McMaster students head to Italy to cheer on their roommate, Olympic figure skater Madeline Schizas
CBC
When Madeline Schizas moved in with Shayla McKeown and Jenna Coulter, she was already an Olympic athlete.
"She's not intense," McKeown said. "Not the kind of what you imagine in your head if you were to say, ‘oh, I have an Olympian roommate.’
McKeown and Coulter met Schizas, an Oakville, Ont.-born figure skater, three years ago when she moved into the home where they were living in Hamilton's Westdale neighbourhood.
“We actually found her on Facebook Marketplace and lucked out pretty instantly,” said Coulter.
“She's always very chatty and vibrant.”
They all go to school at McMaster University, and now McKeown and Coulter are travelling to Italy to cheer their friend on as she skates for Canada at the 2026 Winter Olympics.
“We're just so excited to see her there,” said McKeown.
Coulter loves the Olympic Games and jumped at the chance to see her friend compete.
“I actually went to [the Olympic Winter Games Vancouver 2010] and I just knew how special, magical it is having the nation come together as one. And I always said I'd love to go back,” she said.
McKeown wasn't so sure.
“It was a little hard to convince her,” said Coulter, “But I made the decision that I was going to go and I said, ‘come on, I'm going to book it, you better come with me.’”
McKeown said it was a “big decision to make.”
“You think of the Olympics as [something] so far-fetched,” she said.
This will be their first trip to Italy. They leave on Feb. 17 and plan to come back on Feb. 22.
The system behind the emergency department wait times Winnipeggers see online had multiple flaws that made waits sometimes appear lower than they should, an internal memo shows.
Police on the west coast of Newfoundland say a 27-year-old woman was arrested on Friday night for impaired and dangerous driving, after being caught speeding down the main road in the rural community of Piccadilly at 88 km/h over the speed limit.
Scientists are seeing tropical fish in Nova Scotia with more frequency, and their arrival is prompting concerns about what their presence could mean for local species down the road.
New Brunswick Premier Susan Holt says health care won’t be exempt from her efforts to cut spending — even though her health minister says big spending increases will be unavoidable in coming years.
Pierre Ny St-Amand, the man who drove a bus into a Laval daycare in 2023, killing two young children and injuring six others, has been declared a high-risk accused.
A former CTV and CBC reporter hired to serve as Manitoba’s trade envoy to the United States is taking home more than $480,000 Cdn a year in consulting fees, according to his contract with the province.
The teen who lit her classmate on fire at a Saskatoon high school returns to court on Monday to learn the judge's decision on her sentence.
On a July morning in 2024, Dwayne Cardinal was packing up his tent outside the Bissell Centre when a police cruiser pulled up and two officers got out.
The City of Revelstoke and the Columbia-Shuswap Regional District have passed motions formalizing their intention to push the provincial government to protect an old-growth forest.
The province will once again decide who will hold Niagara’s top municipal post after the sudden resignation last week of Bob Gale, but exactly when the next regional chair will be announced isn’t clear just yet.
A wind warning is in place for Windsor-Essex, Chatham-Kent and Sarnia-Lambton on Monday with gusts as high as 90 km/h possible, according to Environment Canada.
Just a year after the Alberta government made a big splash unveiling its new border security team to the public with an announced $29-million investment, its latest budget shows the province only spent a third of the total it earmarked for the work over its first year.
Following several fatal collisions in northern Ontario this winter, a Sudbury, Ont., resident has created a website to track incidents across the region.