MONTREAL — At 40 years old, Deanna Stellato-Dudek skates and twirls across the ice at full speed in front of thousands. She gets tossed high in the air by her partner, Maxime Deschamps, before landing in his arms and resuming their routine.

Stellato-Dudek is doing more than just skating competitively into the fifth decade of her life; she’s on the verge of becoming the oldest woman figure skater to win an Olympics or world championship ever. On Wednesday, she and Deschamps — skating for Canada in her new hometown — won the pairs short program at the ISU World Figure Skating Championships, putting them halfway to a title that seems almost impossible to imagine.

“I am certainly amazed by what she is doing,” said Deschamps, who is eight years younger, after their short program skate Wednesday at Bell Center.

“She doesn’t train like somebody who is 40 years old; she’s more like someone 18,” said Manon Perron, a longtime skating coach in Canada who is an adviser to the national team. “She’s not afraid to fall; she’s not afraid to do something.”

Stellato-Dudek spends two to three hours a day training just to be able to practice. She says the most important thing she does each night is get her muscles ready for the next day.

“There’s no points in figure skating for being older,” she said. “So, it really doesn’t matter at the end of the day. I just have to do what I need to do to feel as ready as all of my competitors do.”

She does it because she still loves skating. When she returned to the sport eight years ago, she committed to giving it “everything I got. So that when I [am] 80 years old, enjoying a glass of wine over dinner, I can think, ‘Hey, you know I went back and I did it.’”

Before many of the other skaters at these world championships were born, Stellato-Dudek was a rising American star from Chicago’s suburbs. She won the 1999-2000 ISU Junior Grand Prix Final and the 2000 junior U.S. Nationals. At the time, the United States was amid a figure skating run led by Michelle Kwan, Sarah Hughes and Sasha Cohen. Stellato-Dudek might have joined them, but she was battling persistent hip injuries.

Then came the general teenage angst felt by many skaters who begin to lament their lost childhoods. At 17, she retired, certain she was doing so without regret.

“You want to get as far away from it if you feel like you haven’t completed or finished everything you wanted to in the sport,” she said Wednesday. “It’s very easy to leave and kind of have a bad taste in your mouth with regards to it.”

She became an aesthetician in Chicago, got married and spent 15 years without anything to do with skating.

“She went and had a life,” says Andre Bourgeois, Skate Canada’s Next Gen Director who is one of the country’s team leaders for the world championships.

In 2016, at 33, she started wondering what she had left behind. At first, she skated in rinks around Chicago before eventually reuniting with an old coach who had moved to Florida. A U.S. Figure Skating official suggested she try pairs, and soon she was matched with Nathan Bartholomay, who also was training in Florida.

Stellato-Dudek and Bartholomay had success with two bronze medals at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships until injuries forced Bartholomay to stop in 2019. A coach recommended Deschamps, who is based in Montreal, so she moved to Canada not long before the pandemic, during which the two tried to build cohesion in whatever rink they could find open.

Still, a clock is ticking on her career. She is racing to get Canadian citizenship before the 2026 Winter Olympics, which is realistic given her and Deschamps’s status at the top of the sport.

And yet she will be 42 by then. Standing in a hallway just off the Bell Center ice, Wednesday, Perron shrugged at the idea.

“If she can do it at 40, she can do it in two more years,” Perron said.