It’s Olympic season and ice dancers Marie-Jade Lauriault and her husband, Romain Le Gac, refuse to sit still. It’s not what ice dancers do, after all. For one thing, they have some corners to turn, some catching up to do, some eyeballs to impress. After finishing second at the Canadian championships a couple of years […]
Scott Moir
A New Look for Schizas
This new Madeline Schizas floats. The two-time Canadian champion looks different this year. It’s the arms, the hands, the head, the feet, the body. Something in the way she moves. She’s taken a step like Joannie Rochette took a step a year or two before the Vancouver Olympics, when suddenly she changed from a competent […]
Stars On Ice Becomes Hot Ticket
Outside the Air Canada Centre, there was sturm. Inside there was drama. A post-Olympic Stars On Ice had come to Toronto. But it wasn’t like any Stars On Ice we’d seen in years. The Air Canada Centre was packed. Stuffed right to the rafters. That means 17,000 seats sold. A sell-out in Canada’s largest city. […]
Virtue and Moir: on Top of the World
To describe the genius of Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir is to require an armful of exclamation points. As one fellow skater put it, they are “beyond.” Way back in 2010, when Virtue and Moir won their first Olympic gold medal in Vancouver in their early twenties, the 1980 Olympic champion Robin Cousins was already […]
Virtue and Moir: reborn after the Grand Prix Final
Okay, folks. Listen up. Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir have no intention of finishing second at the Pyeongchang Olympics, although they finished second at the Grand Prix Final last month. They are not in this race for silver, for second-best, for forgotten footnote. Anybody remember who Sham was? The horse that finished second to Secretariat. […]
Brian Orser: dance coach to the stars
REGINA Brian Orser added a new dimension to his career persona Thursday at Skate Canada International: ice dancing coach. People took a double-take at the sight of the coach of Olympic and world singles champions leaning against the rink boards, overseeing the first practice of the day for Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir. So how […]
Virtue and Moir, kissing the ice, still
These days, with the Olympics looming, Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir prepare by attending team seminars. And there they see their own accomplishments from the past: their youthful gold medal at the Vancouver Olympics and their silver medal from the Sochi Games. “We see pictures of old Tessa and Scott,” Moir said. “We see the […]
Virtue and Moir: The show must go on
Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir came back after a two-year sojourn last year because they wanted to skate. And they felt they had more to give. “We felt like we could be better,” Moir said. Youngsters No doubt, an Olympic gold medal is on their minds. But it’s not all and it’s not enough. […]
Weaver and Poje: home at last
Yes, they had won medals at two world championships, chalked up undefeated strings on Grand Prix circuits, ruled Canada’s ice dancers for two years, and earned sheets of standing ovations for their heartfelt routines. But still, Kaitlyn Weaver and Andrew Poje felt something was missing. A flutter, a little heat, perhaps. A new energy. After […]