Gabby Daleman is BACK!

Up until a few weeks ago, Gabby Daleman was Canada’s best-kept secret.

We’ve hardly seen her in three years.

She’s determined to change that with her straight-ahead fierce focus. Never has there been an athlete who is clearly about blood and thunder, intensity, and sheer want-to passion. She’s motivated like a wasp to a honey pot. She won’t be stopped.

That’s why she will be dangerous in weeks to come, hey, even this week at Skate Canada Challenge in Calgary, where she will compete the women’s short program on Saturday and the long on Sunday. That’s one more step to the nationals in January, and then there’s that one spot allotted to Canadian women for the Olympics.

She wants it.

At 16 years-old, she was the youngest member of the Canadian team – not just the figure skating team – to compete at the 2014 Sochi Olympics. She helped Canada win gold in the team event at the 2018 Olympics in Pyeongchang. And she’d like to set a record by being the first Canadian female figure skater to compete at a third Olympics, in Milan in February.

It’s a huge task: Daleman has been away from the skating wars for three years, out with injury. Excruciating injuries.

Daleman hasn’t participated in a Canadian championship since 2022, since the last Olympic qualifier.

“It’s been a minute,” she said from Colorado, where she now trains. “We’ve been fighting. We’ve been going through the trenches.”

At the 2022 Canadian championships, she won the bronze medal, but knew she was capable of so much more. Things went awry in the free. She called it “heart shattering.”

Things unraveled afterward, through no fault of her own. One day, while heading off to training at the Granite Club in Toronto, she was sideswiped on the busy 401. A female driver, not paying attention, tried to pass her and took out the side of Daleman’s car and the front too. Daleman was thrown against the door. The impact jarred her back, causing stress fracture upon stress fracture.

She tried to continue to train but she was pushing a disc out in her back to the point where doctors told her: ‘If you have a bad fall in skating, you are going to be paralyzed at 24.”

So she stepped off the ice. Although she had been training, she couldn’t actually walk. This meant she had to pull out of the national championships, first time in her career. This problem was only the first tip of a landslide. Things got much worse later.

Basically, her back just needed rest. She worked on her core strength, using Pilates to make sure one side of her back could stabilize. “It was a lot of learning curve,” she said. “It took time and patience and I was not born with patience. That is one thing that god did not give me. It’s not in my DNA. God did not give it to me. I have zero.”

But this she did. She began to resume training because she was the only female skater other than Madeline Schizas who had attained the world minimum score to compete at the world championship. And Daleman was the alternate. She had to be ready in case something happened to Schizas.

But this test of her patience now looks “like a cakewalk,” to Daleman, considering the disasters she faced afterward.

Next season? Competitions in the summer of 2023. In one of them, she did a great short program. But in the long program, at her very last jumping pass, she slipped on her Axel takeoff, and landed awkwardly. She didn’t know it at the time, but she had just torn ligaments in her right ankle, her landing foot. “I never felt a pain like that,” she said. “I don’t know how to this day how I finished that program.”

She bailed out of a spin, and there was another spin to go. Daleman finished it in agony. “It was not good,” she said. “I was like, this is not happening.”

She had completely torn two ligaments. Because it happened on her landing foot, she needed surgery to ever skate again. And take note, this was the right foot, the landing foot, that takes all the incredible force of jump landings.

“Well, I’m not ready to give up my sport yet,” she said. “But I couldn’t even walk without pain. My goal at the time was: Let me walk without pain first. So I guess, hey, we’re doing surgery. I had no choice.”

The incident happened in August. It wasn’t until December that she got the surgery. It involved doctors installing a “tightrope”  – something like a fishing line, put through two ankle bones. She had two of them and surgeons pulled them close together. With torn ligaments, your ankle just flops. This was to stabilize it.

“Her foot is so small and the doctor was doing two tightropes to stabilize the foot as much as possible to get her back on the ice.,” said Rhonda Raby, Daleman’s mother. But when the surgeon inserted the second tightrope, two bones on either side of her ankle were fractured.

The surgery was to take 2 ½ to three hours. Raby went off to lunch and when she returned, she was astonished to find Daleman was still in the operating room. After more than five hours, doctors explained to her what happened.

They inserted a plate in her ankle and fastened it with a screw.

This setback plunged Daleman into deep depression. “My mental health went down the drain,” she said. “We were suffering heavily from depression. I couldn’t set foot in the gym. I couldn’t even have someone mention skating to me. I was not doing well at all. Every day for four months straight, there wasn’t a day that went by when I wasn’t sobbing. I thought: ‘This is either going to make or break me.’”

At this point, Daleman says: “I wish we could say we were done [with setbacks].” She wasn’t.

“She went back to training, but her ankle was always sore,” Raby said. It took Daleman a long time to get back onto the ice.

Next summer, Summer Skates. She got through those. About a week later, she was warming up for a program, and she had a freak fall on a triple loop.

By this time, she was training at Mariposa Club in Barrie, Ont., where her parents had moved, and both of her coaches (Mitch Islam and Michael Hopfes) were away. Ryan Arnold was there. “I just looked at him and kind of laughed at first,” Daleman said. “I just can’t believe I did that dumb fall,” she told him.

Then reality kicked in. She couldn’t move the ankle. She realized she had just broken her ankle again. The hardware had been too strong for the way she fell. And the fall snapped her ankle.

Arnold carried her off the ice. She knew she was going to have to have another surgery. “We knew the hardware had to come out because the ankle was never going to heal properly with the hardware, because of where I had rebroken it,” she said.

This was in September of last year.

Daleman decided to approach this catastrophe with a completely different mindset. She decided not all was lost. She still had time to recover before the next world championship. Her surgery was in December, about a year after her first surgery.

Daleman decided: “We’re going to go into the surgery, we’re going to do it, and we’ve got to lock in because no matter how many spots we get, we’re a year out from Olympics, we’ve got to lock in, we need to focus and we need to just start getting the job done.”

That’s what she did. Four days after the surgery, she was back in the gym, starting workouts. They went from there.

She was still under a time crunch. She needed to get to international competitions to get the minimum scores for major events like Four Continents, worlds and Olympic.. It turned into a nerve-wracking waiting game.

“It was mentally exhausting, if I’m being honest,” she said. At a competition in the summer, she was told she needed to get a score in the 166 range to get an international. She also had to show that she could complete a long program, because she hadn’t done one in three years. She did.

Then she was told that she needed to get another one. She did. Skate Canada did not send her to any of the Challenger or B internationals in September. Maybe one in October. Time was ticking.

“It was a complete waiting game,” she said. “It was starting to tear me down because if I don’t get a chance to get a Challenger, I won’t get the score for the Olympics and then I don’t even have a shot at that. So there goes making the Olympics for a third time. There goes creating history. Everything goes down the drain again.”

But Daleman told herself to keep her head down, keep skating, keep doing what she had to do. The other things were out of her control.

Her mother called her one morning and told her that Skate Canada was going to send her to the Ice Challenge in Graz, Austria. She was standing with her coach, Tammy Gambill and fellow skater and old friend Amber Glenn when she got the news. Everyone was over the moon for her. Daleman was in tears.

When she got to Graz, it was another test, just being there, and knowing that she had only one shot to make the ISU minimum scores. There wouldn’t be a second chance. “I thought I was going to throw up and pass out,” Daleman said. And she was tired from jet lag. She decided not to go out to dinner with her mother the previous night. She just wanted to focus. She had dinner in her room.

“We needed to lock in,” she said. “We need to put the head down. We don’t have time for anything else.”

During the short program, she felt great, but almost numb, having forgotten what it felt like to be on international ice. But she reminded herself: “ We’re good. We’re golden.” She skated last. She had also skated last when she competed at Oktoberfest a few weeks before that. “You’re fine. Do you job, trust your training,.“ she kept telling herself.

That short program, to “Moulin Rouge,” was only two weeks old. That was a gamble in itself.

When she took to the ice, and heard her name, representing Canada, she smiled the biggest smile. “This is where I was meant to be,” she thought. “We got there. Just do it.”

She won the short program with 63.17 points, defeating former Canadian champion Kaiya Ruiter, who was second. Daleman had landed her patented triple toe loop – triple toe loop combo, which got a GOE of .84, and then a double Axel and a triple Lutz, with a .98 GOE.

Ruiter had attempted a more difficult triple flip – triple toe loop but underrotated the second part. And she did an easier triple loop.

Long program? Daleman won that, too, with 117.81 points to give her a total score of 181.04, the highest mark by a Canadian woman to that point this season. “It wasn’t perfect by any means,” she said of the free. “People are forgetting that I was literally learning how to walk this past March.”

Maddy Schizas was later to contest Finlandia Trophy GP and top that score with a 65.16 short program and a 123.44 free skate for a total of 188.60. And later, Sara-Maude Dupuis, although she got a Skate Canada assignment, also got a second international, the Warsaw Cup. )She had earlier done the Nepela Trophy.)

Dupuis won both the short (66.23) and the long (119.43) for a total of 185.66. Her free program mark was helped by landing a triple Axel, which officials deemed clean, with a minus .16 GOE, but her GOE were generally scarce. Her base value score was 59.44, and she was able to boost that only to 60.97. Daleman had higher GOE.

But Daleman had proved her point: that she is a contender. She attained her score with only one international after a three-year absence and having to overcome a cascade of injuries. She answered a big challenge. And succeeded.

The world minimum score for women to get to a world championship (and thus and Olympics) is 90, the sum of the technical scores of the short and long programs. Daleman defied the odds by getting 93.03 in her one shot.

.Daleman said she wouldn’t wish her past three years on her worst enemy. She’s been injured for the first three years of this quad.

Her long program is to “Samson and Delilah,” a routine she did 2021-2022 season. To be honest, Daleman kept the program because she didn’t have the cash to get a new program. She is not financed by Skate Canada. The cost of her new training site – in U.S. dollars – is coming out of her own savings. She is gambling everything.

She knew she needed to go to Colorado, where she was skating with athletes better than she was, who would push her.

It’s a miracle that she kept going. She doesn’t know how to answer how she has done it. “I love what I do, to be quite honest,” she said. “In my entire life, I’ve had people try to tell me I could never do something. I was never going to be anything and I just always knew this was what I was made to do.

“I wasn’t going to let the bullies, when I was younger, tell me what to do. Why would I let people when I’m older try telling me what to do. No matter what, I didn’t want the opportunity for skating to be taken away from me.

“I knew that if I could overcome this, I could pretty much overcome anything.”

She’s been like a feather caught in a vortex. But she lives by her favourite quote. She says: “I survived 100 per cent of the worst days that I thought I couldn’t.”