How Winnipeg’s Cindy Klassen became an Olympic legend 19 years ago in Italy

February 6, 2025 Canuck

A few hours before she’d become an Olympic champion, a little boy waving a Canadian flag caught Cindy Klassen’s eye.

Inside the Lingotto Oval, where speed skating events took place during the 2006 Olympic Games in Torino, Italy, Klassen had a chance to get a feel for the ice she’d be racing on that day.

Klassen had already earned silver and bronze at the Olympics. The only colour she hadn’t yet placed around her neck was gold. The 1,500-metre race was the perfect opportunity to climb to the top of the podium.

She looked back on that race in a conversation with CBC Sports, as Italy prepares to host the 2026 Olympics in one year’s time.

After finishing her training session that day, Klassen motioned for the boy to come down to ice level. She learned the boy, who was named Vito, and his father had come to Italy to watch Canadians compete. She added her signature to the collection of autographs on his flag.

Vito left an impression on Klassen, who was 26 at the time, as she prepared to race.

“I just thought, I want to show him how much fun the sport of speed skating is,” Klassen said. “He was my motivation that day. I just remember going to the line and feeling confident. I was racing the top skater in that distance in the 1,500 and I just felt good. I just felt calm and confident.”

With Vito in the stands, Klassen put up a time of 1 minutes 55:27 seconds. She was golden. Her teammate, Kristina Groves, won silver. Both raced faster than Dutch legend Ireen Wüst.

After she and Groves sang O Canada on the podium, and Klassen received her first Olympic gold medal, she made her way over to where Vito was sitting. She tossed her flowers and motioned for someone to hand them to the boy.

Three women wearing medals, including two Canadians, smile and pose on the podium. — Klassen, centre, poses on the podium after the 1,500-metre race where she won gold. Fellow Canadian Kristina Groves, right, won silver, and Dutch skater Ireen Wüst, left, claimed bronze. (Ryan Remiorz/Canadian Press)

Nearly two decades after she became Canada’s most decorated Olympian, the 1,500 event stands out in Klassen’s mind when she thinks of the Olympics in Italy.

The race is etched in her memory not just because she became an Olympic champion that day, but also of the people around her. There was Vito cheering in the stands and Groves celebrating on the podium beside her, but it was also the one race her entire family was able to attend.

In addition to the gold medal in the 1,500, Klassen also brought home two silvers (1,000 and team pursuit) and two bronze medals (3,000 and 5,000) from the 2006 Olympics. She became the only Canadian athlete to capture five medals at one Olympic Games — winter or summer.

Klassen’s record-breaking performance prompted then-IOC president Jacques Rogge to call her the “woman of the Games.” She was chosen to carry the Canadian flag at the closing ceremony, and returned to Canada a household name.

The Royal Canadian Mint even issued a quarter showing Klassen mid-stride in front of a maple leaf to commemorate her achievements.

Looking back, Klassen admits she feels that was another person on occasion.

“Sometimes I think, I actually did that? I actually speed skated on the national team?” Klassen said.

“It just seems so long ago. But I just feel so grateful for the opportunities that I had to be able to be raised in this country where I had the chance to be able to skate and to compete for a country and the friends that I made along the way.”

That’s Klassen in a nutshell. Her perspective never changed whether she skated in last place or found herself on the podium, as she did five times at the 2006 Olympics.

It’s an outlook she derives from her faith, which Klassen has always put above skating. She’s always known there’s more to life than the sport.

A Canadian woman competes in speed skating at the Olympics. — Klassen, pictured here at the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, was the same person no matter how she placed in a race. (Kevin Frayer/Associated Press)

“When people say how do you define a champion, that to me is how you define champions, when results don’t dictate who people are because it doesn’t make a difference,” said two-time Olympic gold medallist Catriona Le May Doan, who was Klassen’s teammate at the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City.

Trying a new sport

That Olympics was Klassen’s first. But if she had it her way back in the 1990s, she would have been at the Games competing in hockey, her first love.

When Klassen didn’t make that team, her parents, Jake and Helga, suggested she try speed skating. They had a connection with a coach at the local club in Klassen’s hometown of Winnipeg.

Klassen was reluctant.

“It was the last thing I ever wanted to do because the tight skin suit, it looked funny,” Klassen said. “And then also the long blades, those looked kind of ridiculous to me coming from hockey.”

At her first practice, Klassen wore a track suit, because she refused to wear a skin suit. Local kids lapped her on the rink as she adjusted to a new kind of blade. Her goal that day? Just stay on her feet.

To her surprise, she went to a second practice, and then another, and another. It became a challenge for Klassen to master a new sport. Eventually, she even came around to wearing a skin suit after her coaches convinced her it would make her go faster.

Then came the 1998 Olympics in Nagano, Japan. Klassen was in awe of Le May Doan and Susan Auch, who is also from Winnipeg. Klassen thought they looked so strong and smooth skating in a Canadian skin suit.

