Beware the Underdog

SAINTE-JULIE, QUE. – When Maxime Deschamps hauls a thick foam mat to an empty patch of asphalt in the parking lot outside Arena CSSJ, every other skater warming up in the mid-morning sun knows what he and his pairs partner, Deanna Stellato-Dudek, are set to attempt.

None of them will utter a word about it until Stellato-Dudek and Deschamps, who won gold at the 2024 world championships, have performed the move in competition, which won’t happen until September. Right now it’s late July, but it doesn’t matter. When it comes to game-changing new moves these figure skaters observe a strict code of silence. Forget breaking Omerta. These athletes won’t even bruise it.

But they pause their own routines to watch as Stellato-Dudek, a native of suburban Chicago who became a Canadian citizen last year, stands with her heels at the edge of the 10-centimetre thick crash pad, facing Deschamps. He sinks into half-squat, reaches down with both hands and laces his fingers together. 

She treats his hands like they’re a rung on a ladder, places her left foot inside and presses down into his palms. He braces for dynamic action. In one quick motion, Deschamps, who has spent his whole life in the Montreal area, straightens his knees and his spine, pulling up with his hands, transmitting all that power into the sole of his partner’s foot. If you can picture a Highland Games athlete tossing a caber, it’s almost identical in motion and explosiveness.

If the launch is Deschamps’ responsibility, the flight belongs to Stelatto-Dudek, who, while airborne, is all grace and experience and perfect positions.

A split-send after the throw, a freeze-frame would show her upside down, roughly a metre above the ground, the bottoms of her shoes facing the sky, her face tilted toward the mat. Her eyes find a landing spot, her mind zones in on the way her feet will hit the ground if she completes this backflip as planned.

This morning, the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina are still six months away, but perfecting a new move well in advance could help set the tone for a crucial season in the careers of Canada’s top figure skating tandem.

They won a world title in 2024, but slipped to fifth in last year’s championship. Both say the attention and expectations that accompany a title defence also drained time and attention from the training schedule that helped make them champions. Neither wants to squander a late-career chance at Olympic gold, even though they know they’ll operate under an even brighter spotlight, working through significant obstacles.

Deschamps, who, at 33, has spent three decades managing an extreme case of ADHD, says Milano Cortina will be his last Olympic Games. He has plans to become a coach, but they’re on hold until then. 

‘From champion to challenger’

Stellato-Dudek isn’t considering retirement, and might compete through 2030. She is already the oldest athlete ever to win a world figure skating title, and she accomplished that feat at 40. Now she’s 42, and trying to improve when biology suggests she’ll slow down. Right now, there is no plan B. There’s only Milano Cortina.

Neither her age nor his ADHD is a handicap, but they’re both realities Deschamps and Stellato-Dudek have to navigate on the path back to the podium. They’re two people working to become better individuals, so they can team up for their best shot at an Olympic title.

“Max and I are really good at being underdogs, so it’s ironic that we put ourselves back in that position before the Olympic games,” Stellato-Dudek says during a break between practice sessions. “It’s probably the best place for us to be. The crown hasn’t been lost. It’s just waiting to be re-earned.”

Stellato-Dudek floats to the ground and lands without a sound. Just a crease in the foam padding.

She spreads her arms, tilts her face toward the sun and breaks into a wide smile. 

Half an hour from now they’ll do it again.

In skates. 

On ice.

In front of coaches, and Skate Canada officials in town to monitor their progress. Whether the backflip ends in a clean landing or a wipeout, nobody outside the rink will know.

Until September.

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Ask Stellato-Dudek what concessions she makes to her age, and she serves up a one-word answer.

None.

If you’re in your 40s and aiming at your first Olympic Games, the attitude makes sense. Your body might change as the years pass, but the job requirements don’t. Whether you’re 22 or 42, you perform a two-minute, 50-second short program, and a free skate that lasts four-and-a-half minutes, at every competition, all season long. Preparing for that workload means three-a-day training sessions all summer. Judges aren’t grading on a curve, and the skills on display don’t care about your age. You land the jump or you don’t.

