GABRIELLA PAPADAKIS & GUILLAUME CIZERON
It had been a long four-year campaign for French ice dancers Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron following a disappointing result at the 2018 Olympic Winter Games in PyeongChang, where they missed the top step of the podium by a scant 0.79 of a point.
In the intervening years, Papadakis and Cizeron won 10 of the 11 competitions they entered, finishing second at the 2020 European Championships behind the Russian team of Victoria Sinitsina and Nikita Katsalapov.
With the pandemic raging throughout 2020 and 2021, the French duo opted not to compete last season and used the time to prepare for the 2021-2022 campaign and, more particularly, the 2022 Olympic Winter Games.
Papadakis and Cizeron arrived in Beijing ready to do battle. China had proven to be a lucky place for the duo in the early days of their senior career. It was in Shanghai that the team won their first Grand Prix title at 2014 Cup of China and the World title four months later in the same city.
It was with that positive mindset that the team opened their quest for Olympic gold with a solid performance of their innovative “waacking” dance set to “Made To Love” and “U Move, I Move” by John Legend. Papadakis and Cizeron claimed top spot in the rhythm dance with a new World record score of 90.83.
“We tried a couple of hip hop dance styles. Pretty early on waacking was a style that we discovered. We found a specialist in waacking in Montréal and started training it because it was really new. It was a lot of discovering,” Cizeron explained when asked why they chose this dance style.
“When we started working on it last year, we knew