She wouldn’t admit it to anyone because the sport was still so new to her, but that’s when she thought she might be able to make an Olympic team, too.

A record-breaking Games

Four years later, she was at the Olympics, alongside Auch and Le May Doan. Klassen won her first Olympic medal, a bronze, in the 3,000 in 2002.

Three women on an Olympic podium wave, wearing medals and holding flowers. — Klassen, right, celebrates her first Olympic medal, a bronze, in Salt Lake City in 2002. She’s joined by German Claudia Pechstein, middle, who won gold and Renate Groenewold of the Netherlands, left, who finished second. (Paul Chiasson/Canadian Press)

In between Olympic cycles, she became world allround champion in 2003, followed by titles in the 3,000 and 1,500 at the World Single Distance Championships.

“She really had that raw strength and that grit and sort of that workhorse mentality of just grind through,” said Le May Doan, who had retired from skating and called Klassen’s races from the CBC broadcast booth in 2006. “We saw that leading into [Torino], and then we saw that throughout the Olympics.”

Going into the Games, Klassen didn’t want to put pressure on herself. She wanted to take things race by race. She stayed away from newspapers, not wanting to read what they were saying about her.

“I knew that I had a chance in a number of distances, but I just wanted to keep that goal as doing better than in 2002,” she said.

“It just seemed like race after race things just kept going well, and I achieved more than what I had expected.”

That might be understating it. Klassen made the podium in every race she entered at the 2006 Olympics.

She didn’t stop there. Her dominance continued into the 2006 World Allround Championships, which she won a month later.

A warm welcome home

Back in 2006, there wasn’t any social media. She didn’t have a sense of how her performance had resonated back home while at the Olympics.

A woman signs autographs for fans with Canadian flags. — Klassen signs autographs at the airport in Winnipeg when she returned to Canada in March 2006. (Marianne Helm/Canadian Press)

She’d stayed in Europe for a couple weeks after the Games to compete in World Cup events, and figured any excitement would have died down by the time she got home.

“But when we arrived in the airport, there was this huge welcoming for all of us. It was unreal. I just did not expect that at all.”

Endorsement deals followed, and so did the prize now called the Northern Star Award, given to Canada’s top athlete of the year.

Injuries plagued Klassen’s career after that. She had bilateral knee surgery a year and a half before the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver.

Her goal was just to get to those Games, and it’s another one she achieved.

“I never made it back to the top of my game again,” she said. “But skating in Vancouver was something else. It was out of this world. I just remember stepping onto the ice and the roar of the crowd. When a Canadian came onto the ice, you couldn’t hear anything. It was so loud.”

She retired from the sport in 2015, and was inducted into Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame two years later. She’s also a member of the Order of Manitoba.

A woman signs a square that says Canada's Walk of Fame 2019. — Klassen was inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame in 2019, one of several honours she’s earned since her record-breaking performance at the 2006 Olympics. (Chris Young/Canadian Press)

She spent time as a police officer in Calgary before pursuing the “mom life” and staying at home to raise her two children, who are now five and two years old.

Inspiring future gold medallists

Her performance left an impact on Vito, who Klassen reconnected with at a Toronto coffee shop eight years after the 2006 Games. He still had the flowers Klassen tossed to him, dried and pasted in a book.

It also left an impression on Isabelle Weidemann, who was 10 years old when she watched Klassen perform in 2006. She was new to the sport and had no idea it could take her to the Olympics.

She put Klassen posters on her walls and cut out her image from Cheerios boxes, creating her own shrine to her favourite athlete.

“When I think back to that quintessential Olympic moment, the little Olympic flame that sparked for me as a kid, that’s it: Torino 2006, watching Cindy Klassen,” Weidemann told CBC Sports’ Anastasia Bucsis. “Watching that legacy of women of that era.”

Weidemann made the long-track speed skating Olympic team in 2018 and again in 2022, when she brought home three medals: a bronze, silver and gold. Like her idol, Weidemann asked to carry the Canadian flag at the closing ceremony.

She goes into 2026 as a medal threat, and will compete in the country where Klassen dominated two decades ago.

For the Canadian skaters who will compete in Italy, Klassen has simple words of advice: once you get to the line, believe in yourself and your training.

A woman smiles with a baby on her back. — After retiring from speed skating, Klassen worked with the Calgary Police Service. Now, she is focusing on being a mom to her two children. (Submitted by Cindy Klassen)

“Trust what you’ve done to get yourself to that point, and then have fun because it’s going to be over in a moment,” she said.

“It’s so important to enjoy those moments because it’s amazing to be able to be there at the Olympics. You don’t want to miss out on the enjoyment of it.”

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Canada News

How Winnipeg’s Cindy Klassen became an Olympic legend 19 years ago in Italy

Trying a new sport

A record-breaking Games

A warm welcome home

Inspiring future gold medallists

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