Paris (AFP)

Focus on Beijing and the 2022 Olympics for Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron: the 2018 Olympic ice dance vice-champions prefer to give up the 2021 Worlds in the face of persistent health difficulties and will therefore not skate for the season.

"Absence of competition for nearly a year, protocols surrounding the Covid-19 which require periods of quarantine, early 2021 which still raises a lot of concerns and uncertainties, psychological wear and tear (...) are as many elements and constraints that do not allow preparation in optimal conditions, "said the French Federation of Ice Sports (FFSG) in a press release Tuesday.

"Even if the competition were to take place in a sanitary bubble", the quadruple world champion duo (2015, 2016, 2018 and 2019) "prefer to put aside this 2020/2021 season to focus on the preparation for the Olympic Games 2022 ", she adds.

The 2021 Worlds are scheduled from March 22 to 28 in Stockholm.

They represent, except for subsequent regulatory adaptation in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, the main gateway to the Olympics-2022.

However, it is national quotas, and not nominative sesames, which must be allocated to it: it is thus possible that French skating obtains one through its other tandems.

A final selection test is also scheduled for fall 2021 to distribute the last Olympic tickets.

- "Need a more solid objective" -

For Papadakis (25) and Cizeron (26), the Swedish competition was to be the only one of their winter.

Last fall, when world skating resumed chugging along with the prestigious Grand Prix circuit, which traditionally sets the pace for the first half of the figure skating season, but has been largely revised downwards under the effect of related health constraints. virus, they did not participate.

"We will not prepare for the European Championships" - initially scheduled for this month of January but since canceled - and "we will directly target the World Championships", they predicted in early November.

Mars then seemed to them a "reasonable horizon to avoid training and taking walls" and "to give themselves some certainty over the longer term".

But "the cascading cancellations create a climate of uncertainty and doubt that is difficult to manage for all top athletes. The holding of the World Championships is still hypothetical, we needed a more solid, more concrete objective", justifies Guillaume Cizeron, according to comments reported in the press release of the federation.

"The Olympics-2022 are our priority and we will do everything with our team to prepare them in the best possible conditions", he continues, stressing that he "never had such a long period without competition".

- "Russian mountains" -

The last international outing of Papadakis and Cizeron dates back precisely one year, to the European Championships in Graz (Austria), in January 2020. The five-time European champions (2015-2019) had experienced their first defeat in nearly two years and the Olympics-2018, for only fourteen hundredths, for the benefit of Russians Victoria Sinitsina and Nikita Katsalapov.

The 2020 Worlds scheduled for March in Montreal, where they have been installed since 2014, were then canceled, and Quebec confined.

Faced with health restrictions and the lingering uncertainty of the months that followed, "it was a bit of a roller coaster, we went through moments of complete despair, Cizeron said in November. It is difficult to renew hope. ".

"We went through different emotional phases during this period and needed to review our goals to create a new dynamic," confirms Gabriella Papadakis.

"We want to put the odds on our side for next season, hoping that the conditions will be met in September for a normal resumption of sporting events," she projects.

In the meantime, one year before the Beijing Games, the two skaters intend to start preparing for their future Olympic programs.

With for objective, the most coveted gold, the only one which eludes them still.

© 2021 AFP