This is a first for French skating. A month after Olympic gold, Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron put a golden final touch to their season by winning a fifth world title on Saturday in Montpellier. Excluded like all Russians in response to the invasion of Ukraine, Victoria Sinitsina and Nikita Katsalapov, outgoing world champions and Olympic silver medalists in Beijing, were however absent.
She remained faithful to her sequined golden dress worn in Beijing, swapped her red top for a brown one, but once again Papadakis and Cizeron, beyond the technique, were able to release the emotional intensity which allows them to win hearts far beyond skating insiders. They were rewarded with a total of 229.82 points, a new world record.
The duo pushed by the public
The nearly 9,000 spectators at the Montpellier ice rink had capsized before that, from the presentation of the French duo. “It’s an indescribable feeling to hear so many people screaming for you. We both had goosebumps. It was really difficult to hold back our tears before our performance,” admits Cizeron.
Papadakis and Cizeron edged two American duos, Madison Hubbell and Zachary Donohue (222.39 for their most recent competition), and Madison Chock and Evan Bates (216.83). All four their training partners in Montreal, and their close friends, as evidenced by their long embraces, and their hands tied up on the podium.
At the top of tricolor skating
At 26 for her, and 27 for him, Papadakis and Cizeron, also 2018 Olympic vice-champions and five-time European champions (2015-2019), become the first five-time world champions in the history of French skating. Andrée and Pierre Brunet, the last to be able to compete with them at the top of the pantheon of tricolor skating with their two Olympic titles obtained in pairs in the interwar period (1928 and 1932), stopped at four world titles.
Above all, Papadakis and Cizeron still mark a little more of their mark on the history of ice dancing: only the Soviets Lyudmila Pakhomova and Alexandr Gorshkov are now ahead of them in the number of world crowns, with six topped in the 1970s.
A still unknown sequel
World gold, a month after Olympic gold, comes to put the dreamed final touch to a crucial season perfectly mastered. Before, the Clermont dancers remained on twenty months spent without competition, between their defeat in January 2020 at the European Championships – their only since the Olympic Games-2018 – and last October, mainly because of the Covid-19 pandemic and the difficulties for them, who have lived in Montreal since 2014. And after that, what do Papadakis and Cizeron have in store? Mystery for now. “The future does not really exist for the moment”, she replied to the JO-2022. “We’ll see,” he limited himself to saying on Saturday.