Ice Dancing Photos and Highlights: French Team Glides to Gold

During the 2018 Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, where the French couple finished second, by less than a point, to the Canadian champions Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, Gia Kourlas, the dance critic for The New York Times, wrote that Papadakis and Cizeron made ice dancing as ethereal as ballet. “Suddenly, a competition is a conduit for more than skating,” she wrote. “It’s a window into another space and time: eerie, quiet, floating.”

Monday’s victory redeemed their stirring but ultimately disappointing performance in 2018. In that event, Papadakis experienced a wardrobe malfunction in the short dance, leaving her left breast briefly exposed, which seemed to unnerve the couple during the routine. She called it her “worst nightmare.”

The French won the free dance, aspiring to perfection, but could not overcome Virtue and Moir. Afterward, Papadakis was left so full of contradictory emotions that she told reporters, “I think I’d start to cry if you tell me now that the dog of your grandmother died.”

Since then, Papadakis and Cizeron have lost only one competition, the 2020 European championships, where they were edged out by their Russian rivals Sinitsina and Katsalapov.

The French couple won the rhythm dance in Beijing with 90.83 points, a world record. The short program from 2018 dissolved into memory. Cizeron said the moment felt like “an out of body experience.”

Papadakis and Cizeron arrived in Beijing after having taken long competitive absences to protect themselves from the coronavirus. Last October, in their first competition in 20 months, in Finland, Papadakis and Cizeron took first place but faced what appeared to be a cynical attempt by a Russian skating judge to promote the Olympic prospects of Sinitsina and Katsalapov.

The judge, Aleksandr Vedenin, a coach and former Russian national champion in the Soviet era, made homophobic remarks to a Russian television network that were later reported by the French sports publication L’Equipe. Vedenin said that the French couple had skated “beautifully” and would “be hard to beat.” But, in reference to Cizeron, who is gay, Vedenin said the French “skate with class but are cold,” adding, “The partner doesn’t have a traditional orientation and he can’t hide it.”

By contrast, Vedenin said, Sinitsina and Katsalapov “can express true love.”

The French Figure Skating Federation filed a complaint with the sport’s international governing body, the International Skating Union, which condemned the remarks. Vedenin said his words had been taken out of context or translated imprecisely. Cizeron told L’Equipe that the Russians “are afraid of us because they saw our programs are good.”

Four months later, the quality of the French performances was unsurpassed in Beijing.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/02/13/sports/ice-dancing-olympics