Of Razors and Ricky Martin

I took the liberty of spending the first two flights of the rhythm dance baking a stockpile of cookies, reasoning that I would desperately need some emotional support snacks to get through the opening days of individual figure skating competition. Readers, that pile is already crumbling away.

Full RD results are available here, but what you really need to know is that a scant 0.46 points separates Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron from Madison Chock and Evan Bates. That is a single grain of sand on the scoring scale. Even by the razor-thin score margins expected in ice dance, this is a vanishingly small gap between the top two teams.

I would have laughed if you told me six months ago this would be the situation in ice dance at the Olympics. No one—and I mean absolutely no one—has ever won an Olympic gold medal in ice dance during their first year of partnership. It doesn’t happen, for structural, technical, and political reasons. The understanding in figure skating is that skaters need time to develop their partnership. Skating in close hold, or balancing upside down on your partner’s back, or staying synchronized in your twizzles at 60 RPM, is very difficult. Fournier Beaudry and Cizeron have dramatically compressed that development curve. They are demonstrating technique that other teams would struggle to develop in a decade. Ice dance judges are also notorious for throttling the placement of new teams, often sentencing new partnerships to spend years demonstrating their skills before rewarding them with high marks. The omertá against new ice dance teams rising too quickly makes Fournier Beaudry and Cizeron’s success even more spectacular, and for some people, suspect.

Fournier Beaudry and Cizeron could become Olympic champions in the next 48 hours. If that happens, there will be a lot of discussion about how this team reached the apex of the sport so quickly and under the pall of problematic past partnerships. Fournier Beaudry’s former partner, Nikolaj Sorensen, was suspended from competition for sexual maltreatment. Fournier Beaudry has wholeheartedly supported Sorensen and remains in a domestic partnership with him. Cizeron’s former partner, Gabriella Papadakis, has publicly spoken about the hostile and controlling atmosphere in their partnership, a candor that cost her a commentary position with NBC at these Olympics. To quote Adam Rippon from Glitter and Gold about this team: “There is some sinister energy around the partnership…I don’t know if it’s necessarily a story a lot of people are gonna root for at first.”

I’m sure the team would very much prefer if everyone shut up about their past partners and focused on the moment, but it would be irresponsible to ignore the context around this team. This Olympic ice dance competition has become a painful exercise in watching the sport attempt to separate art from artist. I don’t have an answer to whether or not that separation is possible. What I do know is that if the result of all this discussion is that Fournier Beaudry and Cizeron are Olympic champions, I will be watching very closely to see if the same generosity is extended to new teams in the future who demonstrate impeccable talent but lack the same competitive mileage.

Now, where does this leave everyone else? If you’re Chock and Bates, you have to lace up and hope that you have a few points better than your best to try and win. If you’re Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier, currently four points off the lead, the order is the same. A year ago the conversation about Olympic gold was about the difference between Chock and Bates and Gilles and Poirier; the return of Fournier Beaudry and Cizeron has complicated that conversation, to say the least. Four points is the equivalent in ice dance to four one hundredths of a second in downhill skiing: you can win or lose this in a blink.

Further down the standings, things are even more interesting, particularly with the group of teams clustered around the bronze medal position. Sub-1 point margins separate the teams now ranked between 3rd and 8th place, which means that if anyone has a sloppy day during the free dance, it’s the difference between a medal or the abyss. Lilah Fear and Lewis Gibson and Charlene Guignard and Marco Fabbri, currently sitting fourth and fifth, respectively, will be the teams to watch beyond the top three. They could push up to the bronze or find themselves sinking down the standings if they don’t skate clean. Clean, in the context of ice dance, means maximizing element levels and squeezing the highest possible GOE scores on each of those elements. You will rarely see outright falls or obvious mishaps in ice dance, so the difference in placements really can come down to who sold a Ricky Martin program better three hours into a competition.

And speaking of our friend Ricky: the number of teams who chose Ricky Martin tracks for their 90s-themed rhythm dances might be singlehandedly responsible for his Spotify revenue right now. The ISU mandated high energy for the rhythm dance, and that order coupled with byzantine music rights clearing meant an awful lot of teams hit up Mr. Martin for their backing tracks. I’m going to have “Maria” stuck in my head for the next two weeks, but maybe it will drown out the rising pitch of anxiety for the men’s event starting tomorrow.

See you back here tomorrow, readers.