Canadian speedskater Valérie Maltais takes momentum into Calgary World Cup

CALGARY — Valérie Maltais has found another gear heading into her fifth Olympic Games.

The 35-year-old speedskater from La Baie, Que., opened the World Cup season with the fastest 3,000 metres of her life for her best result in the distance, which was a silver medal last week in Salt Lake City.

After another silver medal in women’s mass start Saturday, and helping Canada take silver in team pursuit there Sunday, Maltais hopes to carry that momentum over to Friday’s 3k in Calgary.

“I’m really excited to race another 3k. Here in Calgary the ice will be fast again, the crowd is good and so I want to do a race that I will execute the way that I’m planning to and feel like my body and everything else technically, tactically is aligned,” Maltais said Wednesday at the Olympic Oval on the University of Calgary campus.

“That was my goal also last week. The focus is on execution.”

Calgary is the second of five World Cup stops this season. Maltais is among 27 Canadians racing Friday to Sunday for not only medals, but qualification toward February’s Olympic Games in Milan and Cortina, Italy.

Canadians won 16 medals across six World Cup stops during the 2024-25 season, including two gold, eight silver and six bronze.

Maltais is the only Canadian speedskater to win Olympic medals in both short track and long track. She earned short track relay bronze in 2014 in Sochi, Russia.

After switching to long track in 2019, Maltais, Ivanie Blondin and Isabelle Weidemann won team pursuit gold in Beijing in 2022.

Maltais would be among a handful of Canadian athletes at the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver and Whistler, B.C., still competing into 2026.

That group includes hockey players Marie-Philip Poulin and Sidney Crosby and ski jumper Mackenzie Boyd-Clowes. Marc Kennedy and Ben Hebert can join them if their men’s curling team wins next week’s trials in Halifax.

“It’s fun to have experience. That’s how I see it,” Maltais said.

“What allows me to still compete at my best, and honestly I think I’m at the peak of my form right now — my numbers are showing it — it’s because the technology into training and the support that we have around the athlete is so much better. Not that it was not good in 2010, but it’s just like it evolved, like everything else, and we have better ways of training and to understand the body a little bit better.”

Maltais, who married Olympic speedskater Jordan Belchos in 2024, says access to a sport physiologist at Quebec’s Intact Insurance Centre de Glaces during off-season training was a game-changer for her.

“For the previous two years, we didn’t have a physiologist in Quebec,” she said. “That was one of the main things we brought to understand my body a little bit better being 35 years old. I don’t need to train the same as a 21 year old.

“We didn’t lose any time to being injured, which it’s hard sometimes as an elite athlete to not be injured because we’re pushing our body so much. I have a really good team around me. We were always making sure to take care of those little fires that were coming up sometimes.”

Maltais and Ottawa’s Blondin, winner of eight world championship medals in mass start, will race that event, plus the team pursuit with Ottawa’s Weidemann on Sunday.

After getting shut out of the World Cup podium and placing third in the world championships last season, the trio employed a new strategy of Weidemann staying at the front for all six laps in Salt Lake City and not changing leaders.

“We needed to prove to ourselves that we could do that and that we still had what it took to compete with the top teams because last year, man, we really questioned that,” said Weidemann, who will race Friday’s 3k with Maltais.

Blondin, who was fifth in mass start in Salt Lake, seeks an individual podium on the national team’s home ice in Calgary, but the 35-year-old accepts a training trade-off to be ready for the Olympic Games.

“We’re not peaking for these World Cups. We’ve been kind of training through it, not necessarily tapering for these races,” Blondin explained.

“The goal this year is the Olympic Games. You want to be peaking at that moment.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 19, 2025.

Donna Spencer, The Canadian Press