Every sport has its own immortal questions.
Is there more to Spygate than we were told? Were the 1981 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships fixed by the Soviets and East Germans? And, in figure skating: exactly what happened in Canton between Igor Shpilband and Marina Zueva in June 2012?
One year, they annexed the podium at Worlds. The next, everything began falling apart.
The coaching divorce remains a mystery that we don't have a clear answer for - as mysterious in hindsight as it was surprising at the time. It'd be like if, in a few months, Romain Haguenauer announced that he's leaving Marie-France Dubreuil's Ice Academy of Montreal and setting up his own school ten minutes down the road. Only a handful of coaches in history have ever reached Zueva and Shpilband's level of dominance, and only Natalia Dubova would see her own empire crumble so dramatically.
Years later, the scars still hadn't healed. During Sochi 2014, Zueva would tell Sport-Express that "if there is no unity in the coaching team, it is impossible to win", in a barely-veiled snipe at her former partner. Shpilband was even less civil when Time Magazine asked him about Zueva:

“I don’t have any relationship with her."

After Sochi's ice dance competition, Adrianne Lenda - Shpilband's co-coach and fiancee - offered her own uncharitable thoughts on Zueva:

“Did you see the articles today?” she asked. “Virtue and Moir felt their coach, Marina, was not in their corner, and they didn’t feel she wasn’t putting in the same effort she did in Vancouver.
“It’s probably true, because she tends to gravitate toward the more winning team, for selfish reasons.”

For people watching the Dubreuil-Lauzon-Haguenauer triumvirate crush all opposition beneath their blades, could you imagine Patrice Lauzon telling the media in Milan that Haguenauer was a glory hunter who undeservedly took all the credit for Papadakis/Cizeron's Olympic title?
While we might not fully know the truth behind Shpilband and Zueva's spilt, there's no reason not to try and piece the kaleidoscopic fragments of the story together. A combination of the passage of time, gradual internet link decay and a general effort to obscure the actual details mean it's nigh-impossible to create a full history, but there's enough left over to assemble the broader picture.

The backstory

For anyone who isn't familiar with the people we're about to discuss, refer to this fantastic writeup by Lionclaw21, on the leading coaches in the American ice dance scene.
Over their extensive careers, both of Arctic Edge's coaches - Marina Zueva and Igor Shpilband - became well known for their mastery of skating's behind-the-scenes games. After Zueva joined Shpilband in Michigan in the early-2000s, their partnership used his technical expertise, her artistic brilliance and their shared political cunning as the foundations for their rise to supremacy.
Of course, unlike their primary coaching rivals at Vancouver 2010 - the then-married Natalia Linichuk and Gennady Karponosov - Zueva and Shpilband's alliance was purely one of mutual self-interest. For a while, both parties got exactly what they wanted from the arrangement, as their work in Canton raised the bar for everyone else who came after them, both technically and artistically. Our eyes and souls were purified after a decade defined by the dubious stylings of Linichuk and Alexander Zhulin. Without their rise, we might have been living in the world where the diabolical Aboriginal Dance earned an Olympic gold medal.
After breaking North America's Olympic glass ceiling in 2010, Arctic Edge became the first rink to sweep the ice dance podium at Worlds the following year. Meryl Davis / Charlie White and Tessa Virtue / Scott Moir were light years ahead of the rest of the pack, and siblings Maia and Alex Shibutani were the youngest world medalists in half a century.
But the rink's environment was also infamously toxic behind the mirage of perfection, and it's telling that many Canton skaters who pursued a coaching career themselves (such as Moir, or White and his wife Tanith Belbin) have spoken of the importance of building a supportive and healthy training environment for their students to thrive in.
Because the only thing capable of ending Arctic Edge's supremacy was Arctic Edge itself.

