Bronze is the New Gold

While Piper Gilles mouthed “Oh my god!” and looked up in shock, her ice dance partner of 15 years, Paul Poirier, burst into tears. On CBC, commentators Kurt Browning and Carol Lane were audibly emotional and cheerfully failing to hide their pride. Gilles and Poirier were four minutes away from becoming the first Canadian medalists in figure skating since 2018 and they knew it. I reached for the tissue box as the scores came up. The crowd, as the hoary phrase goes, went wild.

Fifteen minutes later that excitement evaporated as the final results appeared. Despite an error so obvious a half-blind dog would notice, the judges placed France’s Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron in first place. The silver medalists, Madison Chock and Evan Bates, offered bloodless smiles and polite applause to the team placed over them. In a grim echo of the entire season, about the only people cheering the results were the winners themselves.

I think figure skating fans, and the skaters themselves, might grudgingly accept yesterday’s result if Fournier Beaudry and Cizeron had the best performance. This is not to say we would like it. In fact, quite a lot of us would have found it personally repugnant. We might curse whatever people and palm greasing eased this team’s way back into competition, but the only thing judged on the ice is what happens on the ice, right? While Chock and Bates have been Olympic champions in waiting since 2022, they still needed to perform perfectly. But Chock and Bates did skate to win it. Fournier Beaudry and Cizeron did not have the performance of the night. And so, a team comprised of two people you wouldn’t trust with a pet rock found a way to compete and win at the Olympics.

The inconsistency and opacity of figure skating scoring is already maddening for fans and athletes alike. The celebration and support of deeply problematic athletes and coaches threatens to snuff out what life remains in the sport. The average Johnny Weir-primed figure skating viewer won’t understand why an obvious error apparently makes no difference in scoring, and they aren’t so invested in the sport that they’ll stick around to find out more. That would-be fan will bounce to the next event or TikTok and give their attention to something else. ISU officials granted a gold medal to the white whale of sports controversy this Olympics and they will reap the media backlash.

Meanwhile, the 2026 ice dance event is already breeding conspiracy theories and forensically-minded scoring analysis, but unless a judge breaks down and confesses to ordinal fixing a la Marie-Reine Le Gougne in a Milan hotel room, the results aren’t changing. Even if they did, it would offer grim satisfaction at best. Jamie Salé and David Pelletier received gold medals in 2002 at a second, muted medal ceremony. The US figure skating team eventually received their team event gold medals after a two year delay in a special ceremony during the 2024 Paris Olympics. In both cases, the results were made fair but the Olympic moment could not be made right.

Every athlete wants to win an Olympic medal the way Piper and Paul did. Whether or not you love the “Vincent” program or enjoy their taste for camp, Piper and Paul did precisely what every athlete sweats for. They skated with precision and passion. You could hear that the entire arena was on their side from the moment the music started. Even better, you could see that they knew they were in the middle of a magic moment, and they were rewarded for it. Long-time followers of mine will know that I’ve cheered for this team for more than a decade, and so I savour the glory of this bronze on behalf of the long-suffering Perry Mason Free Dance Appreciation Society. Their joyfulness is what I’m choosing to remember in spite of the competition results.

And yet.

The ISU has fumbled the bag so badly here that any feel-good moments from the rest of the games will be undercut by this controversy. Figure skating is already struggling for relevance and this nonsense isn’t helping. But maybe an organization that nominated Eteri “Whoops was that Trimetazidine?” Tutberidze for coach of the year deserves to find itself banished to the wasteland of cultural relevance.