All About Olympians Marie-Philip Poulin & Laura Stacey’s Real-Life Hockey Romance
What To Know
- Team Canada hockey stars Marie-Philip Poulin and Laura Stacey are also a married couple.
- They’ve played on the national team together since 2017 and have participated in several Olympic Games.
- They also play together on the Montreal Victoire.
Marie-Philip Poulin and Laura Stacey aren’t just teammates at the Winter Olympics. The hockey players, who stood at the top of the podium together in 2022, are also in a real-life relationship. The couple, who play for Team Canada, will face off against the Czech Republic on February 9.
Poulin and Stacey have been together almost as long as they’ve been playing together. They’re linemates on the Professional Women’s Hockey League’s Montreal Victoire since 2023, but their romance began years earlier, when they both joined the national team.
Shortly after their wedding, Poulin — Canada’s superstar captain and the only person to score in four Olympic finals — reflected on going public with her relationship to CBC. “This is probably the most myself I’ve ever been,” she said. “Being myself, having the community, family, and friends embracing me, embracing us, embracing this new team. And it doesn’t matter who you love, it’s who you are. And I think that’s the best part about it. I’ve always been the hockey player. But I have a wife, and I can be myself.”
In the joint interview, Stacey added, “[Poulin] puts up that front of, ‘I’m the hockey player.’ That’s all people see and have seen of her. The world knows her as the best hockey player in the world, but they don’t know her as the best person in the world as well.”
How long have Marie-Philip Poulin & Laura Stacey been together?
In their CBC interview, the couple said that they felt sparks at a Team Canada event in 2017. From then on, their relationship was on-again-off-again. After losing to the United States in the 2018 Winter Olympics, Poulin said she was at one of the darkest points of her life, feeling like she “let the entire country down.”
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A few months later, Poulin and Stacey faced off against each other in a league game, and Poulin followed Stacey’s team bus back to her hotel afterwards. She asked Stacey to talk in the car, during which Poulin finally convinced her to go out to dinner. They consider that day their anniversary.
How did Marie-Philip Poulin & Laura Stacey meet?
It’s unclear if Poulin and Stacey met before Stacey joined the Canadian national team in 2017. They ran in the same circles, though Poulin was a few years ahead of her future wife.
However, they did recall the moment their relationship began at that Team Canada event. “A few of us decided to go skinny dipping in the pool at 2 a.m,” Stacey said. “The two of us looked up into the sky at the same time, and we saw a shooting star. Our eyes met, and we asked each other if we just saw that. Nobody else in the pool saw it or knew what was going on, but we saw it. For the rest of that nigh,t it was a weird feeling. I had a feeling.”
When did Marie-Philip Poulin & Laura Stacey get married?
After announcing their engagement in May 2023, Poulin and Stacey tied the knot in September 2024.
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They both joined Montreal Victoire about a year earlier. “We did have those hard conversations, the two of us sitting here and seeing what was going to happen,” Poulin said. “There was no package deal. And that was something that we take a lot of pride in. I’m myself, she’s herself.”
They opened up about balancing their work and personal lives after their wedding. “You’re not going to see us fight or argue. We know it’s business, and we know we’re going to get the best out of each other,” Poulin explained to CBC. “When we train, we do our work. It’s not about us being lovey-dovey. It’s us getting better, making people around us better.”
Do Marie-Philip Poulin & Laura Stacey have kids?
The power couple hasn’t expanded their family — yet. In that 2024 interview, Poulin said that having kids was their “next project.”
“And it’s going to be interesting for us — two female athletes navigating how to have kids, when to have kids. It’s definitely going to take some thought, some planning, because it is brand-new to us and it’s brand new to a lot of people too,” Stacey added.
