Why two Canadian ice dancers chose to compete in orange spandex, sequins
BEIJING • Olympic ice dancing is often the most fabulous of events, with blasting music, sassy moves and costumes that are ... well, extravagant.
After three hours of endless interpretations of delinquency displayed in various forms of fake leather, short shorts and seethrough shirts with little to hide, there appeared at the Olympics ice rhythm dance the Canadian team of Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier dressed in something best described as sherbet buried in an avalanche of sprinkles. Orange. Very, very orange.
In dancing to a seventh-place finish in the first day of competition Saturday, Gilles and Poirier wore spandex jumpsuits with coloured feathers on the shoulders, or maybe they were whirligigs. The fronts were ablaze with Vs of rhinestones that dipped to freighting lows; the backs clung tight to every curve. The costumes demanded attention.
Which is why Gilles and Poirier loved them.
Their rhythm dance routine is based around two Elton John songs, I Guess That’s Why They Call it the Blues and I’m Still Standing. And the way they see it, if you’re going to go with Elton John at the Olympics, you’ve got to go all-in.
“He’s such a showman and he’s always about putting on a spectacle and so we wanted this program to be that, putting on a spectacle, putting on a show for people and making a bold statement. And that’s why we wanted costumes that made a bold statement in a bold colour,” Poirier said on Saturday night.
So they called their costume designer, Peter Defreitas and asked for the best Elton John interpretation Defreitas could make. He came back with the ones they are now wearing — in several different colours — to see which one had what Gilles described as “the most impact.”
“And orange just happened to be the one that was
so bright that you’re like ‘that’s it!’” she said.
Not everyone can pull off wearing orange spandex jumpsuits covered in sequins and rhinestones, but Gilles and Poirier are accustomed to turning the skating circuit into their personal Halloween party. They’ve gone roller derby and bullfighter and Sgt. Pepper, along with some more conservative selections.
Two years ago, while dressed in matching black tuxedos with pink piping, Piper caught her hair on Paul’s shirt button. They skated this way for about five seconds, Poirier standing upright with the top of Gillis’s head attached to his chest.
“It was like one of those pure panic moments, like, what do I do? Do we stop? Do we keep going? Paul’s like, just keep moving,” she later told reporters.
They haven’t had similar disasters in the current orange costumes that they’ve been wearing since the fall skating season started — a miracle considering the number of sequins and rhinestones that Poirier estimated to be in the “hundreds upon hundreds if not thousands.”
“Thousands” is also what two spandex, orange sherbet, rhinestone and sequin costumes cost, Gillis said, though the expense is covered by the skaters’ sponsorships. And when they step onto the ice in a traffic cone blaze, the reaction is worth it.
“You walk out and people are like, ‘You guys are like a sunset.’” Gillis said.
And the best thing anyone has said about the costumes?
That “we have great butts,” she said.