“I will not be outworked by an 18-year-old,” she says. “It’s not gonna happen. I don’t care what my age is. I outwork everybody.”

By now, Stellato-Dudek’s backstory is well known among figure skating fans, and has earned press coverage from mainstream U.S. outlets like ESPN and the The Washington Post.

At 20 years old, she was the young phenom who quit the sport cold turkey.

At 36, she was the manager of a medical spa in suburban Chicago who rekindled her love for figure skating during a corporate retreat. Attendees at one session were asked what they would do with their lives if they knew they couldn’t fail, and Stellato-Dudek blurted out that she’d win the Olympic gold medal.

From there she dove back into training, retrieving her old skates from her mom, who had kept them for the 16 intervening years, and reinventing herself as a pairs skater. By 39 she had relocated to Montreal to train with Deschamps, and by 40 she had won a world title. She gained her Canadian citizenship in 2024 

And now she’s a middle-aged dynamo who trains with the focus of a person who knows time is a finite resource.

“I came back to this sport to not have any regrets,” she says. “I’m not going to stop until I can be 80 years old and be at peace with the decision I made to come back.”

If competing in pro sports into your 40s is a 12-round slugfest against Father Time, high-profile athletes have landed some staggering body blows this summer. In July, boxing legend Manny Pacquiao, age 46, faced 30-year-old champion Mario Barrios in a title fight, and battled him to a 12-round draw. That same week, 45-year-old Venus Williams defeated Payton Stearns, 23, to reach the second round at the D.C. Open. A month later she teamed up with Montreal’s Leylah Fernandez to reach the doubles quarterfinal at the U.S. Open. And week one of the NFL season saw 41-year-old Aaron Rodgers, who suffered a ruptured achilles tendon in 2023, throw four touchdown passes to lead the Pittsburgh Steelers to a 34-32 win over the New York Jets.

‘I would have given up skating’

Stellato-Dudek presents another testament to athletic longevity, setting the pace for peers half her age during daily training. Her main challenge, according to Josée Picard, the pair’s coach, is managing the intensity she brings to every practice session.

“It’s not easy. For Deanna, it’s the Olympics every day,” says Picard, who has coached the pair since they first began skating together in 2019. “You’ve got to try and funnel the energy and put your energy into the things that are going to pay off in the long term.”

Picard’s job, then, is to factor Stellato-Dudek’s age into the team’s training schedule, balancing exertion, duration, and volume to ensure the pair gets the most benefit possible out of each practice session. So where, with younger skaters, Picard might do full run-throughs of each routine, she’ll drill Deschamps and Stellato-Dudek on sections of their programs. The goal is to perfect the parts to create a stronger whole, while still limiting mileage on the veteran skaters’ bodies.

If Stellato-Dudek makes a point of keeping up with younger skaters on the ice, her post-practice routines reflect the self-awareness of an athlete seeking to stay sharp deep into their 40s. Where a younger iteration of Stellato-Dudek could eat whatever she pleased, the current version eats the way she needs to, calibrating her intake of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins to fuel performance and support recovery. She drinks two litres of water, and consumes 60 grams of protein every day. Even on weekends.

And where a younger athlete might socialize outside of practice, Stellato-Dudek spends her spare time stretching, or lounging on her couch in a pair of hip-length Normatec boots, which purport to boost circulation and revive tired muscles. When one work day ends, prep for the next one begins.

“My 19-year-old co-workers do absolutely nothing for recovery. I have three hours of recovery,” she says. “That is the price I pay for doing this at 42. I refuse to pay the price on the ice.”

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After Maxime Deschamps tugs a snug-fitting nylon cap onto his skull, he settles into a leather recliner set up in front of a flat screen monitor, in the centre of a white room on the third floor of an office building in suburban St-Hubert. He clicks a remote control to start the video, then stares at flickering images of Les Bougnon, an award-winning French-language sitcom that had a three-season run on CBC in the mid-2000s.

Where Stellato-Dudek’s training days often end with her wearing Normatec pants while reclining on her couch, Deschamps’ post-practice routine often brings him to Neuroperforma, a brain health clinic where he undergoes regular neurofeedback sessions like this one, seeking to optimize his cognitive performance, and mitigate the symptoms of his ADHD.