Catalysts and context

How did we go from a Worlds podium lockout in 2011 to internecine implosion one year later?
It was because Arctic Edge was always a ticking timebomb, and the decisions Shpilband and Zueva made only accelerated the inevitable meltdown. It's not a secret that Canton was a vicious environment - Virtue's spoken of bullying, Belbin's spoken of draconian body standards and disordered eating, and everyone's mentioned the constant cut-throat tension between the skaters - but the coaches' actions just poured petrol on a bonfire.
Both coaches were known for favouring particular teams at the expense of others, providing them with more attention and better programs. And to make things worse, Zueva's favouritism was often correlated with whichever Canton woman her son Fedor happened to be dating at any particular point. He was linked to Belbin circa 2005, Virtue from 2008 to late 2009, and Davis from 2012 onward. There were also rumours of him pursuing Maia Shibutani at some point, as well as his 2010-11 on-ice partner Jana Khokhlova. And coincidence or not, it's impossible to dispute that Belbin/Agosto were Zueva's top team for 2005-06, or that Virtue/Moir had the superior 2009-10 season, or that Davis/White were perceived as Zueva's favoured ones as Sochi approached. He'd ultimately marry Davis in 2017.
It's difficult enough to create a civil behind-the-scenes atmosphere between top ice dancers under normal circumstances. Having a situation where the coach's favour was nepotistic while her son saw the rink as his own personal Tinder isn't "normal".
Not that Shpilband was any better. An oft-repeated rumour is that, during the 2011-12 season, he began favouring the newly-created American team of Madison Chock / Evan Bates (and, according to one version of the story, Shpilband arranged secret tryouts between Chock and her new partner behind the back of Bates' previous partner, Emily Samuelson). The Shibutanis - who'd fall from 3rd at 2011 Worlds to 8th at 2012 Worlds - blamed their poor season on Shpilband's lack of attention, and the Shibutani family would allegedly play a major, behind-the-scenes role in getting rid of him. Everything in this paragraph is second-hand rumour and hearsay, but the fact that it's even plausible speaks of the cloak-and-dagger machinations behind each and every move in Canton.
And while this was all happening, Shpilband and Zueva's own relationship was rapidly deteriorating. Several sources from the time mentioned Shpilband's own dissatisfaction with the broader situation at Arctic Edge, and with Zueva's public primacy within their coaching tandem. A Moscow News article mentioned that even before their partnership dissolved, he was considering going solo himself at some point. The Detroit Free Press said Shpilband thought Zueva wasn't consulting him when drawing up training schedules. A 2021 RIA Novosti interview with Shpilband referenced rumours about his spouse, Adrianne Lenda, interfering in the training process and sparking internal conflict with Zueva as a result. Russian journalist Elena Vaitskehovskaya asked Shpilband at 2012 Worlds whether he was offended that Zueva gave more media interviews than him, only for him to "bitterly" answer that the journalists were paying more attention to Zueva's opinions than his own.
Something had to give.

Civil war

On June 3, 2012, fresh off of yet another Canton cakewalk at that year's World Championships, an earthquake tore through the power structures of global ice dance.
The Detroit Free Press broke the story, saying that Shpilband had been fired from Arctic Edge. Their article also discussed how, like a failing marriage, there had been interventions to try and save it: US Figure Skating (USFS) had been informed of problems between Shpilband and Zueva weeks before, and Shpilband mentioned talking to USFS about the "issue I had with Marina".
Shpilband said that Zueva should have waited until after Sochi 2014 to dissolve their partnership, instead of breaking up a winning machine two years before the Olympics. Zueva's response, as quoted in Russian media, was interesting.

"It's better than two months."

European medalist John Kerr spoke for everyone with his brilliant reaction on Twitter.
Now, what actually happened that day?
Well, we don't know for sure. Even a decade later, everything remains shrouded in a veil of secrecy that would make the CIA proud. All we have to go on are the various moments that made it into the media, which are naturally influenced by how everyone involved in the saga wants to make themselves look better and their foes look worse.

Zueva's perspective

The Associated Press quoted from Zueva's official statement:

"Igor and I built this program together, and it was great. Unfortunately, we are going in different directions," Zoueva said in a statement released by U.S. Figure Skating. "The skaters are very talented and focused. They have very strong work ethics, and together we will move forward."

Although Shpilband turned his rink into a national ice dance powerhouse before Zueva's arrival, it's fair to say that her involvement was essential to Canton becoming the all-conquering superpower it was.
Immediately after the split, she told RIA Novosti that the breakdown had nothing to do with their current students, but rather that it was because Shpilband wanted to train personal students of his own separately from her, in what she called a "conflict of interest" that showcased his desire to "start his own business inside our shared business".
Later in 2012, at the Rostelecom Cup, she would offer slightly more insight into the breakup:

When you parted ways with your coaching partner Igor Shpilband in the summer, there were many predictions that this breakup would provoke a decrease in the quality of your pairs' performances. Did you have to face any negative consequences in connection with this whole story?
"Of course. It was a tragedy for me that we broke up. However, I did not think it was possible for me to continue working on the terms Igor offered."
Do you mean Igor's desire to work with new couples separately from you?
"Yes. He wrote to me about it in a letter. That he wanted to have a separate group with which he planned to work at the rink at the best time - and so on. I tried to negotiate, to explain that in my understanding there is no such thing in collaborative work, where some students are one's own and others are shared, but Igor said that he had already made his decision and wasn't going to change it. So initially it was his decision, not mine."
^{Source: November 10, 2012, from a sport-express.ru interview, titled "Марина Зуева: "Чемпионы обязаны двигать свой вид спорта вперед"."}

Her now-former coaching partner would naturally tell a different story.

Shpilband's perspective

In the initial Detroit Free Press article, Shpilband said he was blindsided by his dismissal. Although it was known that there was some behind-the-scenes turmoil between him and Zueva, he appeared to believe their mutually-successful partnership was worth salvaging (or at least preserving until Sochi 2014), and she clearly disagreed.
The Detroit Free Press quoted Arctic Edge's general manager Craig O'Neill as saying that the rink's "three top teams" - Virtue/Moir, Davis/White and the Shibutanis - felt "Igor wasn't there anymore for them", and Shpilband added "he told me the kids don't want me at the rink anymore. For what reason, I don't know."
Shpilband said he left a message with Davis and White, but didn't mention Virtue/Moir or the Shibutanis. Online observers back then noted it fit the pattern of the latter two teams being considered Zueva-aligned teams at the time, rather than Shpilband-aligned ones.

