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New Brunswick’s speed skating high-performance hub started with a dream and a little bit of funding.
For a while, a group of about a dozen fast skaters trained in the province’s capital of Fredericton five days a week.
“It was kind of a labour of love at first,” said Derrick MacLeod, who was the high-performance coach for the group, and is now the provincial technical director and coach for Speed Skate New Brunswick.
The goal was to produce one Canada Games medallist, and most of all, to make sure kids were training in the best environment. But the success to come from that has been more than MacLeod could have imagined.
Three of those skaters are now competing in short track speed skating at Milano Cortina 2026, a massive feat for a province that’s often overlooked and in a sport that’s long seen its best athletes come out of Quebec.
When one of those skaters, Moncton, N.B.’s Courtney Sarault, crossed the finish line in the women’s 500 metres on Thursday, she became the first person on the Canadian team from outside Quebec to win an individual short track speed skating medal. She took home bronze in a time of 42.427 seconds.
“I hope that this inspires people that maybe are from smaller towns that they can also dream big and you’re not limited to your smaller town,” Sarault told CBC’s Devin Heroux after the race. “If you want something, you can work for it. Anything’s possible.”
It’s the second medal 25-year-old Sarault has captured at her second Olympics. Last week, she won silver in the mixed team relay event.
Sarault is joined at the Olympics by teammate and fellow New Brunswicker, Rikki Doak, a short-track speed skater from Fredericton. They’re the only members of the short track Olympic team who aren’t from Quebec.
One of only two athletes from New Brunswick at Milano Cortina 2026, Courtney Sarault of Moncton, became the first Canadian, outside the province of Quebec, to win an individual Olympic short track speed skating medal. After her win, she told CBC Sports’ Devin Heroux that she hopes it will inspire future generations of athletes from New Brunswick.
Brendan Corey is also from Fredericton and trained with the group. He’s competing at the Olympics with the Australian short track team.
The province has also produced several younger skaters who could find their way to the biggest stage someday. That includes Courtney Charlong, who won 500m gold and 1,000m bronze at the world junior short track championships earlier this month.
Charlong is from Campbellton in the northern part of the province, showing that speed skating talent isn’t isolated to one pocket of New Brunswick.
In a province of fewer than a million people, New Brunswick has three Olympic-sized ice surfaces, seven speed skating clubs and about 600 skaters, coaches and officials.
“You want to appreciate where Quebec is,” MacLeod said. “They are the epitome of short track. But that said, we can compete against them. We can beat them. We know that.”
A path to follow
On Thursday, a group gathered at the Willie O’Ree Place in Fredericton, where Sarault, Doak and Corey used to train, to watch Olympic competition.
Another group got together in Dieppe, N.B., just outside of Moncton, on Saturday.
“It’s very unusual for us to have athletes at all in any level compete at the world stage from New Brunswick,” Edison Wasson, the head competitive coach with the Codiac Cyclones club in the Moncton area, told CBC’s Ian Curran on Saturday.
“To have three right now that are doing so well, it just makes that path seem a little more solid and a little more real. It’s fantastic.”
About 50 people gathered to cheer on Moncton’s Courtney Sarault in the women’s 500-metre short-track speed skating event on Thursday, with a number of future Olympic hopefuls in the crowd.
MacLeod started coaching Sarault around age 13, when her family moved back to New Brunswick from Ontario. Her resiliency was one of the first traits MacLeod saw in her.
When she joined the high-performance group in Fredericton, Sarault made the three-hour round trip from Moncton five days a week to train with the best in the province.
Doak and Corey, meanwhile, had different paths.
“[Doak] was probably the first one to really stand out of the three of kind of having that speed, having the national championship victories at a youth age,” MacLeod said.
She hasn’t skated at Milano Cortina 2026 yet, but is an option for Canada’s women’s 3,000m short-track relay team, which will skate in the final on Wednesday.
“For her, it’s all just about her belief in herself and I think that’s at a real good high now,” MacLeod said.
Corey didn’t show the most talent when he was younger, but he had heart. He was coachable and took all the feedback he was given.
He didn’t advance to the final in the men’s 1,000m or 1,500m, but still has the 500-metre distance on his plate.
“He’s got a toughness that you’ll see in him,” MacLeod said.
‘I wasn’t going to give up’
All three skate with grit in an unpredictable, strategy-driven sport.
You saw it in Sarault’s 500m race, where she fought back to put herself in medal contention.
Courtney Sarault of Moncton, N.B., won her first individual Olympic medal in the women’s 500-metre short track speed skating race, coming on late to claim the bronze medal. It’s Sarault’s second Olympic medal at Milano Cortina 2026, following on the heels of her silver medal in Tuesday’s mixed team relay.
It came in a distance that hasn’t always been her forte. She worked all summer long to improve at the distance.
“It’s not over until it’s over,” Sarault said. “I wasn’t able to turn as well as I wanted to on the inside. But I’m known to be a fighter and I wasn’t going to give up. If it wasn’t working on the inside, I was going to try and take it on the outside. That’s what I did and I just left everything I had on the ice, and it got me a bronze medal.”
It’s a trait coaches from Quebec have noticed. They call it “doing things N.B. style,” MacLeod said, which means pulling out fast in a race or taking risks to push their way to the front.
“They all have that in them,” he said about the province’s skaters.
Sarault, who was the Crystal Globe champion as the top woman on the short track World Tour for the 2025-26 season, will race for another medal with the 3,000m women’s relay on Wednesday.
She also has a chance to earn another individual title in the women’s 1,000m. The quarterfinals for that event are set for Monday.
Her success, along with Doak, Corey and Charlong, could push the province to even greater heights in the sport.
The province’s high-performance program is on a hiatus until there’s another group of about a dozen skaters to train together and push each other. MacLeod believes it’s coming, pointing to registration numbers that have doubled over the last four years.
The next great New Brunswick speed skating athlete may not know about the sport yet. Maybe they’re a figure skater or they play hockey, like Sarault did growing up. Maybe they’ll discover it when they watch these Games.
“Sometimes there is kicking down doors, sometimes there’s knocking down doors,” MacLeod said.
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