What Would You Do If You Knew You Wouldn’t Fail? Inside Deanna Stellato-Dudek’s Olympic Comeback at 42

A story of patience, potential, and returning to the dream long after the world expects you to let it go

By Jenny Smith Mattfeldt

Published January 22, 2026

You’ve probably seen the headlines by now; a 42-year-old woman headed to the Olympics, skating against competitors nearly 15 years her junior. She’s draped in Oscar de la Renta, throwing backflips on ice, and quietly dismantling every tired idea we have about age, timing, and what women are allowed to come back from. Somehow, that still barely scratches the surface of what Deanna Stellato-Dudek has actually done.

Her Early Years

Deanna Stellato-Dudek didn’t just skate young, it was part of who she was. She stepped onto the ice around five or six years old, and by the late 1990s, she was already being talked about as one of the most promising junior singles skaters in the United States. Before she was old enough to drive, she had built a résumé most athletes never touch: an ISU Junior Grand Prix title, a silver medal at the 2000 World Junior Championships, and a reputation for powerful jumps, expressive skating, and an unmistakable work ethic. All of that before the age of 17.

She was, by every definition, on track.

Then her body interrupted the narrative. A series of hip injuries, followed by a fractured ankle, stalled her momentum just as she was transitioning out of juniors and into the most competitive years of her career. Around 17, less than a year before the 2002 Winter Olympics she had long dreamed of, Stellato-Dudek retired from competitive singles skating altogether.

The exit was quiet. There was no final victory lap, no tidy ending. Just unanswered questions about how far she could have gone and the sense that something had been cut short before it ever had the chance to fully unfold. That unresolved ending is what makes her eventual return feel so electric. Because this wasn’t a comeback story written out of nostalgia. It was a chapter that simply hadn’t been finished yet. (And yes eventually, it leads to her throwing actual backflips on ice in her forties.)

The Comeback Begins

For the next 16 years, Deanna Stellato-Dudek lived what most people would call a normal life. She got married. She built a career as an aesthetician. Skating became something she had done once. Extraordinary, yes, but firmly in her past.

Then, on a work trip in 2016, she was asked a routine team-building question: What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?

Without thinking, she answered, “I would win an Olympic gold medal.”

The words surprised her as much as anyone else in the room. She hadn’t realized the dream was still there, quiet, dormant, but very much alive. Two weeks later, she called her mom to ask if her old skates were still in the basement.

She laced them back up and discovered she could still land the jumps so she made a deal with herself: train every day for three months and if she stayed committed, she’d allow herself to take the idea seriously. Her coach told her she looked like she’d only been off the ice for six months (rather than over a decade.) But the goal wasn’t immediate success. It was something deeper. Stellato-Dudek wanted to know that she would never walk away again wondering what if. That one day, at 80, she could kick back with a glass of wine and say, I went back and did it.

Skating, she’s said, gives her a sense of routine, discipline, and artistic freedom she hasn’t found anywhere else. It isn’t the promise of winning that keeps pulling her forward, it’s something far more intrinsic. Skating is the fabric of who she is. And as people began reaching out, sharing that her return had inspired them to reclaim old dreams or make bold changes of their own, she realized her story had grown bigger than chasing a medal.

Dripping in De La Renta

For the 2025–26 season, Stellato-Dudek did something no figure skater had done before: she took the ice in custom Oscar de la Renta. After reaching out directly to designers she admired (including some cold call LinkedIn messages) the de la Renta house agreed to create dresses for both her short and long programs, marking its first foray into figure skating costume design.

Matching Drive

In 2019, Stellato‑Dudek began for a partner who was as hungry as she was. She tapped every contact she could in the skating world, and coaches helped connect the dots to Maxime Deschamps, a French‑Canadian skater based near Montreal whom she had never met. They clicked almost immediately, she was impressed by his strength, explosiveness, and drive, and committed to chasing the next step together.

As their sights shifted toward the 2026 Olympics, they realized they would need to be citizens of the same country. Stellato‑Dudek pursued Canadian citizenship with that same relentless, graceful determination, fully leaning into what it would take to compete alongside Maxime on the world stage. But the partnership wasn’t just about logistics or techniques, it comes down to that shared hunger to win.

The gamble paid off. Together, they won the World Championships, cementing themselves as one of the sport’s premier pairs teams (and making history as the first to ever land a backflip in international pairs competition) as they dialed in on the 2026 Olympics.

Keep Your Eye Out

Now, all signs point to Milan. Stellato‑Dudek and Maxime Deschamps will represent Canada at the 2026 Winter Olympics, taking the ice against the world’s best—nearly 20 years younger than she was when she first dreamed of this moment. Her story is built around challenging age expectations in a sport dominated by younger athletes, embracing her years as a source of strength and artistic edge rather than a limitation.

(And she’s expected to compete in her custom Oscar de la Renta dresses, a couture statement as electric and remarkable as her story itself.)

And yet, despite the glamour and the medals on the line, Stellato‑Dudek remains clear-eyed about what this journey truly means. She wants her hunger and perseverance to resonate beyond the rink: “I hope a lot of athletes stay around a lot longer. I hope it encourages people to not stop before they've reached their potential. And I hope it transcends into other areas, not just in sports, but also in other areas of life, like work and professional careers.”

And when she steps onto the ice in Milan, the world won’t just be witnessing a competition, we will be witnessing a woman's pursuit of potential decades in the making.

---