The Olympic ice dancing free dance was held on Wednesday, and as always under the new rules (they will always be the “new” rules to me), if you win the long program in skating, you win the medal. I have run hot and cold on ice dancing. When it began it was meant to be essentially ballroom dancing on ice. And then the British team of Torville and Dean revolutionized the sport with their long program to Ravel’s Bolero:

It’s still so beautiful and perfect, and they were working under very strict rules about lifts.

One of my favorite teams that came out of that ice dance era was the French sibling team of Isabelle and Paul Duchesnay. They were absolutely fantastic but their innovation and their choreography which pushed against the format of ballroom dancing in favor of modern dance didn’t help them with the judges:

I’ve always felt they were short-changed, and so I’ve always rooted for the French dance teams who tried to keep their influence alive.

Which brings us to Wednesday.

It was already difficult to root for the top French team Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron. Fournier Beaudry’s former partner Nikolaj Sorenson—she only teamed up with Cizeron last March—has been credibly accused of rape and was in fact suspended from skating for 6 years. But his suspension was overturned on a technicality—he has not been cleared—and he was in the arena yesterday cheering his girlfriend Fournier Beaudry on. The 3 of them had a warm and fuzzy moment during the pair’s post performance bows.

And the ick doesn’t end there. Cizeron’s own former partner Gabriella Papadakis, with whom he had set a world record in ice dance scoring, wrote about the experiences of women in elite figure skating where she described her partnership with him:

In her book, Papadakis described suffering in a deeply unbalanced relationship with longtime ice dance partner Cizeron, with whom she broke the world record when claiming gold at the 2022 Beijing Games.

Papadakis wrote that, at a certain point, the idea of finding herself alone with him terrified her. She wrote about him being a “controlling” and “demanding” partner and expressed a feeling of “being under his grip” at times.

In Friday’s interview, she expanded further on their relationship.

“As long as I took a backseat role while Guillaume was the leader, everything went well,” she said. “It’s when I wanted to be an equal in this relationship that things started to become more and more difficult.”

And:

Papadakis’s memoir came out last month. The title, Pour ne pas disparaître, means “So as Not to Disappear.” An excerpt came out in the French publication L’Équipe last month, and that’s what Gannon referred to in the live broadcast on Monday. In the excerpt, Papadakis said her former partner Cizeron was “often controlling, demanding, and critical,” and at one point she would not skate with him unless a coach was present. They tried to reunite for another run after their gold medal in Beijing, but even therapy didn’t help, she wrote. By the end, Papadakis told Cizeron that she feared him.

Papadakis’s book, as described in reports and in interviews she gives, is about more than just her career. She uses it to critique the entire figure skating system, and specifically the way it prioritizes men while pushing women to align as best they can with the male gaze. Men lead, women follow, and Papadakis talks about feeling as if her body was not her own. She writes that she was raped twice a teenager, once by a choreographer-coach when she was 18, but she never reported the attacks because that would have made her look weak. To be a champion, she had to keep going.

NBC had hired Papadakis as a skating commentator—if you watched the US championships last month you would have seen her coverage. Once the book was published Cizeron complained to NBC that it was unfair to him for her to be a commentator, and NBC fired her.

The last time I checked NBC didn’t have a judge on the skating panel.

Hmmm.

And in case you might think this is just gossip and emotion, the most authoritative skating sports journalist weighed in too:

And all of this awful and disgusting backstory aside, there is still the issue of the actual scores:

When the scores came out yesterday it was clear something was way off for the French team to have been so much further ahead of Chock and Bates. And as it turns out, there was.

Nothing can be done about any of it. Such is the way of any sport that relies on the subjective judging of human beings. But we were robbed, both of a gold medal and of the chance to not have creeps taking the glory.

I’ll leave you with this: