French figure skaters Guillaume Cizeron and Laurence Fournier Beaudry pulled off an incredible exploit on Wednesday, winning Olympic gold in ice dancing after skating together for just a year.
Cizeron, 31, and 33-year-old Fournier Beaudry, took the title ahead of reigning world champions Madison Chock and Evan Bates of the USA after the free dance finale.
Canadians Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier took bronze.
For Cizeron it is a second consecutive Olympic ice dance gold after he won the title at the Beijing Winter Olympics four years ago with Gabriella Papadakis.
Cizeron and Papadakis retired from competition following their fifth world title in 2022 and he teamed up last March with his close friend, Fournier Beaudry.
Cizeron and Fournier Beaudry had taken a slim 0.46-point lead over the Americans going into the free dance finale at the Milano Ice Skating Arena.
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The Americans, who are friends, training partners in Montreal and rivals of the French, presented a fiery flamenco to an orchestral rendition of the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black”.
But skating last, the French concluded their competition with a mesmerising routine set to the powerful soundtrack of the 2022 film “The Whale.”
They finished 1.43 points ahead of the three-time world champions.
Gilles and Poirier snatched bronze with their Vincent van Gogh tribute to the music of “Starry, Starry Night”, which received huge cheers and pushed Italian couple Charlene Guignard and Marco Fabbri into fourth place.
Fournier Beaudry, a Canadian who received French citizenship last November, had been available after the suspension of her former partner, Nikolaj Sorensen, who was implicated in a 2012 sexual abuse case in Canada, which he has denied. Sorensen was in the crowd in Milan.
On the road to the Games, the French couple experienced a tumultuous season.
Three weeks before the Games, they found themselves embroiled in controversy when Papadakis published a book that caused a huge stir.
In it, she harshly criticised her former partner, claiming she had been under his “control” during their time skating together.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP)
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