Electrodes embedded in the skull cap feed information to a nearby computer that monitors Deschamps’ brain activity. When his attention drifts, the picture disappears. That’s the computer, with those electrodes telling it which regions of Deschamps’ brain are active, prompting him to focus on the screen. Steady images are the computer’s reward to Deschamps for maintaining concentration.

Looking ahead to Milano

These processes unfold in a few hundredths of a second, which explains why the screen flashes black instead of going totally blank. The sequence will repeat itself for the next 20 minutes. Over time, and repeated rewards for sustained concentration, these sessions aim to engrain the habit, enabling Deschamps to concentrate better during practice, and in his day-to-day life. 

“For Maxime, he doesn’t need to do anything. The brain will learn what it needs to do,” says Rock Therrien, Neuroperforma’s founder. “When the brain signals go in the right direction, immediately you get a reward.”

The regimen is the latest step in a life-long process of managing his ADHD. When Deschamps was first diagnosed at age 4, the doctor told him he had “l’energie du tonnere de dieu.” The Energy of The Thunder of God.

Deschamps says that before skating became his vocation, it was already his outlet. His mother, following the doctor’s suggestion, enrolled him in as many activities as possible. Soccer, hockey, swimming, karate, piano. But skating gripped him the way no other hobby could. Other kids at Sportplexe Pierrefonds, the suburban rink where he first learned to skate, might spend three or four hours practising. Deschamps would stay for seven or eight.

“I wasn’t trouble. I just couldn’t sit in place. I always had to move,” he says. “Skating, I was just able to do so many hours. I was feeling free on the ice. I was able to jump. Try new tricks. I always wanted to move.”

Deschamps says that when he opted, as a teenager, to specialize in figure skating, he also decided he wouldn’t use standard ADHD medications like Adderall and Ritalin. As an adult, he doesn’t even drink coffee – he says the caffeine would dull the effects of his neurofeedback sessions.

He started the therapy two years ago, at Stellato-Dudek’s suggestion. She thought of Deschamps when she saw Kirk Cousins using it on the Netflix series Quarterback. 

The episode, titled “Mind Games,” shows Cousins, then the Minnesota Vikings’ starting quarterback, using a mobile version of the neurofeedback setup: a skull cap and a smart phone with a specialized app; a few quiet moments before practice for a session in the front seat of his car.

“The best thing is that you just kind of let it happen,” Cousins says. “As long as you can set it up and devote the time to it, the training itself does the work for you. You just watch the video.”

When Deschamps straps on his skull cap a technician seated nearby watches a monitor, which displays a graph charting 66 measures of brain activity. Deschamps keeps his eyes on the TV, where the picture adjusts to match his level of focus. The steadier his concentration, the clearer the images on screen. 

Therrien says patients can show noticeable improvement after five sessions. He says 12 neurofeedback workouts can yield results – improved sleep, concentration, reaction time and stress management – that last weeks. His clinics serve the general population, but Therrien says the benefits for high-level athletes are clear.

“I don’t know of a sport where you don’t need stress management, you don’t need recuperation, you don’t need reaction time,” he says. “We can train the brain to have better capacity.”

Deschamps has always embraced the upside of ADHD. “Thunder of God” level energy is an obvious asset to any athlete. The problem, he says, was that the downside can be just as extreme – fatigue, depression, struggles to stay on task. And competing as part of a tandem further complicates the situation.

“It’s not always easy to have (a partner) that's low and high, but at the same time I’m demanding of myself,” he says. “I don’t see my ADHD as something that would take me backwards, but more as a super power. When it’s time to be on, I’m extra on.”

Deschamps began regular neurofeedback sessions heading into the 2023-2024 season, the  campaign that ended with a gold medal at the world championships in Montreal. The next year he attended sessions less frequently, and the pair faded to fifth at the worlds in Boston last spring.

