Stellato-Dudek cautious in return from injury, but figure skater again prepared to challenge her fears

Chris Jones reports from Milan.

It was a glorious Friday in Milan. The skies were blue. The mountains north of the city, obscured by cloud since the start of the Winter Olympics, finally came into spectacular view.

Deanna Stellato-Dudek and Maxime Deschamps, the Canadian pairs skaters, arrived together to the same dream — the counteragent to 10 days of pain, fear, and worry.

Stellato-Dudek struck her head on the ice in training in Montreal on Jan. 30, threatening her decade-long quest to skate at the Olympics.

“The last week and a half has been a living nightmare that I would not wish on anybody,” she said, after she and Deschamps practised in Milan for the first time, the day after their belated arrival.

At 42, Stellato-Dudek was poised to become the oldest female figure skater to compete at an Olympics in nearly a century. Then disaster struck.

She would not get into the specifics of her accident, which caused the pair to miss the team event. “It has been less than 10 days. I, myself, have not processed what happened. Since the moment the accident occurred the only focus was tunnel vision: How can I get here?”

There are other mysteries. She claimed that she did not suffer a concussion. “That would have been difficult to recover from,” she said, and she talked about doing exercises, not normally part of post-concussion protocol.

But she declined to explain what sort of head injury she did sustain if not a concussion, citing, oddly, privacy laws.

“Those laws exist for a reason,” she said. “I don’t deserve to know anybody else’s personal medical information, nor do you deserve to learn mine.”

She also said that she was off the ice for only three days, even though Deschamps said he’d been training alone while waiting