sa国际传媒’s greatest figure skating days are firmly rooted in the past. That doesn’t give much hope for the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics but it makes the annual Stars on Ice revue, which makes its annual stop tonight in Victoria, all that more compelling.
Last year’s show was the last spin around Save-on-Foods Memorial Centre for retiring four-time world champion Kurt Browning and tonight will be the same for Patrick Chan.
“It’s bittersweet,” said Chan, who has put on so many great performances on Blanshard Street, both in competition and show.
“It’s been in the back of my mind. This is getting progressively harder to pull off. Our son is older now and we have another baby on the way and I also have a 9-to-5 job [as a financial adviser]. It all kind of pushes you to your limits.”
But what a run it has been with three individual men’s world championships, Olympic individual silver and Olympic team gold and silver.
Chan is looking forward to returning to the Memorial Centre, where he delivered one of the great performances in Canadian skating history at the national championships in 2011, the year he was named the Lou Marsh Trophy Award winners as sa国际传媒’s top athlete.
“Victoria is a different crowd, an older crowd, but they have such passion and appreciation for the sport,” said Chan, 33.
Island skating fans are highly knowledgeable about sa国际传媒’s skating history, from the 1980s onwards, in which the Brian Orser and Elizabeth Manley era – which began with the 1988 Calgary Olympic trials at the old Victoria Memorial Arena — paved the way for Browning and Elvis Stojko, who in turn did the same for the likes of Chan, Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir.
But for the first time in Winter Olympics history, sa国际传媒 was shut out in figure-skating medals at Beijing in 2022, after winning four at Pyeongchang in 2018.
“It’s a bit of a shock because we have not experienced that kind of drought in Canadian skating,” said Chan, who retired from competition following the 2018 Winter Olympics.
“One generation has usually rolled into the next generation. We are in a transition period while the level of competition around the world has increased. We are asking our young Canadian skaters to step out of their comfort zones earlier than we have ever had to.”
But Stars on Ice is not about the uncertain future. It’s about the glorious past. Not that the present is ignored, with some intriguing current storylines tonight on Blanshard. They include Deanna Stellato-Dudek, 40, who became the oldest figure skater to win a world championship when she captured gold in March at Montreal with Maxime Deschamps in pairs. The American Stellato-Dudek, who took 16 years off from the sport before returning, has been living in sa国际传媒 since 2019 and has applied for her permanent residency card and hopes to represent this country with Deschamps in the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics.
Also performing tonight will be men’s world champion Ilia Malinin of the U.S., tabbed the Quad God, after he landed a record-breaking six quadruple jumps in a single program and recorded the highest points ever in the world championships in March in Montreal. The 19-year-old is the hottest thing in skating, the only person ever to land a quad axel in competition, something he will be attempting tonight on Blanshard.
“Quads are really hard and a lot of it is mental,” Malinin said, by phone.
“It’s one rotation, times four, and making it look good under pressure. It takes both physicality and mentality to do that.”
Island skating fans will get a preview tonight of what is expected to be one of the biggest sports stories in two years time.
“I am going to give it everything I have leading up to and at the 2026 Winter Olympics,” said Malinin.
Tickets are available at the door or Select Your Tickets.
