IVANIE BLONDIN
Sport: Speed Skating
Event: Women’s 1,500 metres, Mass Start, Team Pursuit
Age: 35
Hometown: Orleans
Residence: Calgary
Local Club: Gloucester Concordes
Fourth Olympics
Instagram: @ivanieblondin
VIEW IVANIE’S COMPETITION SCHEDULE HERE.
By Martin Cleary
Nineteen months after achieving her ultimate goal of reaching the Olympic medal podium (not once, but twice) in her third Winter Games, Gloucester’s Ivanie Blondin decided to cut herself some serious slack.
And why not. Variety is the spice of life and she has been known to follow the customary script, by transforming into a competitive cyclist in the summer and taking novel approaches to her athletic training.
After earning gold and silver medals at the 2022 Beijing Olympics and recording an impressive 2022-23 season (12 World Cup medals including four gold as well as two gold and one silver at the world single-distance championships), Blondin decided to start the 2023-24 season by going in a new, but not-so-new direction.
On the encouragement of Speed Skating Canada’s national short-track speed skating director, Blondin elected to return to hockey-arena racing and reconnect with short track, which was a big part of life for five years as a teenager. She wanted to compete in both long-track and short-track speed skating races for Canada in her fourth Olympic appearance at the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Games in Italy.
A determined and race-hungry long-track speed skater, Blondin hadn’t raced around the 111.12-metre track in 14 years, but she has been known to bring that element into her long-track training.
Blondin gave short track her best shot. But this time, she was a masters-aged, 33-year-old athlete against racers almost half her age at the 2023 Canadian championships in late September. There were 39 racers and she was one of the two oldest in the field.
After a myriad of 500-, 1,000- and 1,500-metre races around the tight oval, her 4,548-point total left her in 12th position and out of the running for the 2023-24 national team. It would be her first and only step in the direction of being a two-sport athlete for the 2026 Olympics.
“I have nothing to lose right now,” Blondin told La Presse at the time of the national championships. “I already have my (Olympic long-track) medals. And I like being underestimated. I’m motivated by that.
“I have nothing to prove to anyone. It’s for me. At the moment, I’m taking it as it comes and we’ll see where it takes me.”
Where it took Blondin was right back to long-track speed skating, which will be her focus next month as a member of Canada’s 15-member team for the 2026 Milano Cortina Olympics. It will be her four Winter Olympic Games.
She’ll attend the Games with a little extra boost as Farm Boy has joined her team. The grocery store chain announced this week Blondin is one of two featured athletes along with women’s hockey player Renata Fast of Burlington, ON, for Farm Boy’s Feed the Dream program, which will award two $10,000 grants so Ontario youth can chase their sporting dreams.
A second commercial venture involving Blondin also is expected to be released in the lead-up to or during the Olympics.
The road Blondin travelled to become one of the world’s most successful and popular speed skaters saw her experience several sports while growing up in the east end of Ottawa.
Her father Bob spent hours creating and maintaining an outdoor skating rink in the family’s backyard. At age two, Blondin stepped onto the smooth surface and felt right at home in her Velcro skates.
A year later, she moved indoors and used her brand new in-line skates to move around the furniture in the living room and the dining room.
When she was 10 years old, Blondin loved cross-country skiing and won the Quebec Cup in her age group.
In preparation for one cross-country ski race, she completed a two-kilometre warm-up trail and finished that only minutes before her race start time. It proved worthwhile as he went on to win the four-kilometre race.
“We went to Camp Fortune one time and I couldn’t keep up with her. She just took off,” Bob said, giving another example of the need for speed in her life. “Someone said to me ‘there’s a little kid out there, is that yours?’ Yes, and I can’t keep up to her. She’s flying.”
As a young teenager, Blondin also found her way onto the cycling velodrome at Bromont, PQ, and won a national track title for her age category.
When she was introduced to speed skating through the Gloucester Concordes Speed Skating Club, she brought her speed onto the ice.
“When they taught her something, she wanted to perfect it,” he added.
At 14, Blondin was the youngest to make the Canadian junior short-track speed skating team and qualified for three world junior championships. A year later, she was the youngest to be named to the Canadian senior team.
