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An important series of events on the road to the upcoming Winter Olympics begins Friday as the 2025-26 Grand Prix of Figure Skating series begins in Angers, France.
For those who don’t know, the figure skating season is basically made up of two parts. The second part, beginning in January, features the national and world championships. The Grand Prix tour is the backbone of the first part.
Each week from now through late November, a total of six meets will be held in different countries around the world. After this week’s Grand Prix of France comes the Cup of China, then Skate Canada International in Saskatoon, followed by stops in Japan, the United States and Finland.
Skaters are allowed to compete in any two of these events, earning points based on how they finish. Once the regular season is complete, the top six in each discipline — men’s, women’s, pairs and ice dance — are invited to the prestigious Grand Prix Final in early December in Japan. That event should give us a pretty good look at the top medal contenders for the Winter Olympics in northern Italy two months later.
Canadians to watch this season
The main goal for Canada’s figure skaters this season is to return to the Olympic medal stand after they were completely shut out in 2022 in Beijing. This ended a nine-Games podium streak dating back to Brian Orser’s silver in 1984 in Sarajevo and peaking with a national-record four medals in 2018 in South Korea, where Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir won their second Olympic ice dance gold and helped Canada to the team title.
In Milan this February, Canada’s best medal chances are in the partner events.
2024 world champions Deanna Stellato-Dudek and Maxime Deschamps are expected to headline the country’s two entries in the pairs competition, while four-time worlds medallists Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier should lead Canada’s three ice dance teams.
Canada qualified only one athlete in each of the women’s and men’s events after Madeline Schizas and Roman Sadovsky both failed to crack the top 10 at the world championships last spring. Exactly who gets to fill Canada’s Olympic spots will be decided after the national championships in early January in Gatineau, Que.
Stellato-Dudek and Deschamps broke through two seasons ago, winning both of their regular-season stops on the Grand Prix Tour, taking bronze at the Final and adding a gold at the Four Continents Championships (the rest of the world’s answer to the European championships). They capped it off with the performance of their lives at the world championships in Montreal, electrifying the hometown crowd by capturing Canada’s first world title (in any discipline) since 2018.
Stellato-Dudek and Deschamps kept their momentum going into last season, winning both of their Grand Prix assignments in the fall. More good news came in December when the Chicago-born Stellato-Dudek became a Canadian citizen, clearing the way for the Montreal resident to compete for Canada at the Olympics (a passport is not required on the Grand Prix circuit and at the world championships).
But health issues and inconsistent performances dogged the duo throughout the championship portion of the season. A Deschamps illness forced them out of the Grand Prix Final, and their preparations for February’s Four Continents championships were knocked off kilter when Stellato-Dudek took a hard fall in practice and badly bruised her rear end.
The Canadians rebounded from a rough short program to take the silver there but couldn’t do the same at the world championships in Boston, finishing a disappointing fifth in defence of their world title. “Sometimes you win, and sometimes you learn,” Stellato-Dudek said at the worlds.
That’s a wise way to look at it. And much of the pair’s struggles in the back end of last season can be chalked up to misfortune. But Stellato-Dudek, the oldest woman ever to win a figure skating world title, turned 42 in June. And Deschamps is no spring chicken either as his 34th birthday is coming up in December. So it’s fair to worry that age may have been a factor in their drop-off. Here’s more on Stellato-Dudek and Deschamps from CBC Sports contributor Morgan Campbell.
Asher Hill and 3-time Olympic medallist Kaetlyn Osmond are ready to recap all the juicy figure skating stories this season as we look ahead to Milano Cortina 2026. Here they preview the Canadians competing on the Grand Prix circuit, fill you in on all the news you may have missed and tell you who came out of retirement to try once again for Olympic glory. Watch the 2025 Grand Prix of Figure Skating on CBC Gem.
Gilles and Poirier, both 33, have never quite hit the heights that Stellato-Dudek and Deschamps have. But the premier Canadian ice dancers of the post-Virtue-and-Moir era have been incredibly consistent at the world championships, reaching the podium at four of the last five, including back-to-back silvers in 2024 in Montreal and last season in Boston, where they were Canada’s only medallists.
Gilles and Poirier have also won four consecutive national titles if you exclude their absence in 2023, when Gilles was recovering from surgery for ovarian cancer.
Though they finished seventh and eighth in their two Olympic appearances, Gilles and Poirier won the prestigious Grand Prix Final two seasons ago. They took gold and silver in their two regular Grand Prix events last season before finishing fifth in the Final after Poirier tripped on the boards during their short program. But they bounced back to repeat as Four Continents champions, defeating Americans Madison Chock and Evan Bates, who went on to capture their third straight world title.
Besides Gilles/Poirier and Stellato-Dudek/Deschamps, the only Canadians to qualify for the Grand Prix Final last season were Marjorie Lajoie and Zachary Lagha, who placed fourth in the ice dance. They were sixth in the season-long standings after earning silver at each of their two tour stops, and they went on to finish seventh at the world championships.
The pairs tandem of Lia Pereira and Trennt Michaud were the only other Canadians to win a medal on the tour last season, grabbing a bronze in China. They were 11th at the worlds.
Who to watch this week
We’ll find out right away whether Stellato-Dudek and Deschamps have ironed out the wrinkles. Their competition in the pairs event at the Grand Prix of France includes Japan’s Riku Miura and Ryuichi Kihara, who are coming off their second world title in three years.
The only other skaters representing Canada this week are the ice dance team of Marie-Jade Lauriault and Romain Le Gac. They’ll face worlds bronze medallists Lilah Fear and Lewis Gibson of Great Britain.
Canadian Laurence Fournier Beaudry is now representing France with her new dance partner Guillaume Cizeron, who came out of retirement after winning five world titles and Olympic gold with Gabriella Papadakis. Fournier Beaudry split with her former teammate Nikolaj Soerensen after he received a six-year suspension for “sexual maltreatment.”
The men’s event is headlined by American superstar Ilia Malinin. The 20-year-old Quad God went undefeated last season, including his second straight world title, and is favoured to win gold in his Olympic debut this winter. He’ll face France’s Adam Siao Him Fa, who handed Malinin his last defeat — at this same event in 2023.
The women’s competition features Japan’s Kaori Sakamoto, whose bid for a fourth straight world title was foiled by U.S. teenager Alysa Liu.
How to watch
CBC Sports’ live coverage of the Grand Prix of France begins Friday at noon ET with the women’s short program, followed by the pairs short at 1:50 p.m. ET. Here’s the full streaming schedule and here’s the list of entries and results.
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