On Wednesday evening glitter, sequins and gold dust will descend on the Milano Ice Hockey Arena. The world’s best ice dancers will perform their hearts out in Milan for a chance at glory.
Team GB’s Lilah Fear and Lewis Gibson are among five teams in contention for a medal, which would make them Britain’s first figure skating medallists since Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean in Lillehammer 1994.
This will be the first competition since 1984 in which no team has a previous Olympic medal, and the battle is tight at the top. The new partnership of France’s Guillaume Cizeron and Laurence Fournier Beaudry won the European Championships in January and sit top of the standings after Monday’s rhythm dance, the first of two programmes.
Americans Madison Chock and Evan Bates are three-time world champions but may be comparatively fatigued after competing twice in the team event last week en route to winning gold; they sit in provisional second. Then there is what is widely expected to be a three-way fight for bronze, between Canada’s Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier, Fear and Gibson, and Italian hopefuls Charlene Guignard and Marco Fabbri.
As it stands, the gold is likely to go to Cizeron and Fournier Beaudry, who scored a season’s best on Monday. They only joined forces last March, but appear to have edged ahead in the race for the Olympic title. It would be a second Olympic gold for Cizeron, who won in 2022 with former partner Gabriella Papadakis.
Theirs is not a straightforward story of a team disrupting the established order. There is a shadow hovering over all the glitz and glamour of ice dance, one of the Winter Olympics’ most magnetic disciplines, which has Cizeron and Fournier Beaudry at its epicentre.
The reason for the pair’s partnership is twofold. Both initially were without partners; Papadakis retired after Beijing, while Fournier Beaudry’s former skating partner and current boyfriend, Nikolaj Sorensen, was accused by a former skater of rape and sexual assault in 2012. He received a six-year suspension for “sexual maltreatment” from Skate Canada in 2024, on the basis of findings from Canada’s Office of the Sport Integrity Commissioner.
The suspension has since been overturned on jurisdictional grounds – Sorensen was neither a Canadian citizen nor a skater for Canada at the time of the alleged assault, instead competing for his birth country Denmark, and did not agree to be retroactively bound by Canada’s sporting code of conduct. That ruling is now under review, while there has been no criminal investigation into the allegations.
Canadian-born Fournier Beaudry received French citizenship in November to clear her to skate in Milan with Cizeron, who, in turn, has been involved in an ugly public row with Papadakis. She has accused him of controlling and bullying behaviour in a new memoir, saying she felt “under his grip” and that at one point the idea of being alone with him terrified her.
He, in turn, denies her allegations and has accused her of running a “smear campaign”, and has had lawyers file letters to cease the “dissemination of defamatory statements“ about him. Papadakis has since been cut from NBC’s analysis team after the network called her memoir a “conflict of interest”.
Fournier Beaudry has publicly defended Sorensen and she and Cizeron have refused to comment on the accusations against her former partner at these Games.
Sorensen’s alleged victim said shortly before the start of the ice dance competition: “The comments of the reigning Olympic champion and a team in contention for the upcoming Olympic title carry weight, and using their voices to publicly undermine a survivor’s truth further enforces the culture of silence in figure skating.”
Therein lies the ugly truth at the heart of one of the most aesthetically beautiful sports. Figure skating as a whole has long been dogged by stories of abuse, exploitation, and ethical grey areas. The last OIympics in 2022 was in many ways the Kamila Valieva Games; it emerged the 15-year-old had failed a doping test shortly before the start of the competition, and her performances suffered after the news was revealed.
That led to scenes which the IOC president Thomas Bach described as “chilling”, as her coach, Eteri Tutberidze, berated her for mistakes on the ice. Valieva, who was only a child at the time, has only just returned from a four-year ban; Tutberidze has been welcomed back to the Games as a coach in the Georgian team, while skirting an IOC red line, as she also coaches Russia’s teenage prodigy for this Games, Adeliia Petrosian.
Tutberidze received no punishment for her bullying behaviour, and the Russian system has become infamous for churning out young super-talents while showing little regard for their emotional or physical health. Cases of abuse and malpractice abound elsewhere: the long-serving head of the French skating federation Didier Gailhaguet resigned in 2020 over accusations he had covered up for a coach accused of rape and sexual abuse by former skaters.
Ice dance, and figure skating as a whole, is due a reckoning with its chequered past and present. If Fournier Beaudry and Cizeron win gold on Wednesday night, it will be another signal that the sport would prefer sweeping such issues under the carpet than finally righting its wrongs.