“When she made the national senior team, it was a shock to the team,” Bob said. “They never had a 15-year-old on the team as everyone else was 20 or older. Travelling was an issue at her age. She was still in school. Who was going to tutor her?
“She’s passionate for the sport. She loved the people. She loved meeting the people. She loved travelling.”
After five years of racing short-track speed skating, which included numerous concussions and the disappointment of not qualifying for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic team, Blondin considered pulling out of the sport. But Concordes’ coach Mike Rivet convinced her to fly to Calgary and discover long-track speed skating.
For a year or so, Blondin was a member of both the long-track and short-track national teams and capable of racing at the international level. By choosing long-track speed skating, the Garneau high school grad rewarded herself with a long and successful career that keeps going and going and going as she loves to race up to five times at each two- or three-day World Cup stop.
For the past 16 years, Blondin has been one of the anchors of the Canadian team on the World Cup circuit, at world championships and during the Winter Olympic Games.
Approaching her fourth Olympic Games, she has proven over the past four years she’s capable of defending the Olympic gold medal in women’s team pursuit with Isabelle Weidemann of Ottawa and Valérie Maltais of La Baie, PQ, as well as earning a medal in the physical, 16-lap mass start, which brought her silver at the 2022 Beijing Games.
Blondin, Weidemann and Maltais were the World Cup women’s team pursuit champions this season with one win and two second-place results in three races. The final World Cup race in women’s mass start goes this weekend in Inzell, Germany and Blondin is ranked third in the point standings. She posted one win and one third-place result in the first four mass-start races.
“She’s passionate about her sport,” Bob repeats, explaining that high-level training drives her to work with the men’s team.
“She loves the sport. She loves to compete. She works hard.”
Blondin’s quest to master every sport she has entered has delivered her enough medals and trophies to start her own hall of fame or museum – including a record seven female athlete-of-the-year honours at the Ottawa Sports Awards dinner and six Catriona Le May Doan Awards as Speed Skating Canada’s female long-track athlete of the year.
Besides her two Olympic medals, Blondin has shown her versatility and consistency on the World Cup circuit by winning 93 medals over seven different disciplines – 1,500, 3,000 and 5,000 metres, mass start, team pursuit, team sprint and mixed relay. Her World Cup resume shows 29 gold, 37 silver and 27 bronze medals. She has won at least one gold medal in every discipline except the new mixed relay.
At the world single-distance championships, she’s a 16-time medallist with golden efforts in mass start (2016, 2020), team pursuit (2023) and team sprint (2023, 2024). At the 2020 world all-round championships, where skaters race four different individual distances, she earned the silver medal.
Several years ago, Blondin invited her dad to a World Cup weekend of racing in Heerenveen, The Netherlands, which is considered the Mecca of the sport.
Before he went, Rivet told Bob that his daughter was considered a queen by the Dutch speed skating community and she was popular throughout Europe.
“I was at the (Amsterdam) airport and the customs guy noticed my name. He asked me if I was the father of Ivanie Blondin. I said yes. He said ‘we all love her here.’”
When Bob approached the large arena on one of the race days, he was overwhelmed and puzzled by the huge crowd of people. He was told everyone was waiting to get Blondin’s autograph.
“Back in Canada, speed skating is not well known,” Bob said. “It’s too bad. She works so hard and no one knows her sport.”
IVANIE BLONDIN COMPETITION SCHEDULE
Add Ivanie’s schedule to your calendar on this page.
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Martin Cleary has written about amateur sports for over 52 years. A past Canadian sportswriter of the year and Ottawa Sports Awards Lifetime Achievement in Sport Media honouree, Martin retired from full-time work at the Ottawa Citizen in 2012, but continued to write a bi-weekly “High Achievers” column for the Citizen/Sun.
When the pandemic struck, Martin created the High Achievers “Stay-Safe Edition” to provide some positive news during tough times, via his Twitter account at first and now here at OttawaSportsPages.ca.
Martin can be reached by e-mail at martincleary51@gmail.com and on Twitter @martincleary.
