Virtue and Moir ready for big Olympic finish
Legendary pair has one dance remaining with sights set on a goodbye gold medal
In a rather lopsided and racy affair, it was samba, rumba, samba 8, bossa nova, mambo 1 in the short dance competition at the Olympics on Monday.
Canadians Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir also finished first, with a world-record score of 83.67 on the Olympic stage, as if to stamp an exclamation point on their final Games appearance.
Their closest rivals, training partners and good friends Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron of France, were handcuffed by her unravelling costume and suffered a slip to second at 81.93. Though the dress was both buttoned and sewn shut at the back of her neck, Cizeron ripped it apart in the first few seconds of the program. They couldn’t stop, lest they incur a fivepoint penalty. So on they went. And off it came.
“It was kind of, you know, my worst nightmare happening at the Olympics,” said the French skater, who added that she felt it right away and prayed for help. She certainly needed some from Cizeron through all the gyrating and twizzling of an almost threeminute program. Thankfully, said her coach Marie-France Dubreuil, she was mostly upright through the whole thing.
Ironically, all around her it appeared other dancers were clawing at one another to achieve the wardrobe malfunction that did indeed occur in her final pose, arched backward as she was. Ooh la la.
Yes, kids, ice dance is back in the spotlight at the five-ring circus and the Canadians in particular are lapping it up with just one dance remaining in their impressive, groundbreaking, 20-year competitive careers.
To ensure themselves the greatest chance at a goodbye gold on Tuesday, they turned up the sensuality through a samba, rumba, cha cha short dance set to music by the Rolling Stones, Eagles and Santana. They kept all their clothes on, but this rendition was as steamy as a hot August night in your favourite Latin American bar. Or dance studio, apparently.
“It’s as if you’re watching a ballroom team compete and the rumba is a very sensual, sexual dance,” said Virtue, asked to explain the theme of the program. “Samba, cha cha rhythms are very fun. It’s kind of an easy program to engage the audience, especially one as electric as this.”
There is a spiritual or emotional closeness, as well as the physical, necessary to pull off that act and it comes naturally to them after sharing two decades on ice.
“I think we love to skate together and we love to play the characters that we’re playing,” said Moir. “After 20 years, if you don’t have love for each other — do you know what we’ve been through together? There is a certain amount of that that’s real, but what we’re really proud of is our business relationship.
“It’s been a fun ride to be together.
“We don’t have to fake that feeling of looking into each other’s eyes and feeling something. That’s a joy, it’s been a joy our whole career.
“Today and hopefully in the performance tomorrow, what you’re seeing probably is, we’re really here. I mean, we’ve spent hours in dark, crappy hockey rinks doing programs like this to be in this limelight and to enjoy this moment together and that’s what we skate for.”
Ice dance has always explored the sexier side of skating in pairs. There has always been plenty of loving, touching and squeezing each other. But they are envelopepushers and there is a technical excellence to this program that few can match.
“As well as that sensual, sexual feeling in the short dance, what you do have is a ton of athleticism,” said Moir. “Once you start, you’ve got to keep going. We were really trying to drive the power and speed more today. We knew we’d need that against the French and we’ll be looking to do that again tomorrow. We’re in great shape. We feel good. … We feel like we have more power in our blade, we have more power in our knee than we’ve ever had and we want to showcase that.”
Ice dance is a feast for most of the senses. Because teams were required to dance to Latin American beats, or a close approximation, you had rumba mambos; cha cha, samba, cha chas; salsa, rumba, sambas and a lone, brave bolero, mambo from Toronto’s Kaitlyn Weaver and Andrew Poje of Waterloo, Ont., who were apparently thinking outside the boom box.
Alas, their program was not a perfect 10, marred by a twizzling mishap. They wound up in eighth place, but we’re quite happy to hand them first overall for costumes. Weaver slipped into a glittering new red number bedazzled with genuine Swarovski crystals. It was barely there, but apparently did not commit a skin sin, as determined by the International Skating Union.
“You’re supposed to cover 40 per cent of your upper body,” Weaver said.
Weaver said nobody has approached her with a tape measure.
“Then they’d have to get the surface area. They’d have to do a lot of math. So, no. So far, the feedback has been good.”
It’s easy to predict that either Virtue and Moir or Papadakis and Cizeron will win the gold medal Tuesday. The only major event since Sochi in which at least one of those teams appeared that was one by somebody else was the 2014 Grand Prix Final. That went to Weaver and Poje.