VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Even after nearly 20 years of skating and traveling the world with his ice dance partner Isabelle Delobel, Olivier Schoenfelder was never expecting the phone call he received from her last winter.
The good news: Delobel was pregnant. The bad news: Delobel was pregnant and the Winter Olympics were in little more than a year.
"A huge surprise," said Schoenfelder, who is Delobel's partner only on the ice. "At first I didn't quite grasp the amplitude of what it all meant.
"I congratulated her, of course, but it's true that afterward, it was a shock and quite difficult for me for a while."
Motherhood and elite sport are an increasingly common juggling act, with dozens of prominent athletes, including the Belgian tennis star Kim Clijsters and the British marathoner Paula Radcliffe, resuming their successful careers after giving birth.
There are working mothers at these Olympics, too, including the American Alpine skier Sarah Schleper and the ice hockey player Jenny Potter.
But Delobel's maternity tale is more complex because she is part of a pair, which is not, in this case, a reference to her husband, Ludovic Roux.
The petite, dark-haired Delobel and the tall, blond Schoenfelder, both from France, were world champions in 2008 and were looking like favorites for the gold medal in Vancouver after climbing the ranks for many years, an ice dance prerequisite, and finishing fourth in the 2006 Olympics in Turin, Italy.
But a shoulder injury that Delobel sustained in December 2008 during an exhibition interrupted their season, and it was during her injury layoff that she became pregnant.
"I was still convinced we'd make it to the Olympics," said Delobel, 31, in an interview after the compulsory dance Friday night in Vancouver.
The reaction from their rivals is a blend of admiration for Delobel's ability to return so quickly and of sympathy for Schoenfelder.
"I think if that had been me, Fabian would have reacted very badly," said the French ice dancer Nathalie Pechalat, standing next to her partner Fabian Bourzat on Friday. "When you skate 20 years with someone with the dream of an Olympic medal, it's a big thing. I think you really have to maximize your chances, and obviously, the preparation year before the Games is very important."
Bourzat nodded his head. "We've now done a partnership contract between us to make sure that everything's clear between us," he joked.
But Schoenfelder, 32, has been — according to his peers — quite supportive, even if Delobel was concerned enough that she initially tried to reduce the impact by telling Schoenfelder and their coach, Muriel Boucher-Zazoui, that she was due in early September instead of several weeks later.
"She was afraid of our reaction," Boucher-Zazoui told the French newspaper L'Equipe.
During Delobel's maternity leave, Schoenfelder continued to train and skate on his own, which is of limited value in ice dancing, in which world-class routines are learned and honed together.
"When we learned the news about Isabelle's pregnancy, I definitely had my doubts about the Olympics," he said. "We asked ourselves and the doctors if it was really possible. It took some time to think, but after we made the decision to go for it, we didn't let ourselves doubt. We worked and always tried to make it happen. I think that's how we succeeded."
Though Delobel continued to train and skate deep into her pregnancy, even suffering the occasional fall in practice, she left the ice in late July, giving birth on Oct. 1 to a son, Loïs, and then returning to practice in late October at their longtime training base in Lyon, France. She began three-a-day sessions and intense physical training in November.
"You better believe it was tough," said Delobel, who had gained close to 20 pounds during pregnancy. "It was really a physical challenge, but I'm proud to have managed it."
A four-month timetable for returning to elite competition after childbirth is far more compressed than usual but not without precedent. Laura Flessel, a French fencing star, won a silver at the world championship four months after giving birth. The tennis player Lindsay Davenport returned to the tour just under three months after giving birth to her first child. But there has been no one quite like Delobel in figure skating, the closest perhaps being the Canadian pairs skater Kristy Sargeant, who returned to competition within a year.
"In the Canadian military, there have been some studies done, and it is three to four months to reach prepregnancy physical levels with an uncomplicated pregnancy in a fit person," said Julia Alleyne, the chief medical adviser for Skate Canada, who has written extensively on exercise and pregnancy. "Certainly anything under 12 weeks just doesn't work."
It helps that ice dancers, unlike singles and pairs skaters, do not perform jumps. But it is certainly an athletic endeavor. Alleyne said joint stability was affected by hormones that increased with pregnancy and breast-feeding. Delobel maintained fitness throughout her pregnancy and had a complication-free delivery, but she continued to breast-feed until December, longer than some of her sports advisers recommended.
But after skipping the European championships last month to continue practicing in Lyon, Delobel and Schoenfelder are back on the ice in Vancouver for their first competition in 14 months.
"We are putting everything into the Olympics; we didn't want to reveal our programs beforehand," Delobel said.
Loïs is home in France with Delobel's husband, a former Olympic bronze medalist for France in Nordic combined who is in the midst of a six-month paternity leave to allow his wife to focus on skating.
Delobel and Schoenfelder hope to benefit from the novelty factor with the judges, who have not spent a season analyzing their programs. They were sixth in the compulsories, but early reviews of their two main programs have been positive. They will perform a risqué version of the French can-can in the original dance and have based their evocative free program on the song "La Quete" interpreted by the classic Belgian singer Jacques Brel.
The title means "Quest" in English, and it is an appropriate term considering what Delobel and her partner have been through before and after that unexpected telephone call.
"We realize there's a symbolic aspect to this, but we didn't do it for girl power or to be some sort of model for people," Schoenfelder said. "We did it because we want a medal at the Olympics."
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