Can it get any hotter or better?
Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir say Hamilton fans will see a liberated version of their now-famous Moulin Rouge
AS
BREATHTAKING AS IT WAS in South Korea, next weekend Hamilton will get to see an even better version of Moulin Rouge.
Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, the most decorated Olympic figure skaters of all time, are performing their magnificent Free Dance — “almost in its entirety,”
Virtue says — during the Stars on Ice tour, which plays to a packed FirstOntario Centre May 3.
Liberated from the restrictions of competitive skating rules, Virtue and Moir can really let loose with Moulin Rouge, which, over time, will be regarded as one of the most significant programs in Olympic skating history.
The Canadians finished a narrow second with it in the Free Dance segment to training partners Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron of France — you could debate judging protocol until you run out of air — but had enough total points to claim their second Olympic ice dancing championship.
Elite skaters often don’t perform their competitive programs in show skating,
“It allows us to just go out there and have a blast. We’re hoping the crowds feel that.” SCOTT MOIR
and in many ways this represents the closing of an evolutionary circle for Virtue and Moir who, by the way, are not and never have been “an item.” Thanks for asking, though.
After finishing second at Sochi four years ago, they spent two seasons away from competitive skating, headlining a plethora of professional shows. That perform-on-demand experience sharpened their alreadyadvanced artistic instincts and innate understanding of what appeals to audiences on a gut level. They carried that knowledge back to competitive skating and to Moulin Rouge and now bring competitive skating’s technical dexterities back to show skating.
“We can drop all that stuff with the judges,” Moir says. “It allows us to just go out there and have a blast. We’re hoping the crowds feel that. We enjoy skating for people and can’t imagine what it’ll be like performing for 12 jammed arenas across Canada. How lucky are we?”
Next weekend’s crowd will be the biggest in the 30 years Stars, and its predecessors, have been coming to Hamilton. Jill Kurtz, assistant director of marketing for Core Entertainment, says there are just a few hundred upper-bowl tickets left and more than 16,000 fans will be in attendance.
Virtue and Moir emphasize that they’re not the only skaters driving unprecedented sales across the country, and they’re right.
This has been the greatest six-year stretch in Canadian skating history, with at least one world championship in all four disciplines: dance (Virtue and Moir); men’s (Patrick Chan); pairs (Meagan Duhamel and Eric Radford, twice); and, for the first time in nearly a half-century, women (Kaetlyn Osmond). All are on this tour and 10 weeks ago, all won Olympic gold medals in the team event.
Gabrielle Daleman, a member of the goldmedal team, is also with this Stars tour and so are three-time world champion Elvis Stojko, threetime world ice dance medallists Kaitlyn Weaver and Andrew Poje and former world champions and Olympic medallists Jeffrey Buttle and Javier Fernandez.
While there were other very significant contributors, Virtue and Moir spearheaded the migration of ice dancing’s power from Europe to North America. Although they personify what Virtue calls ice dancing’s “current place where the balance between art and athleticism is really being married well,” she and her partner refuse to take credit for the positive changes in the sport’s landscape. They’ll reluctantly allow only that “we get the conversation going in a different direction.”
They have shown incredible, adaptable, longevity in an increasingly changing sport. Only three others in skating history — legends Gillis Grafstrom (1928), Sonja Henie (1936) and Irina Rodnina (1980) — have won an Olympic gold medal eight years after their first one.
Virtue and Moir — labelled Canada’s Sweethearts when they won gold in Vancouver, and North America’s, if not the World’s, Sweethearts when they won gold in Pyeongchang — haven’t formally announced that they’re done with competitive skating, but you can probably bet on it.
“We’re leaning toward the fact that we’re finished amateur skating,” Moir concedes. “So this is a celebration. We’re so thankful for the support Canadians have given us all these years.
“We just want to skate for them.”