Elladj Baldé might not compete anymore, but he hasn’t hung up his skates. When the former Canadian junior figure skating champion isn’t spinning, flipping and twisting on wild ice, he’s making sure everyone has a chance to fall in love with his sport.
Through their Skate Global Foundation, Baldé and his wife Michelle Dawley focus on improving the social aspects of skating. The Calgary couple aims to nurture young athletes and push the sport towards better equity, diversity and inclusion.
“Growing up, I didn’t have any representation,” says Baldé, whose Guinean father and Russian mother brought their family to Canada when he was two. “It wasn’t until much later that I did see a Black male skater, and the impact that that had on me, it was just groundbreaking.”
One of the foundation’s recent projects was refurbishing an outdoor rink in Calgary’s Temple community, then donating 50 pairs of skates, all to increase access to rink time. Baldé and Dawley, a dancer and choreographer, also want to relieve the financial burden for young racialized skaters who want to compete “at the highest level of the sport.” This May, they’re holding a session of their Art of Performance Camp, where young participants learn technical skills, but also life skills, including body positivity and meditation.
Baldé is also a member of Protect Our Winters, outdoor athletes who push for action on climate change. His ever-growing love of nature was on centre ice when he took our Moose Questionnaire.
This interview is edited and condensed for clarity — all opinions are the subject’s own.
It’s what we call wild ice, ice that forms from Mother Nature. It’s just unbelievable. It fascinates me. We have so much technology nowadays with ice rinks and temperatures and Zambonis and all that. But when that first freeze happens on lakes from early October to mid-November, it’s smoother and has a better glide than anything we could create indoors.
It’s one of the most incredible experiences I’ve ever had as a skater, the feel of the ice, the sound that the ice makes, the entirety of the whole experience. I’m just in awe every time I step on it.
My dad’s from West Africa, and when I was 24 I spent about two weeks in the village where he grew up. It’s in the mountains, there’s no electricity, no running water. You just live with the land. They have chickens, goats, cows, everywhere around the village, and they grow their food.
That was my first time spending that much time in nature, and it really reconnected me in a way that I never expected or knew was possible. To me, that’s a very, very special place. I came back a very different human than I was before going there.
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Kiss, I would say mountain goats. Oftentimes when I’m skating on wild ice, I’ll look on the side of a cliff, and there’s a little family of mountain goats just chilling, watching us skate.
Marry, I’ll go beavers. My wife and I, we just love beavers because they’re so hard working, they create their little cozy home. That’s how we like to live, hard working, but then we also have the coziest, warm little home that we built, and it’s where we want to spend all of our time. And I feel like beavers are like that too.
Kill, that’s a tough one. I don’t like to kill animals. I’ll go for a dangerous one — mountain lions. They’re scary. They’re really, really scary. They’re so stealthy. I would go for bears too, because I’m really terrified of bears. But I think bears are also super majestic. When you see them, they’re just so big and so athletic, they’re pretty awesome. But mountain lions are awesome too.
Any billionaire, Bezos, I mean, Bill Gates, Elon. Big corporations, billionaires, I feel like they can have such an impact on the way that things are progressing in our world, and unfortunately, a lot of them don’t really care.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have one. My mom has two cats, and one of them is an elder cat, and he just loves being out there. I support it.
When I started studying veganism, that really opened my mind to the effects that industrial farming and our food industry has on the environment. That was, wow, almost 10 years ago. I was vegan for like five, six years, vegetarian for another two.
When I was vegan, I was trying to change everyone’s mind. Trying to convince people to eat less meat and just consider the environment, animals and our planet.
Rocky Mountains are my home. It’s my backyard. Great Lakes are awesome too, but Rocky Mountains are my jam.
That’s interesting. I think women are more in touch with their intuition. As men, we are so disconnected from our emotions, our intuition. When you look at the environment, you look at our planet, there’s an awareness there that, I think, more naturally women are in tune with. Through my journey of getting more in touch with my intuition and my emotions, I’ve learned a lot from the women in my life. I’ve had to learn as a man how to connect to myself and how to connect to others on a deeper level.
I’d go towards the Arctic. Never been, never touched. It would probably be really cold, but I love cold-plunging, so maybe I’d enjoy it.
The farthest north was Yellowknife. I went there to chase the northern lights and skate under the northern lights, on some outdoor ice. It was awesome.
Every time I step outside, or every time I’m outdoors, I do take a moment to just take it in. The sky, the air we breathe, the trees, the animals, the birds, it’s become a thing that I do now without thinking. When you really think about our environment and the way it works, there’s so much that’s inexplicable, and there’s so much that is just happening, naturally. I’m often in awe of that.
That’s a tough one. I’ll keep maple syrup.
Is it weird if I say nature itself? I don’t know if there’s one person specifically. I just feel like the more time I spend in nature, the more I want to be in nature.
Billionaires and leaders of the world. If they felt more connected to nature, I think they wouldn’t make some of the decisions that they make.
B.C. Yeah, yeah, I just love the nature in B.C.
One hundred per cent yes, triple yes.
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