The two French skaters won the Olympic title that had eluded them four years ago. With 226.98 points, they also set a new world record.
This is the only distinction that was still lacking in their huge track record. Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron were crowned Olympic champions in ice dancing this Monday morning at the Beijing Games, after flying over the competition. With a total of 226.98 points, a new world record, they are ahead of the Russians Victoria Sinitsina and Nikita Katsalapov (220.51) and the Americans Madison Hubbell and Zachary Donohue (218.02).
The French duo, golden sequined dress for Papadakis, red top and black pants for Cizeron, already four-time world champion (2015, 2016, 2018 and 2019) and five-time European champion (2015-2019), delivered a performance of ‘exception. In four minutes and thirty seconds, under the eyes of Guy Drut and Martin Fourcade, present in the ice rink to watch their skated free program to the sound of “Elégie” by Gabriel Fauré, played on cello and piano, they managed to convince the judges that they deserved the Olympic title in ice dancing that they had sorely let slip in 2018.
This Olympic coronation places Papadakis and Cizeron, at 26 and 27, at the very top of the pantheon of French skating. Only Andrée and Pierre Brunet, double Olympic champions in 1928 and 1932 in pairs, and quadruple world champions between 1926 and 1932, nearly a century ago, can still compete. French ice had not known Olympic gold for twenty years and the title of Marina Anissina and Gwendal Peizerat in 2002 in Salt Lake City (United States), already in ice dancing.
Unusual Olympiad
Papadakis and Cizeron were in the lead after the skate rhythm dance on Saturday night. They had even improved the world record (90.83 points against 90.03 at the end of 2019). On Monday, with 136.15 points, they approached their best performance ever (136.58 at the NHK Trophy in 2019 in Japan) on a free program.
Four years ago on the Olympic ice in Pyeongchang (South Korea), Papadakis and Cizeron had experienced a clothing misadventure, when the top of the skater’s dress had come off in the first seconds of their short dance. The French dancers had dominated the free dance the next day, but it was around the necks of Canadians Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, their main rivals and training partners in Montreal, that the gold medal had been passed.
The 2022 Games come at the end of an unusual second half of the Olympiad for the Clermont duo. Both went twenty months without skating in competition between their narrow defeat in January 2020 at the European Championships – their only since the 2018 Games – and last October, mainly because of the Covid-19 pandemic and travel difficulties. for them who have lived in Montreal since 2014.
Since their return in the fall, they have won the three international competitions in which they participated before the 2022 Olympics but preferred, as a health precaution, to give up the European Championships a month ago. So much so that in Beijing, they measured themselves for the first time in more than two years against the very best duos in the world.