HIGH STAKES

It was, Nikolaj Sørensen will tell you now, the craziest of thoughts – or so it seemed at the time. After being denied the chance to compete at the 2018 Olympic Winter Games in South Korea due to citizenship issues, the Danish ice dancer and his Canadian partner Laurence Fournier Beaudry first hatched the idea of switching countries.

In March 2018, they made the decision to represent Canada with the goal of earning a place on its 2022 Olympic Winter Games squad.

Now the second top team in the country, that dream could very well become reality in a few months time.

Though the path has been anything but smooth at times — especially the last two years—Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Nikolaj Sørensen can now see the biggest prize squarely in their sights. It is so close they can almost touch it.

As they spoke with IFS in the middle of a sweltering July — a time for working on and refining the programs they hope will deliver them a pair of tickets to the 2022 Olympic Winter Games — there was no mistaking the optimism in their voices.

“It is going to be the bow on top of the gift for working so hard to get there,” the 29-year-old Fournier Beaudry said when asked what it will feel like to see the five rings on the ice in Beijing, China. “But first, we have to focus on the now, and how to get there.”

“We are changing pace all of a sudden, actually expecting a season to happen this time, which is exciting,” added Sørensen, 32.

Behind them, they hope — along with the rest of the skating world — are the many potholes caused by a global pandemic that ravaged the previous season, but a campaign that also ended with so much hope at the 2021 World Championships in Stockholm.

It was the first competition in roughly 15 months for the Montréal-based team, after an extended layoff following Sørensen’s complex