Canada, France the teams to beat
PYEONGCHANG, SOUTH KOREA— Here’s the God’s honest truth: Nobody knows what the devil ice dance scoring is all about.
Skaters in the other disciplines just shrug their shoulders — haven’t got a clue.
Dancers are often left perplexed as well. Presumably their coaches are hip to the minutiae of arcane rules. What’s legal and not.
The naked eye, among the vast noncognoscenti, can probably only tell when swizzle synchronicity goes awry. And, of course, when dancers get all tangled up or catch an edge and go sprawling — more shocking in dance than the other categories because staying on their fleet feet is the crux of the thing. They don’t lifts over the shoulders, they don’t do throws, they don’t do jumps.
They do drape fetchingly and they’re wickedly agile on their blades and they’re immensely entertaining, although the costumes are often way cuckoo. Indeed, since ice dance was invited into the Winter Olympics as a medal sport — only in 1976 — it has arguably become the most popular of the skating spectacles, and usually the event that sells out first at worlds.
Historically, Canada is very good at it, with three teams qualifying for Pyeongchang, competition launching with Monday’s short dance segment.
This will doubtless be a cut-andthrust parry for gold between Canada’s Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir and Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron of France.
Unlike the Canadians, G & G did not participate in the team event last week, which was mathematically in the championship bag before Virtue and Moir even took to their ice with their Moulin Rouge free skate. Keeping below the radar must have been a strategic decision for the French, who were world champions in the two seasons the Canadians were on competitive furlough. Virtue and Moir, golden in Vancouver, discontented with silver in Sochi — lost to the American tandem of Meryl Davis and Charlie White — returned to the fray with the candid intent of gunning for Gold II in Pyeongchang.
They recaptured their world title in 2017 but were surpassed by the French at the Grand Prix final in December. Which drove them back to tinkering with the Moulin Rouge routine — dialing down the heat on one particularly erotic lift after deciding it was not actually that esthetically pleasing.
Their short dance, a rumba mélange of the Rolling Stones, the Eagles and Santana, has remained basically the same as a slam-bang points magnet. Moulin Rouge is more sensuous and ripe and exceedingly difficult. But the French, gosh they’re good. The two teams train together in Montreal under ice dance savants Marie-France Dubreuil and husband Patrice Lauzon, two-time world silver medallists and possibly the most romantic ice dancers ever. So it’s hardly as if the French were trying to keep anything under wraps. The skaters get an eyeful of each other every day at training.
Each duo has pushed the boundaries, though Virtue and Moir have been reinventing ice dance a lot longer. What characterizes the French is their ravishing artistic style. Barring errors, it might come down to judges’ tastes.
Teammates Kaitlyn Weaver and Andrew Poje, themselves two-time Grand Prix final champions and twice world medallists, are trying to regain their favour with judges, which oddly fell off the past couple of seasons.
Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier have drawn some terrific technical scores as they’ve worked their way up the rankings in a discipline were movement is difficult.
The U.S. has a strong contingent, led by the Shibutani siblings, Maia and Alex. Italian charmers Anna Cappellini and Luca Lanotte, 2014 world champions, are endlessly inventive with their savoury routines.
Really, though, it’s a fight for bronze among the rest of the field, while the Canadians and the French duke it out — cordially — for gold.