Belchos represented Canada on the international stage for 17 seasons, which included wearing the maple leaf at the Olympic Games in PyeongChang and Beijing

QUEBEC CITY, QUEBEC – Olympian Jordan Belchos has announced his retirement from Canada’s national speed skating team. An international medalist in both in-line and on-ice skating, the 34-year-old native of Scarborough retires from competitive sport following a successful 17-year career that included over a dozen medals and two Olympic appearances.

“I feel grateful for the 17 years that I spent as a member of Speed Skating Canada’s national team. In general, I’ve tried to look forward more so than look back, but I’ve realized more and more lately how the high and lows of my sporting career have helped shape me. It is a very rare privilege to have an outlet that permitted me to work towards my dreams and ultimately get to experience many of them. I was fortunate to have family, friends, teammates, staff and an organization that supported me during my journey.”

Belchos became a mainstay on the international long track speed skating circuit after making his World Cup debut in 2008. The long-distance specialist enjoyed a breakout season in 2015-16, one that culminated with a fifth-place finish in the 10,000m at the World Championships. He experienced his best season on the circuit in 2019-20, winning three World Cup medals, which included gold in the Mass Start in Nagano, the only individual distance podium of his career.

He earned four career World Single Distance Championship medals, including two silver (2015, 2021) and one bronze (2016) as a member of the Team Pursuit, as well as silver in the Mass Start in 2020, where he stood on the podium with teammate Antoine Gélinas-Beaulieu, who captured bronze. The national team veteran retires having finished in the top 5 at the World Championships in four different events: 5000m, 10,000m, Mass Start and Team Pursuit.

Belchos made his Olympic debut at PyeongChang 2018, where he finished fifth in the 10,000m and seventh in the Team Pursuit, alongside Ted-Jan Bloemen and Denny Morrison. Four years later at Beijing 2022, he skated to a 13th place finish in the Mass Start, while racing to a fifth-place result in the Team Pursuit with Bloemen and Connor Howe.

“I think I failed in about as many ways as one can, and I refused to let those failures define me. The best example of this in my career was missing qualifying for the 2014 Olympic Games by 0.06 seconds in the 10,000m, then working four years to for another opportunity in 2018, where I finished fifth in the same event. I’ve realized at a certain point in my career that all that really matters is that I feel proud about the effort that I put forth. I tried to train and compete in a way that always lived up to the standard that I hold myself to. I think it many ways it set me free from basing my self-worth on the perception of others and allowed me to pursue success rather than trying to avoid failure.”

After nearly a decade away from competitive in-line skating, Belchos returned to the sport that started it all and made history. He represented Canada at the 2015 Pan American Games in Toronto, earning bronze in the 10,000m points race to claim the country’s first ever Pan Am Games medal in roller sports. It was his first international in-line event since participating at the World Championships in 2004 and 2005.

“If there’s anything that I hope a younger skater could take from me, it would be to not limit yourself and to accept failure. The best example from my career of not limiting myself was from the 2015 Pan American Games, where I knew that winning a medal was highly unlikely, but I prepared to do so regardless. I am certain that if I had limited myself to accepting how good my competitors were, I would have not been able to beat them.”

A student throughout his time as a high-performance athlete, Belchos has already began transitioning into his post-skating career. He has found work with an architecture firm in Quebec City and will begin the pursuit of a master’s degree in architecture this coming fall.

“There are so many people that have helped me throughout my career that I would never be able to name them all, but I hope I’ve been able to communicate to them how much their support has meant to me. The people that I would thank most are my parents, who sacrificed so much for me and never really asked for anything in return. I would have accomplished absolutely nothing in sport without them. If talent is a God given characteristic that predisposes one to being successful, then I believe that having great parents is my only real talent.”

While he will no longer be competing, Belchos will certainly make a few appearances at the Centre de glace Intact Assurance over the coming years, either to enjoy a few laps on the ice or to cheer on his fiancé Valerie Maltais, who is working towards representing Canada at her fifth Olympic Winter Games at Milano Cortina 2026.