As Canada’s figure skaters travel around at the Beijing Olympics, they remind themselves of something: ‘don’t lose Maddie’.

At 18, Madeline Schizas is the youngest Canadian figure skater at the Winter Games and the country’s only representative in the ladies’ singles category. The Oakville native, who stands four-foot-eleven, didn’t have the Olympics on her radar until just recently, yet she’s been the team’s most consistent performer so far in Beijing. She’s shown the poise of an Olympic veteran, yet her teammates still look out for the rookie like a little sibling.

“They say they’re scared of my coach if they lose me,” said Schizas, from Oakville, Ont. “Like we get on the bus and they’re like ‘is she here, we can’t lose her’. There’s a lot of that. I’m very much the little sis of the team.”

Schizas is the one of 16 teenagers representing Canada at the Beijing Olympics. She is the only figure skater in that group; the others are competing in luge, freestyle skiing, ski jumping, snowboard or on the men’s hockey team.

Schizas has already skated in the team figure skating event in the first week of the Beijing Games, and she still gets to skate her individual event, starting Feb. 17. Her maturity is unmistakable – she is also an accomplished singer and pianist and has started Urban Planning studies at The University of Waterloo. The composed teen unleashed jump after jump with the world’s best women in two superb skates that boosted Canada into the final, and then to a fourth-place finish (it may well be upgraded to bronze once a decision is made on a reported doping violation for the first-place Russian Olympic Committee team).

As Schizas skated, her Canadian teammates cheered wildly for the youngster.

“I think I’m very good at handling my nerves,” said Schizas. “I think it’s one of my biggest strengths as a competitor – that I am able to keep a cool head under pressure.”

Even at an Olympics in China during a pandemic, under strict restrictions, with their family members on the other side of the world, Canada’s teenaged athletes have been calm and cool.

Brooke D’Hondt is Canada’s youngest athlete at these Winter Games. The 16-year-old snowboarder had eyed the 2026 Olympics as her time to shine, so when she qualified for the 2022 Games in the high flying half-pipe event, she thought “this one was kind of like an experience, just to kind of take it all in.”

She had already appeared in many of the biggest events in her sport – X Games, Winter Dew Tour, and an FIS World Cup event. She knew her best run would be good enough to make the women’s half-pipe Olympic final.

D’Hondt did make the final at these Games, where she finished 10th. She competed with and talked to Chloe Kim – the American snowboarder who won the half-pipe as a 17-year-old at the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics, then repeated in Beijing. That inspired D’Hondt.

“I was pretty over the moon and overwhelmed, super excited that I was able to put down my two runs and get into finals with the best girls in the world,” said D’Hondt.

The 11th grader from Calgary is coached by her dad, Trevor D’Hondt, so he travelled with her to the Games. She’s been doing school online since eighth grade, and going internationally to competitions for years already.

At these Olympics, D’Hondt took stock of what both the medal-winning women and men were doing in their runs. She plans to try the tougher tricks in her training in Calgary, using halfpipe airbag technology. That way she can try new skills with a soft landing, rather than landing on the hard, icy walls. She plans to take aim at the Olympic podium in 2026.

D’Hondt says seeing Kim on TV at the 2018 Olympics inspired her. Other Canadian teens say it was experiencing the 2010 Vancouver Olympics as young children that sparked their dream.

Schizas was actually there in person in 2010, watching Canadian figure skater Joannie Rochette, who famously skated to an emotional bronze medal, just days after the death of her mother.

For 18-year-old luger Natalie Corless, it was an interaction out on the street in Vancouver during the 2010 Games that stoked her Olympic interest.

“I went to figure skating training, I got to watch the torch run past my house and the best was one of the skaters actually gave me her podium flowers on the street,” recalled Corliss, who lived in Vancouver at the time.

She’s been in the high-speed sport of luge since trying it casually at age 11. She adored it at a recruitment camp, sliding down an ice track on a sled at lightning fast pace, feet first. She’s been hooked ever since.

Corless graduated high school in Whistler this past spring and decided to take a gap year and concentrate on luge to see if she could qualify for the Olympics.

Already a successful junior competitor internationally, she moved to Calgary with some fellow lugers, and they shared an apartment. The independent teen rode her bike or the bus everywhere, joking that she has far more experience driving a luge than a car. Corless went all in and qualified for the Olympics.

Corless had a small setback when she arrived in Beijing. Having recently recovered from COVID-19 before departing for the Games, one of her early tests at the Olympics came up positive. Although she subsequently tested negative, she had to follow special protocols – going only to training and competition at the Yanqing National Sliding Centre, and staying and eating alone in her room in the Olympic Village.

Corless finished 16th at the Olympics. Immediately after her last run, her family and friends were waiting to speak with her live on a big video screen from home in Whistler, a perk offered to all Olympians at the venues. Live at the Games, this felt different from any other video call home.

“My parents have come to every race they ever possibly could have. It was tough to not hear them cheering at the finish line,” said Corless. “I definitely was on the brink of tears when I saw them, you know, I haven’t been home over four months now. I still talk to my parents all the time, but this was definitely it was a different experience.”

Ski jumper Alexandria Loutitt can relate to all about those long months away from home. The 18-year-old Calgary native has been living away from home for years now – first in Germany with some family friends, then with teammates in Slovenia. Canada has closed all of its domestic jumps due to soaring operation costs, so its national team athletes must train elsewhere.

Loutitt wanted to try all the high-flying snow sports she had seen as a little girl on TV at the Vancouver Olympics. A family trip to Germany re-enforced the idea when she saw ski jumping there. Her brother had started trying it, and after some initial resistance, their parents let her try too. The girl who loved to jump off bunk beds and out of trees was instantly smitten with this new way to fly. Back then, Canada had some open jumps, so she got involved in a club in Calgary. Once those closed, she left to keep pursuing it.

“I’ve spent more time outside Canada than inside it since I was 13,” she says. “I didn’t want the same thing that all my friends wanted. And so I have sacrificed a lot of friendships. You know, I didn’t I didn’t want to be out drinking or partying. I wanted to train. I wanted to be in the mountains.”

She has done nearly all of her high school studies online at the National Sports School in Calgary. Now in Grade 12, she plans to graduate on schedule this June. She took just a brief break for the trip to Olympic trip.

“I sent my teachers e-mail is like ‘I’m not doing your school work for like the next 15 days,” said Loutitt.

She was one of the four Canadian athletes who captured a stunning bronze medal in the mixed team event in Beijing – the first ever for Canada in ski jump at an Olympics. Suit violations caused some disqualifications in the event, and Canada was pushed further up the list than most anyone would have projected.

Loutitt, the Olympic rookie was the youngest of the quartet, and 30-year-old, four-time Olympian Mackenzie Boyd-Clowes was the oldest (one of those athletes she watched jump in the Vancouver Olympics). The team hug at the end of his run is her standout memory of the Games. It’s a bright spot for a sport with suffering participation numbers in Canada.

Asked how many teenagers are slated to compete at the 2022 Olympics, the International Olympic Committee supplied a list of athletes born after Feb. 4, 2002, which had 229 names. There are more than 2900 total athletes competing at these Winter Games.

“I think that it’s probably the same for a lot of the teenagers here at the Games, is they don’t they didn’t want the same thing as other kids do,” said Loutitt. “They are focused on what is in front of them, the medals and the podium.”

RACHEL BRADY
The Globe and Mail, February 13, 2022