MILAN (AP) — The new French ice dance team of Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron upset the dominant team of the past four years, American stars Madison Chock and Evan Bates, and claimed Olympic gold at the Milan Cortina Games on Wednesday night.
Beaudry and Cizeron had to follow a season-best performance by the three-time reigning world champions, and they did it with near perfection. The duo was rewarded with a season-best 225.82 points
of their own while Chock and Bates finished with 224.39, making Cizeron the first skater to win back-to-back ice dance gold with different partners.
The Canadian team of Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier earned the bronze medal with 217.74 points, pulling away from the Italian team of Charlene Guignard and Marco Fabbri and the British duo of Lilah Fear and Lewis Gibson with a deeply emotional free skate.
As for Beaudry and Cizeron, they arrived in Milan with controversy stemming from their ex-partners swirling around them.
This time last year, Beaudry was wondering whether she would even compete this season after Skate Canada banned her partner and longtime boyfriend, Nikolaj Sorensen, amid allegations of “sexual maltreatment.” Beaudry has steadfastly maintained his innocence and the suspension was overturned in June on jurisdictional grounds, but the case is still pending.
Cizeron stepped away from competition after the 2022 season, when he won Olympic gold with Gabriella Papadakis. But the chance to make a comeback with Beaudry, who was ninth with Sorensen at the Beijing Games, was too good to pass up.
Beaudry and Cizeron won every event they entered this season save the Grand Prix Final, when they finished second to Chock and Bates in their only previous head-to-head meeting. But their smooth ride to Milan was shaken up when Papadakis wrote in her new memoir that Cizeron had been demanding, controlling and manipulative toward her — accusations he called a “smear campaign.”
The French team hardly seemed distracted by any of it Monday night, when it edged Chock and Bates in the rhythm dance.
Beaudry and Cizeron most definitely were not distracted by anything Wednesday night.
It would have been easy to be thrown off by the way Chock and Bates performed in the minutes before they stepped on the ice.
The two-time Olympic gold medalists in the team event — performing to an instrumental version of “Paint it Black” from the dystopian sci-fi show “Westworld” — turned in the kind of program they have spent the last 15 years together working toward. Every movement seemed to be in perfect harmony, and the flamenco-styled choreography had the crowd clapping along with them.
The only question left was whether the husband-wife team, who had finished a maddening fourth in the individual ice dance at the Beijing Games, had done enough to earn the one medal that had forever eluded them.
It looked as if Beaudry and Cizeron gave them an opening with a bobble on their twizzles. But they soon settled into their program, set to the soundtrack from “The Whale,” and moved as if they were under water with a marvelous degree of refined elegance.
As their winning score was read, Chock and Bates joined the crowd inside the Milano Ice Skating Arena in applauding them.
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AP Winter Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics
