The Current - Elvis Stojko on the agony of falling short at the Olympics

Episode Date: March 3, 2026

The Canadian figure skating star says he understands the pain of athletes — like American skater Ilia Malinin — who feel the weight of the world's expectations on them as they compete. When he fell short of gold in Nagano in 1998, it took him years to recover. But now he's reinvented himself as a race car driver.

Look, Survivor is one of those shows that changed the game for television, and now it is in its 50th season. My name is Alameh Mammu, and I host a pop culture show. It is called Commotion. This week, some Survivor Superfans join the show to talk about why we can't stop watching people outwit, outlast, and outplay. Find that episode and many more on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. podcast. Elvis Stoiko knows the thrill of winning. He is one of Canada's biggest skating stars,

three-time world champions, seven-time Canadian champion, two-time Olympic medalist, but those two Olympic wins were distinct. In 1994, in Lillehammer, Elvis was up and coming. He won silver. Four years later in Nagano, he was the reigning champion. Everyone in Canada had high expectations. How many times has he envisioned this moment he has talked about being in tune with Japanese philosophy. Well, this is his space, his time, and this is Elvis Stoico's skate for Olympic gold. It's the moment from the CBC broadcast before Elvostoeco began his free skate. It did not end in gold. He skated valiantly with a groin injury, limped off the ice, and won silver. And so he knows a thing or two about what the athletes who are now home from the Milano-Cartina Games are feeling, and those who

hit the mark and those who fell short. And what Paralympians heading there in a few days are also anticipating, he's here to tell them that yes, indeed, there is life after the games. Elvis Stoiko, good morning. Good morning. You know, most of us will never know what it feels like to come home from an Olympics with a medal. What did that feel like for you at 94? That was an incredible time. skating was on a massive high with all the I guess all the retired athletes the pros, it was called the Boitano rule so I got to compete against one of my heroes

Brian Boitano and Victor Petrenko came back and of course Kurt was there so we had quite the group and even in like in the ladies event we had Catarina Witt coming back and Torval and Dean it was a pretty amazing time and to be able to skate there in Lillehammer so well

it was just a very magical week for me. I was skating great all week. I was very relaxed. I was just focused on my own path, not thinking about winning or not thinking about trying to make a podium, but just doing my job and embracing Olympics. And it was really about just keeping centered within myself

and not get distracted. And you win silver medal. I mean, you're the second best in the world. It was amazing. We were sitting there and for a while I was first and we're like, holy cow, this could happen. And then Erminoff went out and just clipped me by a little bit. It was one of those things where my brain was like, oh, man, I missed it.

But oh, my gosh, I got a silver. And I still got another, at least one more Olympics to go. And I'm like, oh, the next one, I'm going to, I'm going to focus on the next one for that to try to make that top step. But it was so well received that particular program because of the martial arts background. I got to meet Chuck Norris. He came, he flew all the way over to Lillahammer to watch the course. the ladies event with Nancy Kerrigan and Tanya Harding and Oksana Bayou, all the craziness that had happened. And he asked for me personally through our team and I sat with him during the ladies

event and talked to Chuck Norris about Bruce Lee. And he said, you know, thank you. I watched you from home. And I just wanted to thank you for honoring my friend. What a crazy time to live through. You mentioned that you had Olympics ahead of you as well. And so four years later, you go to Nagano. And you were the favorite for the gold medal. And maybe, I don't know, silver was extraordinary, but maybe you had something to prove as well and thought that you could win that gold medal. When you stepped onto the ice for your free skate,

we just heard a little bit of the commentary just before it began. What was going through your mind? I look at my life pre-98 and post-98. There's these pinnacle moments in my life. Obviously, one of them is marrying my wife who is a massive, massive part of, I guess, my process of understanding

self-love and self-acceptance. But the 98 performance, and I listened to the, I was listening to the commentary, and I got chills again about that moment. It takes you right back because it's such, there's so much emotion that goes into it because your whole life is all about that performance and performing at that level and that moment. And it's just you could make it or break it. and everything could go down the drain and you have to deal with it.

