CÉDRICK BRUNET
Sport: Speed Skating
Event: Men’s 500 metres, Men’s 1,000 m (to be confirmed)
Age: 25
Hometown: Gatineau
Residence: Quebec City
Local Club: Club de patinage de vitesse Gatineau
First Olympics
Instagram: @brunet_19
VIEW CÉDRICK’S COMPETITION SCHEDULE HERE.
By Keiran Gorsky
Cédrick Brunet wasn’t sure whether he was going to the Olympics. The long-track speed skater finished third in his trademark 500 metre event at the final Canadian Olympic team trials in Quebec City, leaving him just off a guaranteed trip to Milano and the 2026 Winter Games.
Qualification was, at this point, wrenched out from his hands. The 25-year-old from Gatineau needed either 2022 Olympic silver medalist Laurent Dubreuil or a relative newcomer in Anders Johnson to win the 1,000 metre competition to open up an extra qualification slot.
Agonizingly, that 1,000 metre race that would decide his fate was not until the next day. Brunet didn’t sleep much that night.
“I was so stressed and waking up like every hour,” Brunet recalled. “It’s just the worst feeling… you don’t have any control.”
It wouldn’t be the first time a berth at a major event slipped through his fingers. Back in 2021, a 20-year-old Brunet burst onto the scene with a shock third-place finish in the 500 m at Canadian Long Track Championships, qualifying him for the ISU World Cup that winter. Or so he thought.
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But a challenge of Speed Skating Canada’s selection process at the Sport Dispute Resolution Centre of Canada ultimately gave his racing spot to a veteran athlete who’d finished behind him at the team trials but had posted superior times in past competitions.
Two days before he was set to fly to Poland, Brunet had lost his spot on the team. And then he was denied a chance to improve on his time and to stage an Olympic bid a few months later when the Canadian Olympic trials were cancelled due to COVID.
“It was difficult mentally. I wanted the opportunity to prove that I could make it,” reflected Brunet, who’d been training on the outdoor natural ice at Ottawa’s Brewer Park oval during the pandemic. “But, I had to tell myself that next time [2026] will be the right time.”
Things have had a way of falling into place for Brunet, though, even as life seems intent on spoiling his sleep. He went on to qualify for the later stages of the 2021-22 World Cup that season.
This time, when the 1,000 m finally came at the Olympic trials, Dubreuil and Johnson finished first and second to cement the Gatineau speed skating club product’s place in Italy, Brunet hooting and hollering all the while from the viewing gallery.
It won’t technically be his first time attending the Olympics, mind you – Brunet’s family is chock full of Olympic pedigree. His father Michel (figure skating) and his uncle Dominick Gauthier (freestyle skiing) both competed at the 1998 Winter Games in Nagano, while his mother is a physiotherapist who’s been to multiple Olympics.
One of Brunet’s formative memories features perhaps his most famous family member, his aunt, Olympic gold medallist Jennifer Heil (ski moguls). Brunet was on site to watch her snake to silver in Vancouver 2010.
He does not remember a great deal about that trip, but he remembers, in vivid detail, jumping into a limousine to take a photo with Heil alongside fellow Olympic champ Alexandre Bilodeau. If there was any doubt beforehand, it all disappeared on those slopes. Come what may, Brunet was going to find his way to the Olympics.
“‘I want to be like her,’” he remembers thinking. “‘I want to be an Olympic champion.’”
Armed with that actionable wisdom that only comes from shared experience, Brunet’s family has had his back every step of the way. In 2021, when Brunet moved from Gatineau to Quebec City to be closer to the newly constructed Centre de glaces indoor oval, his parents followed suit.
He has always had them to lean on at troubled junctures in his young career. In 2024, Brunet suffered a back injury that badly impeded his performance. In another major professional setback, he failed to make Team Canada for the World Championships.
At his lowest, Brunet floated retiring from the sport altogether. But his family wouldn’t hear it. They had fought through injuries and anomalous dips in fortune. They had all come out the other side.
“It’s going to be fun sometimes, it’s going to be shit sometimes,” Brunet summarized their advice succinctly. “Just to know that they are in my corner every time, every time anything happens, it’s nice just to have them and understand what you’re getting through.”
His younger brother Frédéric, a hockey player with the Providence Bruins of the AHL, has been another massive pillar of support. The two have shared a sort of mutual reverence for parallel lives they didn’t lead – Cédrick, who once had ambitions to play professional hockey, and Frédéric, who gets to watch his brother travel the world.
They both find the time to talk about everything and nothing at all. The two brothers have been each other’s mutual reprieve from the daily grind.
“We’re talking about our fantasy football,” Brunet explained. “We talk about everything else besides hockey and speed skating. We’re just talking and we know that we have each other.”
Even with his family behind him, in the months leading up to Quebec City, Brunet has become more capable of consoling himself in difficult circumstances. Just a month after he skated to a career-best time of 34.06 seconds and 12th place finish at the Salt Lake City World Cup, Brunet sustained a minor injury right out of the gate at the fourth and penultimate stage of 2025-26 ISU World Cup series in Hamar, Norway.
“‘Oh shit, it’s happening, oh my God,’” he remembered screaming internally just a month ago.
In a game of deciseconds, it can be so tempting to fret over everything, as every niggling injury threatens to hold athletes back just enough. Externally, Brunet kept a brave face and pushed through the rest of the race, even as he began to fall behind.
The Nicolas-Gatineau high school grad will have to be cautious over the next two weeks as he prepares for Italy. Smack in the middle of the season, he reasons, no one is truly at 100%. If there is one thing Brunet picked up from 2022 Olympic medallist Dubreuil, the man who cemented his Olympic berth, it’s to know when to take a breather.
“The biggest thing about [Dubreuil] is he isn’t shy to take a rest,” their Quebec-based teammate Christopher Fiola said in an interview with the Calgary Herald. “I had to learn to do that. He’ll rest as much as he can so he can race fresh; that’s helped me a lot as well. I see the way he approaches training. He’s been through it, he has a recipe that works and we can all learn from it. He’s paved the way.”
Maybe it is a little fitting then, that Brunet’s very last step to Milano was taken while he looked on from the top of the stands in Quebec City and saw Dubreuil clinch both their tickets to the Games with his win. Brunet has watched that video of the moment he found out he’d become an Olympian “100, or maybe more like 200, 300 times.”
“It’s so nice that Marc Durand filmed the whole thing,” highlighted Brunet, who restlessly watched the race with hands folded on his tuque, and then hugged his Olympic family joyously once his result was confirmed. “For the rest of my life, [that moment] is going to be there.”
CÉDRICK BRUNET COMPETITION SCHEDULE
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