"Gabriella and Guillaume are icons of the ice. Everyone watches them and learns from them": these congratulations, delivered in 2019, come from the Russian Nikita Katsalapov, Olympic silver medalist associated with Victoria Sinitsina on Monday.

"They took a turn" in ice dancing, "brought a big artistic evolution", explains to AFP Romain Haguenauer, the trainer of the quadruple world champions (2015, 2016, 2018 and 2019) and quintuple champions of Europe (2015-2019) for ten years.

"They are one of the first couples who managed to integrate all the technical elements into an artistic concept, being able to convey an emotion, that people watch a program from A to Z, he continues. who breathes."

"They have an exceptional quality of sliding and a very strong, very contemporary interpretation, which we had never really seen. We have the impression that they are floating on the ice", described another of their coaches, Patrice Lauzon. , at Radio Canada a few years ago.

"We want to innovate, do what no one has ever done and take skating in a new direction", ambitioned Papadakis in 2016, then freshly double world champion.

"Never done"

From the following season, the two dancers opted for contemporary music - silences or almost, a mad piano - which had undone the most conservative.

"It's practically + unstoppable +!", Recalls having said to his daughter Catherine Papadakis, who associated the two skaters when they were ten years old, on the ice of Clermont-Ferrand.

“Gabriella and Guillaume wanted to dust off the world of world skating a little more, recalls Haguenauer. They are very aware of what is happening in the artistic world, they have a very modern sensibility.

This season again, even Olympic, Papadakis and Cizeron have endeavored to clear unexplored territory with their "hyper innovative" rhythmic dance according to Haguenauer.

A creation inspired by waacking, born in the gay clubs of Los Angeles in the 1970s.

Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron were perfect in the ice dance final at the Beijing Olympics, February 14, 2022 SEBASTIEN BOZON AFP

"Our program with the most creative research and which makes sense to us", underlines Cizeron, one of the rare sportsmen in activity to have publicly evoked his homosexuality.

"I find it interesting to use a dance style that is not very well known, and that has never been done on the ice. It's not like doing something that we've seen 300 million times . It brings something," he told AFP.

"We made the choice of ambition", abounds the coach.

Gabriella, who also plays the violin, started skating at the age of four.

"It was not at all a daredevil, remembers her mother. She took a very long time to cross the rink."

liberator gold

Guillaume first tried judo and then trampoline before melting for the ice.

"It was the opposite: he was at the bottom, he fell a lot and took a lot of risks," she continues.

Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron during the gala at the European Figure Skating Championships in Graz, January 26, 2019 Daniel MIHAILESCU AFP / Archives

Between Gabriella, the eldest of her siblings, with an easy and sonorous laugh, and Guillaume, the youngest, more reserved, the current passes.

"They were very complementary: him very flexible, it gives this very ample, very relaxed skating, and + Gaby + rather very toned and very straight", compares Catherine Papadakis.

For Papadakis and Cizeron, who left for Montreal in the summer of 2014 after a stint in Lyon, to follow Haguenauer there and join the school set up by Lauzon and Marie-France Dubreuil, the story is then that of two Mirror Olympics.

The first, with a meteoric rise the following winter, their second only as seniors, but which ended up unraveling at the wrong time, between the delicate cohabitation with the Canadians Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir in training - in gold at the JO-2018 in front of them - and the misadventure of the dress that comes off in Pyeongchang.

The second, delicate from 2020, between overwork for her, first and only defeat since the 2018 Olympics (at the European Championships in January 2020), Covid-19 pandemic and withdrawal from competitions, but finally illuminated by gold Olympic liberator.

Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron impressive in ice dancing at the Beijing Games, February 14, 2022 Anne-Christine POUJOULAT AFP

Will there be a third?

"I'm ready for this to be my last season," unlike four years ago, Papadakis told AFP at the start of the season.

"If it makes sense for us to continue, we will continue, continued Cizeron. If it doesn't ..."

© 2022 AFP