'That part of my life is definitely complete' — Meagan Duhamel retires with 3 Olympic medals, 2 world titles

Meagan Duhamel woke up in Pyeongchang with a frantic thought in her head.

"I thought, 'Do I have to skate my long program? Did I skate my long program? Am I competing again?'"

This despite the two Olympic medals laying next to her on her pillow.

One was the gold she won in team figure skating earlier in the week and the other the bronze ("which seems pretty golden to me," Duhamel says) she won for pairs the night before at the games in South Korea.

"That's everything you dreamt of your entire life," the 32-year-old from Lively says in an interview with CBC Sudbury. 

"It's not just the medal. The medal serves as a symbol of hard work and dreaming and all these other moments that led to this, all the failures that led to this. For this one success, I had to fail thousands of times."

Nearly quit skating 

Starting in 2004, Duhamel struggled with two different partners to break through in the Canadian skating world and she seriously considered retiring before partnering with fellow northern Ontario skater, Eric Radford of Balmertown, in 2011.

"So many times I seriously thought I had experience as much as I could, and it was as good as it could get for me," Duhamel remembers.

Together, they have captured seven Canadian championships, two world championships and a complete set of Olympic medals, including the silver they won in the team competition at the 2014 games in Sochi.

After these Olympics, she and Radford are doing some seminars in Australia, then touring Japan and Canada doing a series of skating shows that wrap up in May.

"And that's when things will settle down and I'll decide what I want to do for the rest of my life," Duhamel says.

While she will never hang up her skates for good and will still do figure skating shows, she will no longer strive to stand on top of a podium with a medal around her neck.

"That part of my life is definitely complete," she says.