MIce dancers Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron won gold in Beijing with a record rating. The French, the outstanding couple of recent years, four-time world champion and five-time European champion, scored 226.98 points in the addition of rhythm dance and freestyle. Silver went to Victoria Sinitsina and Nikita Katsalapov from the Russian Olympic Committee team, who ran to Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2. The Americans Madison Hubbell and Zachary Donohue won bronze with their program on “Drowning” by Anne Sila.
The gold medal for Papadakis and Cizeron was set before the Winter Games – provided they had brought their class through the pandemic. Last season, the French didn’t compete at all, this season before the Olympics they only featured at the French Championships and the Finlandia Trophy. But already in the rhythm dance last Saturday they had shown their old, great class.
Their performance on the ice surface of the capital’s indoor stadium on Monday afternoon left no doubt as to who the best dancers on the ice are. Their duet to the elegy by Gabriel Fauré lent a touch of magic for a few minutes to the once again dreary atmosphere of the Olympic skating competitions in front of a small and largely disinterested invited Chinese audience.
“We have shared so many experiences together,” said 27-year-old Guillaume Cizeron afterwards about the Olympic appearance with his one-year younger partner. “A day like today would have been so much harder if we hadn’t had these 18 years together to get by.” On Monday, the two left open whether Papadakis/Cizeron would continue to share experiences on the ice in the future. You would have thought of this day so far, but not of the future, said Guillaume Cizeron.
