National championships will help decide figure skaters who will compete to secure Canada’s Olympic spots

For Canada’s top figure skaters, the Canadian National Skating Championships is the competition that will set up the rest of their season.

Results will impact who is named to compete at the 2025 ISU Four Continents Figure Skating Championships in February and the 2025 ISU World Figure Skating Championships in March, as well as, for those age-eligible, the 2025 ISU World Junior Figure Skating Championships. However, for some disciplines, it would not be unusual for Skate Canada to hold off on making world championship nominations until after the Four Continents.

The skaters who will go to the senior world championships have a very important job ahead of them: qualify Canada’s Olympic quota spots for Milano Cortina 2026. Athlete names will be put on those spots following the 2026 Canadian Championships.

READ: How Team Canada can qualify for Milano Cortina 2026

The 2025 Canadian National Skating Championships are taking place at Place Bell in Laval, Quebec. There are still tickets available if you’d like to attend in person.

The entire event, including practices and competition, will take place January 14-19, 2025. The first couple days of competition are reserved for the junior events, with the senior events starting on Friday, January 17.

Here are a few things to keep an eye out for in each senior discipline.

Ice Dance

Canada boasts two teams that consistently contend for major international podiums. At the ISU Grand Prix Final, there was a flip for the first time in how they ranked against each other.

Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier are three-time world championship medallists, highlighted by their silver medal in Montreal in 2024. But the first half of this season did not go super smoothly for them.

After winning Skate Canada International, they finished second at their second Grand Prix event, Finlandia Trophy, following a fall in their free dance. Their podium hopes at the Grand Prix Final were dashed in the rhythm dance when they had a very costly fall on the required pattern step sequence. But in a great display of resilience, they put that disappointment behind them to earn the second-highest score in the free dance. 

READ: Gilles & Poirier aim to tango to the top before dancing onwards to 2026 Winter Olympics

To win their fourth national title, they’ll have to skate better than Marjorie Lajoie and Zachary Lagha, who finished fourth at the Grand Prix Final, one spot ahead of Gilles and Poirier.

Lajoie and Lagha had gone to Skate Canada International with hopes of challenging their veteran teammates for the top spot on the podium, but a fall in the rhythm dance prevented the scores from being as tight as anticipated. At the Cup of China, Lajoie and Lagha finished less than four points behind two-time world championship medallists Charlene Guignard and Marco Fabbri of Italy in the fight for first place.

These will be the first national championships since 2022 to feature both teams. Gilles and Poirier missed the 2023 nationals while she recovered from surgery after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Lajoie and Lagha missed the 2024 nationals while she recovered from a concussion.

Canada can send three ice dance teams to the world championships. If the first two spots are considered all but locked in, then the battle for the third spot should be interesting. Last year, Marie-Jade Lauriault and Romain Le Gac placed one spot ahead of Alicia Fabbri and Paul Ayer. While Lauriault and Le Gac have been competing on the senior international scene since 2016-17, Fabbri and Ayer only competed in their first senior Grand Prix event in the fall of 2022 and are a young team on the rise.

Pairs

Canada has also qualified three pairs for the world championships. As coincidence would have it, there are three pairs on the national team.

Leading the way should be reigning world champions Deanna Stellato-Dudek and Maxime Deschamps, who won both of their Grand Prix events this fall. They withdrew from the Grand Prix Final as Deschamps was recovering from an illness, but just days later had great reason to celebrate as American-born Stellato-Dudek took her oath of Canadian citizenship. That ensures their eligibility to represent Team Canada at the Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic Winter Games.

The second-ranked Canadian team is Lia Pereira and Trennt Michaud, who finished in the top eight in both world championship appearances since they teamed up in 2022. This fall, they reached the podium at the Cup of China after finishing fifth at the Grand Prix de France.

Rounding out the national podium last year was Kelly Ann Laurin and Loucas Éthier, who went on to make their world championship debut in Montreal. This fall, they just missed the podium at Finlandia Trophy, finishing fourth.

A new pair to keep an eye on are Fiona Bombardier and Benjamin Mimar. They made their international debut together at an ISU Challenger Series event in November, winning bronze at the Warsaw Cup. Bombardier, daughter of two-time Olympian Josée Chouinard and two-time national pairs champion Jean-Michel Bombardier, was the national bronze medallist in women’s singles in 2023 before picking up pairs.

Women’s Singles

Canada will send just one woman to the world championships. Heading into the nationals, there are five who have earned the minimum technical score to make them eligible for selection.

Two-time national champion Madeline Schizas will be looking to reclaim the title from last year’s gold medallist, Kaiya Ruiter. Schizas, 21, who has been the main face of Canadian women’s figure skating over the last few years, finished fifth and seventh at her two Grand Prix events this fall. At 18, Ruiter is continuing her development after moving to Toronto from Calgary in the off-season to work with renowned coaches Tracy Wilson and Brian Orser.

Katherine Medland Spence surprised just about everyone when she won gold at the Warsaw Cup in November. It was her first true international competition and the 24-year-old defeated Ruiter as well as several skaters who competed at last year’s world championships.

Fresh out of the junior ranks is Uliana Shiryaeva, 17, who was fourth at last year’s nationals. Sara-Maude Dupuis, 19, has regularly represented Canada internationally over the last couple of years.

Men’s Singles

Canada will also send just one man to the worlds. Though there are four who have achieved the required technical score, two of them have withdrawn from nationals after dealing with some injuries during the fall. The most recent withdrawal is defending national champion Wesley Chiu, 19, who pulled out of Cup of China in late November after suffering a badly sprained right ankle in a practice session at the Grand Prix. His withdrawal from the Canadian championships follows that of another 19-year-old contender, Stephen Gogolev.

Roman Sadovsky, 25, is the veteran of the group with a national title in 2020 and two world championship appearances behind him. A back injury forced his withdrawal from the free skate at Skate Canada International. At the Tallinn Trophy ISU Challenger Series event in November, he climbed from ninth after the short program to win the bronze medal. 

Aleksa Rakic, 20, was the runner-up at last year’s nationals. He went on to finish eighth at the 2024 World Junior Championships and showed great promise with his seventh place finish at Skate Canada International in October.