Pereira and Michaud in third after short program

MILAN – Canada has a team in the hunt for a pairs medal at the Olympics.

Only it’s not the former world champions.

Lia Pereira and Trennt Michaud finished third in the pairs short program, while Deanna Stellato-Dudek and Maxime Deschamps sat 14th after a costly fall Sunday.

“We’re very proud. We’ve put in so much work,” Pereira said. “After being pretty content with the short program at the team event, we still came out wanting more, and we’re very motivated people and we always want to put out our best, and today we did that.

“It’s a really nice full-circle moment to do that at the Olympics.”

Pereira, of Milton, Ont., and Michaud, of Trenton, Ont., entered the Milan Cortina Games with momentum after winning their first national championship. They’ll have a chance to bring home a medal after Monday’s free program.

On a night several contenders sputtered, the duo produced a season’s best 74.60 — shattering their previous mark of 70.66 — after a romantic, synchronized skate to “Say You Love Me” by Jessie Ware, lifting their arms in elation when the score was announced.

Pereira and Michaud high-fived at centre ice and shared a hug before exiting the surface after nailing almost every element, as Michaud fought to hold his landing on their side-by-side triple-toe loop jumps.

“We just tried to skate with a little bit more freeness throughout the whole program,” Michaud said, passing through the mixed zone more than an hour before realizing they would finish third. “I just thought we skated really well together today, which was really nice.”

Germany’s Minerva Fabienne Hase and Nikita Volodin stood in first place with 80.01 points after a clean skate, while Georgia’s Anastasia Metelkina and Luka Berulava placed second with 75.46. Pereira and Michaud held a 0.73-point lead over Hungary’s Maria Pavlova and Alexei Sviatchenko.

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Two-time world champions Riku Miura and Ryuichi Kihara of Japan stumbled to fifth with 73.11 after a massive error on their lasso lift.

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Stellato-Dudek and Deschamps, the 2024 world champions, experienced a problem on the same crucial element, losing major points when Stellato-Dudek tripped on the exit.

While holding Deschamps’s arm, she appeared to lose balance before falling backward and hitting the ice hard as the crowd let out a collective gasp. They finished with 66.04 points in an otherwise strong skate to the epic “Carmina Burana” by Carl Orff.

“Complete surprise, because that has never even happened in practice,” Stellato-Dudek said, “We’re one of the best lifters in the world, so unfortunate for us in particular to have that error because that’s usually where we rack up points, not lose them.”

At 42, Stellato-Dudek became the oldest female figure skater to compete at the Olympics in nearly a century, a little more than two weeks after she hit her head on the ice during a training session in Quebec.

The injury — she hasn’t disclosed what it was, except that it was not a concussion — jeopardized a long-held Olympic dream.

She and Deschamps, a 34-year-old from Vaudreuil-Dorion, Que., withdrew from the team event last week and only arrived in Italy on Thursday after Stellato-Dudek received medical clearance. To avoid unnecessary risk, the pair removed their assisted backflip from the short program.

“I feel completely fine. I wouldn’t have been cleared to come here if I was having issues,” Stellato-Dudek said. “It would have been nice to have some extra days of training, of course, that we got taken away from us, but that’s not why this happened. This has never happened before.”

Pereira, 21, and the 29-year-old Michaud, meanwhile, replaced Stellato-Dudek and Deschamps in the team event short program — a repetition the first-time Olympians believe paid dividends Sunday.

“Stepping out on the ice for the first time at the Olympics is, every emotion you can feel, but extremely nerve-racking,” Pereira said. “Today we were like, OK, we’ve done this already. Like, this is such a rare experience to have already performed on the exact same rink, same crowd, the judging panel hasn’t moved. All the unknowns were gone.

“It was like almost fighting a different sense of nerves because we knew exactly what to expect, but it definitely did help.”

The duo joined in August 2022. Michaud was searching for a new teammate after longtime partner Evelyn Walsh retired, and Pereira was a singles skater. They finished 11th, eighth and sixth in the past three world championships.

Stellato-Dudek is the oldest woman to compete in Olympic figure skating since Ethel Muckelt, also 42, represented Great Britain at the 1928 Winter Games in St. Moritz, Switzerland.

Her story is the stuff of legend in the figure skating world.

Born outside Chicago, Stellato-Dudek is a former U.S. singles rising star who retired at 17 because of chronic hip problems. She returned 16 years later as a pairs skater, eventually moving to the Montreal area in 2019 to partner with Deschamps, gaining Canadian citizenship in December 2024 — months after she became the oldest woman to win a world figure skating title.

Deschamps was on the brink of calling it quits before joining Stellato-Dudek, discouraged after cycling through eight partners.

“I’m always really happy to represent for the millennials and the women in their 40s,” she said. “We’re constantly underestimated, and we’re constantly told no, and there’s not one person that told me that I could achieve this when I started.

“The fact that I persevered and was able to be here, I hope gives other people courage to do something else in their lives that people are fighting them against.”

Since winning the world championships, Stellato-Dudek and Deschamps have struggled with consistency, finishing fifth at last year’s worlds and sixth at the Grand Prix Final in December. They also came second at nationals, with Stellato-Dudek battling a stomach bug.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 15, 2026.