Two-time world bronze medalists Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier clearly skate for the love of it, to create shapes, to echo themes in their movements in completely artistic fashion, to leave memories few can forget. (Hitchcock, Vincent, Both Sides Now, Evita, Wuthering Heights). Those things come first of all.
But they are coming into this world championship next week in Montreal with a new pulse, a different one: They are in it to win gold.
“We have some big goals,” Poirier said boldly this week. “We are looking to win this event. We want to be world champions.”
It won’t be easy. Poirier admits that there will be very strong competition. “But I think it’s going to come down to us bringing our best skating,” he said. “We are confident in ourselves and not doubting. It’s a big goal, but we feel up to it. We feel so confident in our preparation and our training, we’re really excited to just get going.”
The best thing going for them is that they have had a long opportunity to develop their routines this year, especially over the second half of the season. It’s been six weeks since Four Continents.
“Last year, it was just a fight to get through the world championships,” said Gilles, who had cancer surgery, missed two competitions and then faced the most important event of the year. They had swept all of their Grand Prix events and won the Grand Prix Final, the first Canadians to do so since Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir in 2016. And then they had to deal with Gilles’ health problems.
Since they won Four Continents this season, Gilles and Poirier have spent their time working on the consistency of their elements. They recognize that earlier this season, their lower GOE put them behind the competition a tad. It doesn’t take much.
They’ve made small changes to the lifts in the short dance. When you make them mid-season, during the frenetic Grand Prix season, there is little time to develop and train them. “It’s hard to see the results at competition with that small amount of time to perfect the dance,” Gilles said.
The changes they have made most recently are changes that are not noticeable to the unpracticed eye, but they have an effect. “It’s really just changing slightly the shape of the lift, some arm movements to give the lift more of a wow factor,” Poirier said. “It’s not a big structural change.
“It’s just a lot of small details, to do with adding an arm here or removing an arm here, changing where we’re looking…On the whole they just create an impression of strength and power and performance and command.”
Poirer feels the changes are gelling and consistent. Over the season, they have had to make adjustments to their rhythm dance – “parts that didn’t grow with us,” Paul said – but their Wuthering Heights free dance has taken wing from the start.
“With both programs, the way they are constructed now, we feel so confident going to worlds. They are exactly the way we want them to be, and they feel the way we want them to.” Poirier said.
They will be up against last year’s world champions Madison Chock and Evan Bates, who haven’t competed since January when they squeaked out a win at the US Championships (they were second in the free dance) , when they both fell ill; Italian stars Charlene Guignard and Marco Fabbri, the European champions. At the NHK, they were upset by Brits Lilah Fear and Lewis Gibson, known for their entertaining routines.
It will be a scramble to get to the top of that field, but Poirier thinks that makes ice dance exciting.
“I think there were years when results felt a bit predictable and you could kind of know what was going to happen ahead of time,” he said. “But I think this year, I think it will be really exciting because there are so many teams that bring something so unique to the table. And we all have our strengths and our special things that we do that make us skaters and performers and artists.”
He thinks it will come down to the top teams leaving no points on the table. “Not letting any of those small things slip, especially; and that the footworks are delivered strongly and with confidence. The levels on the steps rare usually big determiners of scores.” Poirier said.
It helps to “have a moment out there.”
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