The freestyle and the lap of honor were over when the three couples sat down in a sparse room in the Beijing ice rink in front of the world press, put their heads together and stared at their mobile phones. Wordlessly at first. The message also flashed on the displays of the media representatives: “Despite doping cases: Valiyeva is allowed to start.” So ask the Olympic medalists from France, Russia and the USA: How do you rate the fact that the provisional suspension of the 15-year-old ice talent, who had been exposed with a banned heart drug, was lifted at that very moment?
Silence in the round while the ice dancers apparently ordered their thoughts. Finally, Nikita Kazalapov, 30, bent over the microphone. “Very happy,” said the dancer from Moscow, who had just finished second with partner Wiktoria Sinizina. The Olympic champions Gabriella Papadakis, 26, and Guillaume Cizeron, 27, from France exchanged a look: “No comment,” they said diplomatically. US colleagues Madison Hubbell/Zachary Donohue also agreed not to contribute. Returning to the sport, the next question from the audience concerned the costumes. “You can also say ‘no comment’ there,” suggested the moderator. A relieved laugh from the dancers on the podium.
In 2018 in Pyeongchang they were already considered favorites – and were then overtaken by Tessa Virtue/Scott Moir from Canada
Not wanting to waste time thinking about other people’s problems in the moment of triumph is the right of athletes who want to focus their strengths and impressions at the most important moment of their career. US dancers Hubbel and Donohue, both in their 30s, bid farewell to the Olympics on Monday with a long-awaited bronze medal, with their final performance scheduled at the World Championships in Montpellier in March. The Russian duo is also one of the mature ice actors.
And Papadakis/Cizeron, who with their precision and imagination have set the style for this artistic ice skating discipline for a decade, this intermediate form of sport and art, crowned their joint work with gold on Monday. It was time to take stock, and if a skating scandal from another industry happened to cast a shadow over the class, it wasn’t her fault.
For almost 18 years, Guillaume Cizeron recalled, they have been twirling in step over ice since they met each other at the age of nine at children’s training in Clermont-Ferrand. They’ve reached a level of sophistication as a duo that no one can even come close to dancing to, not in tango or waltz, not in lyrical hip hop or waacking, a style from the queer scene that they rediscovered for this year’s short program. They ran their gold freestyle to Gabriel Faure’s elegy like a pas de deux on runners.
Such a long partnership, says Cizeron, can also be a weakness – if something special becomes a matter of course
The creative French were world champions four times, and they broke the world record for points almost 30 times, which in turn can be seen as a record in their own right. Only Olympic gold was missing from her collection; In 2018 in Pyeongchang they were already considered favorites and were then overtaken by the ice returnees Tessa Virtue/Scott Moir from Canada. They also drew motivation from this.
However, as Cizeron recently explained, such a long partnership can also be a weakness when you start to take something special for granted, when you think you know what the other is thinking without asking. And so, amazing as it may sound, they not only constantly worked on the parallelism of the movements, on lifts, step sequences and twizzles, but also on their communication.
Most recently, their art has been missed because they made themselves scarce during the pandemic. They didn’t compete for 20 months, and they also skipped last year’s World Championships in Sweden, where the Russians Wiktoria Sinizina and Nikita Kazalapow took over the throne ahead of Hubbel/Donohue. On Monday evening they all went together to the award ceremony for the ice dancers at the Medal Plaza. And there it was again, the subject they are reluctant to comment on. The medals for the team competition, in which the Russians were ahead, have not yet been awarded for legal reasons.
