Dutch duo finishes fourteenth at the World Figure Skating Championships, gold for 40-year-olds

NOS Sports•today, 07:27

The Dutch duo Daria Danilova and Michel Tsiba finished fourteenth in the pair riding at the World Figure Skating Championships in Montreal. With a score of 172.24, they fell well short of a top ten ranking.

In the free freestyle Danilova and Tsiba achieved the twelfth score. Previously, they had finished seventeenth in the short freestyle, partly due to a fall by Tsiba. The scores of the two performances are added together.

The gold in Canada went to the Canadian duo Deanna Stellato-Dudek and Maxime Deschamps (221.56). At 40 years old, Stellato-Dudek is the oldest world champion in the history of figure skating, a sport usually dominated by young women.

“This is a dream come true for me,” Stellato-Dudek responded. “Forty is the new twenty. I hope to motivate other athletes to continue much longer.”

Stellato-Dudek ended her career at the age of 17 due to a chronic hip injury. Sixteen years later she started figure skating again, with the gold World Championship medal as the highlight.

She is a U.S. citizen but hopes to get a Canadian passport to participate in the 2026 Winter Games.

The silver went to the Japanese duo Riku Miura and Ryuichi Kihara with 217.88. The Germans Minerva Hase and Nikita Volodin took the bronze.

With fourteenth place, Danilova and Tsiba performed slightly less than at last year’s World Championships, when they finished thirteenth. A year earlier they finished ninth.