Tessa Virtue says self-doubt doesn’t go away, but adversity helped prepare her for victories
VANCOUVER—Canada’s best known woman ice dancer opened up to a crowd of teen girls in Vancouver Tuesday about her past failings and successes and said she’s “dreaming big” about what’s next now that she’s officially in retirement from competitive sport.
“It’s not being an Olympic champion that makes me feel successful,” gold-medal ice dancer Tessa Virtue told a crowd of young women at Vancouver’s ‘We for She’ conference, which is aimed at connecting young women with business leaders and entrepreneurs from all walks of life. “It’s that I committed every day to the process and I lived and breathed being an athlete.”
Tessa Virtue and ice dancing partner Scott Moir became household names after capturing Olympic gold in Vancouver in 2010. They gained even more attention during their final Olympic appearance in Korea in 2018, with fans cheering their on-ice chemistry.
The two were expected to retire following a gold-medal performance at the Pyeongchang Olympics in 2018, but had not done so officially until this month, in an announcement made over Twitter from the Abbotsford Centre where they trained. Their careers included five Olympic medals, four first-place finishes at the Worlds, and many more international accolades.
Now that the pair’s competitive careers have come to an end, Moir and Virtue are moving on to business pursuits, including a two-month-long Rock the Rink tour — starting on Oct. 5 in Abbotsford, B.C. and ending on Nov. 23 in St. John’s, N.L. Virtue also recently signed on as an ambassador to Canadian clothing brand RW&CO.
Speaking to a crowd of hundreds of teens and woman business leaders Tuesday, Virtue spoke about the insecurities she faced in high school and how she learned to get over them.
“I wish I could tell young Tessa that she was enough,” Virtue said in her keynote remarks. “You talk about self-doubt — I’m 30 and I feel it. I don’t think that goes away.”
But over the course of her competitive skating career — which included 22 years skating with Moir — Virtue said she learned to accept and appreciate moments of failure.
She recounted one time, after she sustained injuries to her shins and calves that required surgery, that she and Moir lost touch while she was in recovery.
“One of the most critical parts of our success was that partnership, and we had to go to marriage counselling, to see a mental prep coach,” she said. In the end, it was the resiliency of her partnership with Moir that Virtue credits with their 2018 Olympic success.
“It forced us to approach sports in a way that no one had,” she said.
Young women at the conference said Virtue’s talk made them feel encouraged about their own goals.
“I kind of want to be a professional snowboarder,” said 15-year-old Naruna Okundaye, of Richmond, B.C. “Her talking about having failures and being an elite athlete made be think maybe I can do this snowboarding thing for real.”
The sixth annual one-day We For She conference took place at the Vancouver Convention Centre on Tuesday, hosted by the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade, the province of B.C., and Women’s Enterprise Centre.
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