating Championship. She looked on for that hat trick of success after the short program but the free skate saw her drop to second place and a silver medal. It was a poor skate which she admitted herself was a ‘waste of time’ so she will need to pick herself back up.

The 20-year-old has already represented Canada at a Winter Olympics, the 2022 edition in Beijing where she turned 18 during the games. While this will have been a disappointment for her, it will give her the fire to push harder towards Milan Cortina 2026 and a second Winter Olympic Games. 

The gold medal went to Kaiya Ruiter who won the silver in 2023 as a 16-year-old, her free skate program gaining her the top step on the podium in 2024. Born in Ottawa, she is now a Calgary native so there was plenty of hometown support cheering her on. 

There is no time for Ruiter to relax and enjoy the win though as she is straight off to South Korea to represent Canada at the Youth Olympic Games which will start this Friday. That is more pressure on the teenager but she has the temperament to relish the challenge.

The final step on the podium was taken by Hetti Shi who is just 15 years of age. The 2022 Canadian novice champion and 2023 Canadian junior champion, she took the step up in age group to take on the seniors in her stride.

Shi was only sixth after the short program but showed great tenacity to finish second in the rankings for the free skate and climb up to third overall. There is clearly plenty more potential for her to get herself to the top of the sport and is another who will have the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan Cortina at the front of her mind as a realistic target to be aiming for.

Deanna Stellato-Dudek and Maxime Deschamps won the Pairs competition, a remarkable result for Stellato-Dudek at the age of 40. Age is not such an important factor in pairs or ice dance as they are in the singles but in a sport where those under 25 have such an advantage, it is an impressive effort to claim the gold medal.

The pair have only had limited time together, partnering up for the 2019-20 season and then seeing their time cut short over the next two years. They were fourth in the World Championships last year and with the 2024 championships being held in Quebec where Deschamps hails from, their sights are set on a medal in a couple of months time.

Stellato-Dudek has already spoken of her desire to skate at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan Cortina. She will be 42 at that point so it could become even more of a remarkable story if they are anywhere close to the medal positions in Italy. 

Silver medalists Lia Pereira and Trennt Michaud are also a relatively new partnership, though a lot of that is down to the fact that Pereira is only 19 years old. Her partner has enjoyed plenty of success with a previous partner and he has managed to bring that level of experience over to create another talented pair. 

They were sixth at the 2023 World Championships and with another year of skating together under their belts, they will be hoping that they can get themselves in a position to challenge for a minor medal in Montreal.

Third place went to Kelly Ann Laurin and Loucas Ethier. They were bronze medalists at the 2022 Skate America competition and filled this same position at the 2023 Canadian National Skating Championship. They will have been hoping to move up the ranks from third but nobody can knock the consistency that they have shown as a pair since starting out together.

Perhaps the very best story of the 2024 National Skating Championship was the Ice Dance win of Piper Gillies and Paul Poirier. The pair had to miss the 2023 National Skating Championships as Gillies was undergoing surgery for cancer which has made their return this year even more special. To then go and win was a story of Hollywood proportions. 

The pair are both in their early thirties so they have plenty of experience in these competitions with this being their third win in this event. That goes along with the five silver medals and two bronze as one of the best ice dance duos that Canada has had over the last decade and more. 

They have a pair of World Championship bronze medals to their credit, including last year, and have represented Canada twice at the Winter Olympics. They would finish eighth in 2018 and seventh in 2022 and will be looking forward to a third games in Milan Cortina in 2026.

Marie-Jade Lauriault and Romain Le Gac were the silver medal team. The pair have been married for a little over eight years so they have a working relationship that so many people just would not have the mental strength to have.

2022 saw them finish fifth in this event, improving on that to take the bronze medal last year before another step up the podium this weekend. They are yet to take that kind of success onto the world stage, 12th as close as they have got at a World Championship while the sole time that they represented Canada at the Winter Olympics saw them finish 17th in 2018.

The bronze medal was won by Alicia Fabbri and Paul Ayer. Fabbri is 20 years old and hails from Quebec so she will be hoping that a bronze here is enough to get herself and her partner a spot in the 2024 World Championships in Montreal. 

A silver in the 2019 Junior National Skating Championship is the best that they have done at this event prior to the weekend so this is a good step forward for them as a pair. They might have to wait a little longer to represent Canada on the international stage but the 2026 Winter Olympics is far enough away to give them a chance to further their growth.

Les Suprêmes lives up to their name to claim the top spot in the synchronized event. Given that they are a two-time World Champion-winning team and are the defending champions heading into Montreal for the 2024 event, it was no surprise that they were the team to top the charts in Calgary. 

It has been a long battle over the years between them and Nexxice with Nexxice winning this competition in 2023. They were only able to gain a bronze medal in 2024 which will be a little disappointing for them.

The silver medal was won by Nova who had the highest-scoring free skate routine out of everyone but it was only good enough for second place. Their final score was less than three points behind Les Suprêmes which was an impressive effort with a gap of eight points back to the bronze medalists.

The search for future winners of the senior events begins with the junior categories at the National Skating Championship. The taste of a big stage is a key part of the maturation process with the pressure a good reminder of what is to come.

The men’s singles medalists were Terry Yu Tao Jin, David Li and David Shteyngart. John Kim led after the short program with David Bondar in second but the pair did not produce such an impressive free skate as those who went past them into the medal positions.

The women’s singles saw Lulu Lin claim the gold medal with Aleksa Volkova and Mely-Ann Gagner taking silver and bronze respectively. Megan Woodley had the lead after the short program but her free skate score saw her drop out of the medal positions. 

Pairs champions were Ava Kemp and Yohnatan Elizarov. Martina Ariano-Kent and Charly Laliberte-Laure took silver while Jazmine Desrochers and Kieran Thrasher claimed the bronze medal.

Leyla Veillon and Alexander Brandys topped the podium in the Ice Dance competition. Chloe Nguyen and Brendan Giang won the silver medal with Alisa Korneva and Kieran MacDonald rounding out the podium with their bronze.

In the synchronized competition, it was once more Les Suprêmes who proved the team to beat, notching up the junior win before the senior team did the same. That certainly makes it look as if the future of the synchronized competition is going to be in a very safe pair of skates for many years to come.