Nobody in their camp thinks the shift in Deschamps’ therapy schedule caused the regression. Instead, they say their rapid transition from underdogs top gold-medal favourites disrupted their routines and preparation. More interviews, more attention, more off-ice obligations. Last season it was an inconvenience, but both skaters say it prepared them for the scrutiny they’ll face this year.

“In an Olympic year there’s not going to be fewer cameras. There’s going to be more,” Stellato-Dudek says. “It was good that we had that learning experience last year. At least now we know better how to deal with it.”

This off-season, Deschamps resumed his original therapy schedule – three sessions a week, twenty minutes a session – and Picard says she saw improvements in him quickly. More focus and more energy from Deschamps led to more productive practice sessions in the leadup to the most important season of the pair’s career.

“It makes you more consistent (and) making you more consistent works really positively on your confidence,” Picard says. “You don’t have as many doubts going into your events.”

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So about the backflip.

It’s audacious and unprecedented, and dangerous if you don’t do it right. If a skate blade can glide and provide traction on fresh ice, it’s also sharp enough to slice a skater’s clothes, and the skin beneath it. But if you perfect the move, it can set you apart.

After last season, Stellato-Dudek plotted a detailed breakdown of their results from the 2025 world championships on a spreadsheet. The document told her how she and Deschamps scored under each element of the scoring system, and how they compared to other elite pairs in every category. Stellato-Dudek says the exercise helped her understand where she and Deschamps remained strong and where they needed to improve, and helped the team decide how to invest their time and energy over the summer.

“This is what I got from being retired and running a business,” she says. “You think about what services are making you money and which services are not. It’s the same principle. Instead of making money, medals are our currency.”

The backflip, then, is a potential rainmaker, and anybody familiar with the way Stellato-Dudek and Deschamps interact could tell you that the risky new element was her brainchild.

“Deanna has all the crazy ideas,” Deschamps says. “My job is to make them happen. She has the creative brain. I have the engineer brain.”

Deschamps says the early visions for the move were both spectacular and unworkable. He vetoed a proposal that Stellato-Dudek step on his back, then vault herself head over heels. She also suggested standing on his shoulders, and he quashed that idea, too.

Eventually they connected with a gymnastics coach, who helped them through the practical details, and settled on something that seemed plausible – the modified caber toss. They rehearsed the move in the gymnastics facility, with Stellato-Dudek landing in a pit filled with foam blocks, then graduated to the crash pad on the asphalt outside the rink, before finally moving to the ice.

Picard thought the move had potential, but potential alone doesn’t win medals. She still had to figure out how to integrate the backflip into one of their programs, and when to start performing it in public. Initially she wanted to unveil it later in the year, but said a summer of rapid progress signalled that they could perform the backflip at their season opener, scheduled for Labour Day weekend in Lake Placid, N.Y.

Placing the move in their program presented another puzzle for Picard to solve. Performing it too early renders the rest of the routine anticlimactic. Attempt it too late and fatigue becomes a factor. Ultimately, the team decided to put the backflip at the tail end of their short program, after a footwork sequence that brought them to the middle of the rink.

“They have to train and keep training until, when they get there, they’re 100 per cent in shape to do it properly,” Picard said in a mid-August interview. “If all goes well, they should do well. It’s been the best summer that they’ve ever trained.”

The debut came Sept. 3, at the John Nicks Pairs Challenge International, a non-televised event in Lake Placid. Footage shows the pair stopping just beyond centre ice, in line with a Canadian flag hanging from the rafters above mid-rink. 

Deschamps cups his hands. Stellato-Dudek puts her left foot into the makeshift stirrup, and places her hands on his shoulders to brace herself. She presses down, and he pulls up. He launches her, and she completes a heels-over-head rotation before landing on two feet.

Officially, it's an assisted backflip.

The move earned them the highest score in the short program. Later they finished first in the free skate to claim the title.

A gold medal in their first competition in an Olympic year, and a seismic highlight that will reverberate through the sport. Stellato-Dudek and Deschamps essentially dared the world’s other top pairs to keep pace, knowing they probably can’t.

“I didn’t want them to know about it in June and work on it all summer,” she says. “By October, it’ll be too late.”