Virtue and Moir find their golden program
• Once in a while, the world’s best ice dance team puts its foot down.
Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir wanted to skate this year’s free dance — the program that will determine the colour of medal they collect at the Olympics at PyeongChang, South Korea, in February — to music from the movie Moulin Rouge.
“There was no other option for us,” Virtue, 28, of London, Ont., said Wednesday at Skate Canada’s preseason high- performance training camp at the Hershey Centre. “We just knew we felt this and loved it so much, there was nothing that would compare.”
This is, annually, one of the most delicate decisions in figure skating. You have three or four minutes to tell your story to the world.
And in an Olympic season, those stakes go through the roof. You want to put your stamp on something special. Virtue and Moir did that in 2010 with Mahler’s gold medal- winning Symphony No. 5 in Vancouver.
Now, facing their third Winter Games and likely their final competitive season at the height of their powers, they want memorable. There’s no time left for stale or clunky.
“We always l oved t he movie,” said Moir, 29, of Ilderton, Ont. “We know it’s a (theme) used a lot in figure skating, but as we always do, we try to give our own stamp on it and make it unique. Only a handful of times in our career, we’ve brought music to our coaches and almost insisted we skated to it.
“I don’t know what it’ ll look like. It might be a complete mess, but we’re having a blast when we do it. Hopefully, that shows through.”
Last season, they went undefeated with a recordbreaking campaign — their first after a two-year layoff.
They brought in choreographer David Wilson again and called on Sam Chouinard, who had previously helped them with hip- hop movements. They convinced their husband- and- wife coaching team of Patrice Lauzon and Marie- France Dubreuil the famous old cabaret in Paris was the way to go.
Their table- setting short dance, a Latin theme this season, will be a Dubreuil-produced mix of Rolling Stones, Eagles and a little (Carlos) Santana at the end.
They already own the world record score for the short dance and combined points total from last year’s superb comeback.
“Winning after winning is twice as hard,” Moir said. “I think we like that challenge. We didn’t have the free dance we wanted at worlds (they were topped by French training mates Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron). We were trained and wanted to perform at the level we thought we should have.” They still won, anyway. The Canadians want to depart with two Olympic golds — and all the benchmarks.
“We’re thinking about it every day,” Moir said. “That’s already started. It’s so funny how quick you’re going to bed every night dreaming about the Olympics.
“You can’t get away from it, almost.”