Paris (AFP)

Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron, quadruple world champions and 2018 Olympic vice-champions in ice dance, have decided to skate this winter only at the 2021 Worlds, scheduled for March in Stockholm, and will therefore be absent from the European Championships in January, they announced Wednesday.

Papadakis and Cizeron are not currently participating in the Grand Prix of figure skating circuit, which traditionally punctuates the first half of the season but has been affected by health restrictions linked to the Covid-19 pandemic and reshaped.

"We will directly target the World Championships," said Gabriella Papadakis during a videoconference with AFP, the Team and France Televisions.

"We said to ourselves that this is the most reasonable to avoid training and taking walls."

"We will not prepare for the French Championships, nor for the European Championships," adds Guillaume Cizeron.

We gave ourselves a long straight line up to the World Championships, rather than a sawtooth season with travel uncertainties, without knowing whether + Gaby + could or not return to Montreal to train (she did not know). has no resident visa, editor's note) ... We don't want to find ourselves stranded in Europe without being able to train, far from home, or separated in two different countries ".

The last competition of the two French dancers dates back to January 2020, at the European Championships in Graz (Austria).

The five-time European champions had experienced their first defeat in nearly two years.

The 2020 Worlds scheduled for March in Montreal were then canceled due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Then the health restrictions still in force, even reinforced, across the planet, led the International Skating Federation (ISU) to adapt the usual organization of the Grand Prix this fall: at best, the best skaters in the world participate only one stage instead of two this year, and only in their country or the geographical area where they train.

The French Grand Prix, initially scheduled for Grenoble in mid-November, where Papadakis and Cizeron were to skate, was canceled in mid-October.

Fourteen months will thus separate their two most recent international competitions.

The 2021 Worlds, scheduled from March 24 to 27, 2021, are a mandatory step in the race for qualification for the 2022 Olympics.

© 2020 AFP