Long track speed skater Ivanie Blondin isn’t afraid to try new things
Watch out for Ivanie Blondin this season.
The two-time Olympic medallist and 14-time medallist at the ISU World Single Distances Championships started her season off with a bang at the Canadian Long Track Championships, capturing three national titles in as many days in mid-October. Blondin reigned victorious in the 3000m, 1500m, and 1000m—three events in which she is hoping to have similar success internationally as she consistently enjoys in the mass start, in which she has won seven of her world championship medals.
These results came after a summer during which, for the first time, Blondin took her dual-sport athletic abilities a step further, competing throughout North America for a professional women’s road cycling team.
Olympic.ca chatted with Blondin about keeping training fresh, her goals for the upcoming season, and lessons she’s learned over a long career in elite sport.
Congratulations are in order, coming off of the Canadian Championships! How are you feeling?
Thank you! Honestly, it exceeded my expectations by quite a bit. Not that I thought that I wasn’t fit—I knew my fitness level was really high—but it was more the sprint side of skating that I was unsure of, because it was a pretty quick turnaround for me after my cycling season ended. I had literally one month to prepare on the ice for Canadian championships.
So, it was a quick turnaround when I first transferred back over fully into skating. I was [skating during the summer] when I was home in Calgary, which was not very frequently, like one week at a time, a couple days at a time, sometimes throughout the summer. But it wasn’t enough to get the feel for it and progress with it. So my sprint side was kind of lacking at the beginning.
The first race after getting home was a 500m, and it was one of my slowest 500m that I’ve done in the past 5-10 years. So I was kind of alarmed by that. I worked a lot on my sprint in hopes to develop that sprint side come Canadian champs. And it worked.
How do you find that balance between cycling and skating?
With my character, I don’t really have an off-switch—I want to keep competing even during summer training. And a lot of people don’t realize this, but as speed skaters, you train primarily on the bike during the summer. Of course we have dryland and weights, but I would say 75% of our training is actually done on the bike to gain that fitness for the entire season.
The only difference, I would say is that this summer I trained primarily for the bike versus previous seasons, I was training on the bike, but for skating. But it was a nice change of pace and just the mindset of doing something different. I think a lot of athletes kind of get stuck in their ways, but the past two years, since the Beijing Games, I’ve explored a little bit what the boundaries are of doing different things that can be a positive change mindset-wise, but also even physically, and just being in a different environment. Doing something with a full new team of women was so much fun and just refreshing. Every time I would come home, I was energized and ready to go again.
What are you most looking forward to this coming season?
The goal for myself is always to get onto the podium in multiple distances. The mass start, team pursuit, team sprint I’ll be, for sure, partaking in and then I’d like to get back on the podium in the 1500m and the 3000m. That was definitely a goal of mine last year and I had just fallen short from that a couple times. I think I finished fourth multiple times in those two distances. So that’s definitely on my radar for this year.
I feel like I’m skating technically better this year, like something is just clicking, kind of like I’m back to where I was in 2019 when I had that really incredible year—I would say the best year of my career. So I’m really excited to see how the World Cups go and where I stack up on the international field.
It’s definitely going to be weird in the mass start because my main competitor, Irene Schouten, actually just announced her retirement. So that’s going to be interesting to see if the Dutch girls can take a step up.
You talked a little bit about how skating led you to cycling, but how did you first get into speed skating?
I started skating when I was two. My dad always built the neighborhood ice rink, so I started skating really young. And then I went into the learn-to-skate program [CanSkate] with Skate Canada. And then from that, I went into figure skating. I was not very graceful; I was more of a tomboy. The figure skating coach at the time recognized my talent. But she was like, “I don’t think she’s going to be a figure skater.” And she told my parents when I was I think six or seven years old, that they should put me into speed skating to see how it goes. I tried it, and then it was a decision made within two days kind of thing.
I’m very agile on the ice, which is what makes me a really good mass start skater, just moving on the ice, I know how to throw my body around to pass or kind of fiddle my way through the pack. That’s all because of the edge work that I did when I was younger in figure skating.
Is there anything that you wish more people knew about your sport, or that they get wrong?
Um, wearing a skin suit is not all that bad! A lot of people are always like, “Oh, my God, how do you put your body into that thing?”
What do you feel like you’ve learned throughout your career, either about yourself as an athlete or about your approach to sport?
I would definitely say, back in the day, I was a lot harder on myself performance-wise. When I wouldn’t perform, I would really lose my cool and be really hard on myself. There’s definitely been moments in my career where I forgot to have fun. And every time I would fail in the past it was devastating, and now it’s kind of just learning from those moments how to be better in the future.
Especially after Beijing, I think just the pressure off of finally coming home with Olympic medals allowed me to kind of take a step back and enjoy myself and try different things. Last winter, I went back to my roots in short track and did Canadian champs. And then this summer, it was cycling.
I think a big realization that I had to have was that I’ve always been very hard on myself. I still am, to a certain degree, but in a more positive way. But putting things into perspective—this is gonna sound really cheesy—I came home [from PyeongChang] in 2018 completely devastated. But my family didn’t care about the results. They just wanted to see me happy. Our animals—we have Gizmo, our African gray parrot, and Brooke, our Pyrenees, and we actually just got a cat this week—they don’t care about the performances. They’re just happy to see me, which reminds me that more matters than the results.
Did you watch much of Paris 2024? And if so, did you have a favorite moment as a Team Canada fan?
Evan Dunfee has always been one of my faves. He’s such a superstar and I just love his personality and how down to earth he is. He’s just such an incredible human being and I really look up to him. I was pretty devastated to see the results in the race that he had, but I know that he put everything into that race and he did everything that I could, so I was still incredibly proud of him.
Rapid fire with Ivanie Blondin
Favorite place to train?
Girona, Spain.
An athlete you look up to?
Leah Kirchmann from cycling. She’s also one of my good friends.
Any pre-race rituals or routines?
I always tie my left skate first, and sometimes I honestly forget, and then I’m like, “What are you doing?!”
Best skating memory?
I think I have two of those ones. When I was 14-years-old, I qualified for my first junior championship. That’s definitely one of them. It was my first step onto the national team.
And then in 2019 when I won all the consecutive gold medals in a row, that was a pretty big one of my career.
