The results will tell you that Deanna Stellato-Dudek and Maxime Deschamps of Canada finished 14th of 19 teams in Sunday’s pairs short program at the 2026 Winter Olympics.

The results won’t tell that just by skating, Stellato-Dudek had succeeded in what seemed an utterly quixotic quest when she began it 10 years ago, that she had realized an improbable dream that nearly became an impossible one two weeks ago.

Stellato-Dudek, of course, couldn’t see it that entirely that way right now. The fierce competitive fire that carried her and Deschamps to the world title two years ago won’t be entirely banked by knowing that at age 42, she had become the oldest woman to compete in Olympic figure skating since 1928 and the third oldest in history, according to Olympedia.org.

After all, she had battled back from an unspecified Jan. 30 training injury (“not a concussion,” she said). It forced her and Deschamps to withdraw from the team event that began nine days ago and made her wait until last Monday for medical clearance to go to Italy and skate in the pairs event.  After missing three days of training back in Canada, she would be initially afraid to do the easiest triple jump.

"The dream was slipping under our feet, but I still believed in Deanna the whole time,” Deschamps said.

“You have fear, but you have to go through it,” she said.  “There’s no other option.”

She would still be annoyed by her fall on the exit of a lift 20 seconds from the end of the program.  It cost them at least five points and likely a chance to go into Monday’s free skate with a shot at a medal.  They are 8.56 points from third place and 13.93 from leaders Minerva Fabienne Hase and Nikita Volodin of Germany.

“That (lifts) is what we are best at, where we usually rack up a lot of points,” she said.  “That (mistake) has never happened, not even in practice.”

And at the same time, she could be pleased with what an empowering example her quest could be for women of a certain age, both in and out of sports.

“I'm always really happy to represent for the millennials and the women in their 40s,” she said.  “You know, we're constantly underestimated, and we're constantly told no, and there's not one person that told me that I could achieve this when I started.”

She started skating pairs at 34, which was 17 years after persistent injuries led her to end a singles career that included a silver medal at the 2000 World Junior Championships.  She threw her rusty skates into a dusty closet at her mother’s home in suburban Chicago and embarked on a career as an aesthetician.

One day, during a question game at a work retreat, she was given a card that asked, “What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?”  Much to her own surprise, she answered, “I would win an Olympic gold medal.”

And she got back on the ice.

And a U.S. Figure Skating official suggested she try pairs.

She did it first with an American partner, 2014 Olympian Nathan Bartholomay, until he stopped skating five years later because of knee problems. That they were good enough to win two bronze medals at the U.S. Championships convinced Stellato-Dudek she wanted to continue, at least through the 2022 Olympics, if she could find a new partner.

She found Deschamps, now 34, a French-Canadian. Pairing with him meant leaving her job and moving to Montreal and competing for Canada, and, in 2024, getting Canadian citizenship to satisfy Olympic eligibility rules.

“I'm just lucky enough that I found the right partner to be able to get me to these Olympic Games,” she said.

When they won the world gold medal two years ago, the then 40-year-old Stellato-Dudek became the oldest woman to win a world title in any figure skating discipline. The next two seasons would be harder, with a fifth at the 2025 worlds and a sixth (of six teams) at the Grand Prix Final last December.

They also finished second at the Canadian Championships in January, when they were heavily favored to win a fourth straight national title until Stellato-Dudek contracted a virus. And then came the training accident, which meant another comeback would be necessary for her to skate in Milan.

“To know me is to know that I wasn’t going down without a fight,” she said.

She did fall.

She didn’t fail.