HIGH ACHIEVERS: Katherine Medland Spence survives multiple challenges to reach Canadian Skating Championships

By Martin Cleary

Another all-consuming Olympics is on the horizon and the Canadian Olympic Committee is assembling its elite team of winter warriors.

But unlike world championships or World Cup competitions, only the best of the best will earn the privilege to confront their athletic peers from around the world.

Figure skating is a perfect example.

While Skate Canada will nominate three ice dance teams (maximum) and two pairs teams to the COC, there will only be one female skater and one male skater in the singles competitions. These quotas were determined by the results at the 2025 world championships.

Katherine Medland Spence is considered a strong candidate to challenge for that one women’s singles berth, given she earned the bronze medal at last year’s Canadian Skating Championships.

But after enduring “a tough and frustrating” off-season, the Nepean Skating Club member, who trains full time at the Richmond (ON) Training Centre, the concept of competing at the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games isn’t on her radar.

Standing tall and powered by ever-growing confidence today, Medland Spence is focused strictly on two moments as the week-long Canadian Skating Championships wind down at the Centre Slush Puppie in Gatineau.

Medland Spence believes she has already achieved her season’s most coveted victory, after surviving a physically and mentally demanding off season, by being ready for the senior women’s singles short program on Saturday and the free-skating final on Sunday.

How she skates, how the judges mark her and where her name settles in the standings will determine the rest of her 2025-26 international season. If she can feel proud after her two skating performances in Gatineau, that will be her shining moment. Anything else will be truly unexpected.

In the weeks after winning her first Canadian championship medal, Medland Spence decided to put her chemistry studies on hold at Carleton University for 2025-26.

But everything else around her didn’t fall into place and she missed a lot of on-ice practice time to upgrade and polish the technical sides of her programs.

Injuries to her right knee and hips as a result of overuse needed to be addressed with physiotherapy strengthening exercises. Labrum hip tears brought discomfort, depending how she moved. Physiotherapy again provided the proper answers and training her triple jumps was put on hold.

In July, Medland Spence, 25, noticed a lump in one of her breasts and lumpectomy surgery followed at the end of August. The finding was non-cancerous, but it had the potential to become cancer.

As she was carefully mixing rehabilitation sessions with training to prepare for two international competitions, she developed vertigo. This prevented her from doing any spins for six weeks. She only returned to training her various spins about two weeks ago.

“It has been a tough and frustrating season,” Medland Spence said in a recent phone interview about her 2025-26 season. “I wanted to build off of last year.”

While her peers sharpened and strengthened their programs with the dream of securing the lone women’s singles Olympic berth, which will be announced on Sunday, Medland Spence remained true to herself, didn’t look into the future, and refused to predict a result of any kind.

“The Olympics are not really on my mind,” she explained. “The past few months I have literally been trying to survive. I survived and now I’m enjoying it.

“But this season has been a question mark. Should I skate or should I not skate? Now, I want to be at nationals. I’m doing the training and proud of that training. No matter how it goes, I’ll be proud of the fact I am there and feeling like a winner already.”

Medland Spence will have three triple jumps in her seven-element short program and seven triples in her free-skating final.

She will be skating essentially the same free-skating program as last year to the music Clair de Lune. But she has made some minor adjustments in the structure of the program to “allow me to skate freely.”

“For me, I’ve never spoken about the outcome,” explained Medland Spence. “I want to deliver programs that I can be happy and proud of. That’s where I get my satisfaction.”

Despite all her challenges this season, Medland Spence competed twice internationally and made her International Skating Union senior Grand Prix debut at the NHK Trophy event in the 10,000-seat Towa Phamaceutical Ractab Dome in Kadoma, Osaka, Japan.

She placed 11th in all three aspects at NHK in early November with 48.42 points in the short program, 98.21 points in the free skate and 146.63 points overall.

On the practice ice, she skated with Japan’s Kaori Sakamoto, the three-time world champion and double Olympic medallist. It was an inspirational moment she will forever cherish.

At the Nebelhorn Trophy, which is an ISU Challenger Series meet, she was ninth in the short program at 54.16 points, 10th in the free skate at 97.41 points and 10th in the final standings at 151.57 points. She won the PGE Warsaw Cup, which also is part of the Challenger Series, during last season.

“There were many times,” Medland Spence said about stopping skating this season because of her various challenges. “For every competition, we had conversations. Is this best for me? Injuries take a physical and mental toll.”

As her fourth Canadian senior championship approaches, Medland Spence said she is feeling good and training is going well.

“My confidence is getting higher each day with training,” she said. “I’m seeing bits of improvement. I’m incorporating my spins and it’s motivating and reassuring.”

Also competing in the senior women’s event will be Reese Rose from the Gloucester Skating Club and Kaiya Ruiter, who began skating at Gloucester before moving to Calgary.

Gloucester’s David Shteyngart will be in the senior men’s competition Friday and Saturday.

SILVER MEDAL FOR JUNIOR PAIRS SKATERS BRIANNA DION, JACOB COTE IN CANADIAN CHAMPIONSHIP DEBUT

Brianna Dion of the Glen Cairn Skating Club and Jacob Cote of the Nepean Skating Club made the most of their debut at the Canadian Skating Championships on Thursday in Gatineau by winning the silver medal in the junior pairs class.

Dion and Cote finished third in the free-skate final to protect their second-place showing on Tuesday in the short program and were second overall at 131.62 points. They scored 82.21 points in the free skate and 49.41 points as runners-up in the short program.

“It was just so good to have won the silver medal,” Dion said in a phone interview from the Centre Slush Puppie. “It felt so good coming back from our competition in Calgary.”

At the Skate Canada Challenge in Calgary in November, Dion and Cote struggled in their free-skate routine and were third with 111.94 points.

“We had a couple of falls. It wasn’t our best skate. But we tried our best here and recovered,” she added.

Despite a couple of errors involving the Salchow jump, Dion and Cote gave a solid performance in front of supportive fans from the Glen Cairn Skating Club.

“It really helped calm our nerves,” said Dion, who along with Cote admitted a certain degree of nervousness entering the free-skate final in second place.

“Our goal (entering Canadians) was to just have fun and to go try our best. We also wanted to improve our scores. We didn’t have any personal-best scores, but we were really close.”

Dion will head to Dartmouth, N.S., for the Skate Canada Trophy competition Feb. 5-8 for pre-novice and novice athletes. She will skate in the girls’ novice singles division, after qualifying with a sixth-place showing at the Ontario sectional championships.