I was dealing with an injury that I was trying to keep quiet. I sustained it after Nationals, after the short program. Actually, I woke up after National. Skating, great. Woke up next morning and I just had the injury. And it wasn't torn, but the groin was very sore. We held it at bay for the month and a bit leading up to the Olympics. But at that moment, in the long program,

There's so many pieces in the last probably three days leading up to it because I severely injured my leg in the morning of the short program and wasn't sure if I was going to skate or not. And I had to really hunker down and focus on my choice of do I go for this or or, you know, how am I going to deal with this situation? The long program itself, you know, asking the question, what was I thinking at that moment, was just still believing that it could be possible that I could have the magic skate. We call it the white moment and, you know, be on top of the podium. What's the white moment? The white moment is a lot of people call it the flow when you're in a flow state. Guys talk about it when they're in the F1 movie. Brad talks about it.

I'm flying. And that's what it feels like because it's when your skill level and all the skill that you've learned comes into effortless effort. And it happens at the moment that you want it to happen. I've had it those moments at a nationals. I've had it at the world championships. At some internationals, even skating at home, it was training. There's a moment where the flow state kicks in and it's incredible. But you want that flow state. or the white moment to happen when it's the biggest moment in your life. And if that timing comes together, it's the ultimate. And I've seen athletes have it.

And it's just, it's incredible. And I still believed, even though I was injured, I still believe right to the very end that it could happen. And that's what, that was the thin thread that kept me going through the whole program. I almost stopped in the middle of the program and went to the judges and was like, I can't continue. But it was, I just pushed through it. You finished it.

And I mean, I think anybody who is watching it, even now, if you go back to it, you can see that you are in an excruciating pain and you're wincing and you kind of limp to the benches. And if you listen to the TV broadcast, have a listen to this. You can hear the breaths that you're taking. Yeah. You hear the crowd chanting Elvis. They love him.

Everybody loves him. Everyone loves what he's done. He's holding onto his leg. You talked about how your whole life comes down to that one moment. One of the reasons why we wanted to talk to you was because you have all these athletes who will go and compete at the highest level at the Olympics. Not everybody obviously is going to win. Not everyone's going to win gold or silver or bronze. But it's that moment for them.

When that moment doesn't go the way that you want, what happens? You have to search within yourself and find the why. And you have to be able to make peace with it to understand all of those, those parts of it. It's traumatic. It really is traumatic when you, when it doesn't go your way. And the way you've planned it, you manifest you, you do visualization, you see it every day. You know, every time I wake up in the morning, I remember waking up and I'd open my eyes. And then I thought about the day.

I thought about Olympics, how my day was going to go. each day mattered. Every piece of food that went in my mouth, the training that I did, everything went towards that one goal. When it doesn't happen, you have to regroup. You have to allow yourself to come down. You have to allow the emotion to hit you. You have to, you can't block it. No matter how much you try, no matter how strong you are, you have to accept the emotional release that you're going to have because the floodgates come in and you can't stop them. And there's stuff that during that season or previous seasons leading up that you've put on the shelf. Athletes have this incredible ability at that level, that elite level.

We compartmentalize and we learn how to compartmentalize emotion and trauma. So it doesn't affect our moment in our training that will stunt our way to being our best. But there is a time when you stop competing and those floodgings, gates and those compartmentalized boxes of emotion, so to speak, are rattling. They rattle. And they say, hey, you got to face me now. You compared it in the Globe and Mail to grief, right? Absolutely. It's grief. And it's trauma. What are you grieving? Oh, the grief of, of, you have a belief system. For me, it was, my belief was my strength. The belief and the willpower is my strength. And I always knew that up to

