Paris (AFP)

"It's exhausting to take walls" between health restrictions and competitions affected by the Covid-19, said Wednesday Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron, quadruple world champions and 2018 Olympic vice-champions in ice dance, to explain their choice to limit their season to the 2021 Worlds.

She, from Montreal, and he, passing through Auvergne until the end of the week, admit having "gone through moments of complete despair" since the outbreak of the pandemic.

Q: You were supposed to make your international comeback this weekend in Grenoble but the competition was canceled ...

GC: "We expected it a bit, with the second wave coming, but it's true that morally, it's a blow. Everything that is sport, culture, everyone has the impression of taking walls, it's exhausting. Precisely, we changed our strategy because we didn't want to go through this for a year, to prepare for things that in the end won't take place. little certainty over the longer term, rather than small short term goals that risk canceling each other out every time. "

Q: How will your season be organized in this context?

GP: "We will directly target the World Championships (end of March 2021 in Stockholm, editor's note), we said to ourselves that it was the most reasonable."

GC: "We will not prepare for the French Championships (in December), nor for the European Championships (in January). We have given ourselves a long straight line up to the World Championships, rather than a season sawtooth. For the near future, we said to ourselves: + We will stop the disillusionment, after the Worlds last season (canceled), the three months of confinement ... + We prefer to be sure that we will stay in Montreal until the World Championships, training, so we can plan. "

Q: Is it difficult to stay motivated in the face of this lingering uncertainty?

GC: "Usually, we have a long-term goal, the Olympics, but also short-term goals. There, not really, so it's very, very complicated. It's already complicated to hurt your body like you do, so when you train for nothing ... it's been a bit of a roller coaster this summer, we went through times of utter desperation. We had this lack of physical exercise - we don't replace not four hours of skating a day by Zoom lessons -, this lack of skating, of being on the ice, of sharing that with our teammates. It's super depressing, and it's not like we are told that on March 1, things will go back to how they were before ... It's difficult to renew hope, but it's like that in all areas. We are trying to appropriate these new conditions. "

Q: You both had Covid-19 in July ...

GP: "I was very ill, I had a lot of fever, cough, some breathing problems. We first quarantined ourselves because we were in contact. We were far from ice cream two and a half weeks. "

GC: "I had a fever for three days, cough, inflammation of the lungs and loss of smell, which I still haven't really recovered. The first two weeks of training he There was a little shortness of breath, fatigue. "

Q: How do you feel about spending fourteen months without competition?

GP: "Since we were seven years old, we've been competing every two months, so it's not easy. We always know what awaits us, this is the first time in our life that we is in this uncertainty. It's hard as an athlete, because we train for that reason. All athletes are confronted with this: it's weird, we don't know how to deal with it, we has learned precisely to adjust to competitions that are always at the same time, it is the unknown for everyone. "

GC: "What is sad is that everything we missed, we won't catch up, it's not as if it was events that will be postponed or projects that we can postpone See you later. It's difficult to absorb. We would have preferred to have a normal season, but we are trying to stay the course in the long term, with the Olympics-2022. Hence this decision to spare, not to exhausting training for nothing. We will adapt as best we can with the conditions that are given to us. The only thing we can do is do our best to prepare for the deadlines that arise. 'we chose. We try to be patient and to project ourselves in the long term with positivity. "

Interview by Elodie SOINARD.

© 2020 AFP