1998, that my willpower was my gift, that if you believed hard enough and you worked hard enough and you focused and you channel, it can be possible. And when it didn't happen, your whole belief system crashes. That happened to me. Not every athlete goes through that extreme, but their own belief and understanding of themselves and their own motivation. And then all of a sudden, what doesn't happen, it's like all of it falls apart. For me, it fell apart because I believe wholeheartedly that I could that I could do it. And it took a while to understand that later on what I did was almost impossible based on what I'd done to my leg. And I'd understand that where I failed, it wasn't at the Olympics. It was where I placed my mind months before. I wasn't on

the mental path that I normally was on. That got me that feeling in 94 and won my world championships. And somehow I got derailed. Keeping on top of the incredible number of developments unleashed by the U.S. and Israel's attack on Iran can be tough. So if you want to know what's going on but feel overwhelmed by that prospect, I'm Jamie Poisson, and I host the Daily News Podcast Frontburner. We're going to be covering this story all week, one story a day, great guests, clear information, lots of context. Follow Frontburner wherever you get your podcasts. What sort of support when there are athletes who are still coming back now from the Olympic Games in Italy? And maybe they didn't hit that mark, whether it was a medal or not, but they didn't hit that mark that they had set for themselves in their mind over the years.

What sort of support do you think they need when they return? It's massive, especially if it's their final Olympics and they might be their final competition. You never know. And then they just put everything, all their eggs in one basket, and bam, it didn't happen. or a tragedy happens. The support system is very, very important. Coaches, especially being there because they're there on the front lines with you, family, close friends. Those of us who were watching the Olympics too? Yeah. Back then, I got floods of, you know, faxes coming in and people writing and people that had, you know, gone through cancer. And they wrote me and said,

your performance inspired me. And I just was, I just, I started crying. I just, just everything broke down and all this stuff started flooding in. And I started reading this stuff. And I was like, I need to, I need to, to grieve, but I also need to see through my grief. And grief and sadness, there's this wagon wheel of emotion I learned through martial arts. And happiness gives us endurance. Sadness gives us reflection.

So you can always, you'll always have a positive to that emotion, even to, emotion may seem negative. But the grief and the sadness that's there, you have to feel it. You have to embrace it. You have to allow it to go through you. And it's hard for athletes because we train ourselves not to allow emotion to take over too much. Because the skill set that we have, we could miss a jump or a spin or, you know, guys that are and women that are doing ski jumping or downhill skiing. We see it.

We see those accidents and we see things that could happen. and a blink of an eye due to a mishap, a mishap or a lack of concentration. And the support system is so important when an athlete comes home. But your point is that they need to in some ways embrace. I mean, it's going to be hard. That's going to take time. But they need to embrace that grief and those emotions when they're returning if they didn't hit that level that they wanted to hit.

Yeah, yeah. Because you, when you're at that level, you don't have to do it. physically you're giving 100% and mentally too and emotionally too and your willpower. It's all going in the same direction. You have to think you're the best. When you're at the top and you have a chance at a metal and your dream has been there since you were little and you want to be at the top, you give everything. You sacrifice everything.

Every moment, getting up in the morning early where your body is just like, oh my God, I felt like I just got run over by a transport truck. And you're like, I got to do the same thing I did yesterday and the day before. like, how do I do this? Those are all the sacrifices and the drive. These are the things that most people don't see because it's the willpower that gets you out of bed. It's not my talent. It's all about the will to drive and the goal that you set for yourself. Let me just ask you a couple of quick things before I let you go. One is at this point in your life, and you could put your feet up, you could, I don't know, play pickleball or something like that. You are now a professional

race car, or one step below professional, but you're driving race cars, right? What do you love about that in context to what we've just been talking about and the thrill of being in competition? What do you love about driving really, really fast on a track? The adrenaline feel of flying, I love speed. But one of the biggest things, and I ask, and I ask this to kids now in athletes and actors and everything, I said, to really know what you really want to do in life, you pick the thing that you would do when no one was looking. If no one was looking at you, what would you do? And I was like, race cars. I'm inspired even at home I'm exhausted. I get on my sim or I'm working out. It inspires me. And I'll be honest,

not winning that gold inspires me. So I use that as fuel. So whatever fuel you can use, you use it in a positive way. It's not what I've always learned. It's not what happens to us that matters. It's our choices and reaction to it after. That determines the future for you. And it's to learn from it and to understand it. That's why understanding the why part of it,

to understand why it happened and the choices I made before 98 Olympics, I got caught up in the hype of the, in 94, I just went and skated and loved it. and was like, yeah, I'd love to get a medal. That's my goal. But deep down inside is about having that white moment and experiencing it and showing my gift. In 98, it was all about just the win because I had to do it for the country. I had to do it for everyone else and no other Canadian male had done it.

And at the rink, like for six months, I had tons of media, tons of people coming, asked the same question over and over and over and over and over and over again. and I got caught in it and I lost my center. And that's what ended up being the problem with the injury. I created my own scenario. And now with the racing, I've always loved competition. I love pushing myself. I love understanding.

I love those aha moments when I learn more about me. I learn more about the craft. And I love the craft of racing. I love the technical side of it. There's a lot of similarities between skating and racing. A lot of people are like, what are you talking about? And I'm like, there's a lot of similarities between the two, the inner ear and the feel and the motion, allowing the car to dance underneath you like a blade dances. I just love proving things that people would say can't be done.

And I love, I love working out. I love being in shape. I love being in elite condition. And I was like, no, I'm going to embrace this. You know, they have those questionnaires that you do and you fill it out. and it tells you what your career path would be. Every time I filled them out, race car driver, actor, and I laughed. I just was like, it just, ever since I was a kid, those were the things I did on the side,

but they, I never let them go. So what would, just finally, what would you say to people who, I mean, they're not going to race a car, they're not going to compete in the Olympics, but they're going to, they're looking for that white moment in their own lives. They're putting themselves out and they're betting on themselves to try and be as good as they possibly can be. What would you say to them? The biggest thing is the choose a thing that inspires you.

The biggest thing is to understand why. Make sure it's your choice because I lost that where the gold medal, yeah, I wanted to win it, but the reason why got lost in all of this. It became a thing I had to get because it was a thing that was there. And I believe Elia Malinian went through that as well where they already gave him the gold medal. They literally just had to put it on his neck. They were just waiting for it. They're like, oh, he's got this.

And then he ends up in eighth place. Yeah, he had a meltdown. I saw him go out as an athlete doing this for so long. I saw his shoulders get up. He was trying to push his chest up to try to go, I don't feel right right now. My legs aren't there, but I'm going to, I'm going to, I've got the confidence.

And then when he went to skate, he stepped away from the boards. He skated in a circle. And then I saw it in his eyes. And it went out. I looked at my wife and I went, uh-oh. I don't know if this is. going to happen. And he did the quad flip in the opening. Everyone's like, yeah. And I'm like, that was tight. I could tell his movement. And then as he went in for the quad axle,

I'm like, he's done. He ain't doing it. And I'm like, he's going to, now it's going to be hard. Sorry, my puppy's barking in the background. But it's hard for him. And he won so many things leading up. He won everything. Defeated, first quad axle, all this stuff. He's going to learn from it on a massive scale. He'll, you know, he'll come down. He'll have a crash. But then he'll come back and he's already going to go to worlds he's going to use worlds as a way to kind of redeem and again it's it shows you the resilience of the athletic Olympic Olympian mindset and you don't have to be an Olympian to have the same mindset and really it's about belief in yourself that's what fulfillment is it has to come within it's not an external thing the external

reward comes when you honor yourself that is when it comes that's when you win the gold and that's what Alyssa Liu did. She honored herself. Bam, she won. Oh, sorry for my puppy. No, no. Dogs are allowed on the program. Yeah, she's a sweetheart.

She's five months and I'm not paying attention to her. We'll let you go. I mean, I think that's really good advice to everybody. And that idea of searching for that white moment, I think, is a really powerful one, no matter what people are doing. Elvis Stoiko, what a pleasure to talk to you. Good luck on the racetrack. Thank you.

Drive fast and drive safely. I will, I will. Thank you so much. I appreciate you. Thank you for the chat. Take care. Take care. Alastiko, there's a two-time Olympic silver medalist in one of the stars of stars on ice. He's also a race car driver. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.