The skaters' perspective

Because Tessa Virtue is not Oksana Grishuk, the teams at Canton gave us all the polite, stage-managed civility you'd expect, thanking Shpilband for his presence on their sporting journeys.
O'Neill tried to pin the responsibility for Shpilband's ouster upon the skaters:

“What [rink owner] John (Stansik) and I did today was all based on the kids," O'Neill said of Virtue and Moir, Davis and White, and 2011 world bronze medalists Maia and Alex Shibutani. "Igor did talk about starting his own program, and coaching some of his own kids, and we didn't have issues with that. Our main focus has to be the top three teams.
“There was a lot of issues. This has been going on for a couple of months. He's not focused with the kids. What it came down to was the kids didn't want to skate there (in Canton) anymore with Igor. Either they were leaving or Igor was leaving.
“We told him that the kids weren't going to come back to the rink until we had this meeting with you."

But perhaps the most transparent look behind the curtain was offered by Charlie White's mother Jacqui, who gave us some insights of her own, in reply to a Facebook commenter who called the skaters "spoiled brats":

“...I’m afraid you don’t know what you are talking about. This wasn’t initiated by the skaters, they are obviously only trying to hang on by the skin of their teeth to continue training while the coaches battle to the death and when convenient, use them as pawns in the fight. This is an old story of ‘who has control,’ where egos come into play and team cooperation erodes. The skaters in this scenario are not brats, but victims caught in the crossfire.”

Squaring the circle

This entire situation has echoes in history, and it actually is possible to reconcile these differing stories. It wouldn't be the first time that Marina Zueva had used her own athletes as cover to force out a coach she had problems with.
There's notable parallels with an incident following the 1985-86 season, where Zueva - then an ambitious neophyte choreographer working with newly-minted pairs world champions Gordeeva/Grinkov - organised a campaign against the skaters' tyrannical coach Stanislav Zhuk, accusing him of chronic alcoholism, moral depravity and missing training sessions in a denunciation letter to Soviet officials. There are various conflicting accounts of the letter, its authors and its signatories, but the constant in every single version is that Zueva played a key role.
She did have legitimate reasons for it. Gordeeva's memoir My Sergei has an entire chapter called "The Miserable, Pitiless Zhuk", while his training methods were notorious for a monomaniacal focus on micromanaging athletes, controlling their body weight, and doing the most difficult jumps and elements regardless of the wreckage left behind. He was basically a spiritual ancestor of Eteri Tutberidze, with some additional tales of sexual assault. Gordeeva recalled Zhuk making sexual advances on her roommate Anna Levandi (née Kondrashova) and "many girls over the years", while various Russian sources relate similar, independent rumours of Zhuk pursuing Kondrashova, Elena Buyanova and even the at-most-15-years-old Gordeeva while they trained at CSKA (though My Sergei explicitly rejects the last one).
Despite being one of the most powerful coaches in the entire Soviet skating scene, Zhuk was ultimately removed from his post as a coach at the Red Army-aligned CSKA Moscow club, and his students were reallocated to other coaches. Gordeeva/Grinkov and Kondrashova were assigned to the young Stanislav Leonovich, who wasn't even 30 when Gordeeva/Grinkov won the 1988 Olympic pairs title in Calgary. Naturally, their programs were choreographed by Zueva, who would get much of the credit for Gordeeva/Grinkov's brilliance.
Igor Shpilband might not be as monstrous as Zhuk, but it's rather telling that both instances involve a coach with a somewhat toxic reputation being on the receiving end of a political defeat at the hands of Marina Zueva.
For, however you look at it, it's unarguable that Shpilband was the one left in a weaker political position after the split.

The fallout

One day after the breakup, USFS confirmed that Davis/White and the Shibutanis would be staying in Canton as part of Zueva's group. The Shibutanis' decision wasn't seen as a surprise, but many thought Davis/White were the closest to Shpilband and the likeliest ones to follow him elsewhere. A few days later, it was confirmed that Virtue/Moir would be remaining with Zueva too.
Russian Figure Skating Federation (FFKKR) general director Valentin Piseev told Russian press that he would gladly offer Shpilband whatever he wanted if it would see the coach working in his homeland again, but Shpilband preferred to stay in Michigan. According to Ice Musings, he reportedly checked out the Compuware Ice Arena in Plymouth, about ten miles from Canton.
The following week, Shpilband announced that he'd now be working out of the Novi Ice Arena, just twenty minutes away from Arctic Edge. IceNetwork reported that the first Canton skaters to follow him there were Chock/Bates, a team who had finished fifth at US Nationals in their debut season together. Lithuanians Isabella Tobias / Deividas Stagniūnas would join them a day later.
Zueva went on the hunt for a technical expert to replace Shpilband. After being turned down by Margarita Drobiazko and Povilas Vanagas, she eventually lured Oleg Epstein to Canton to serve as her Igor substitute. Italy's Maurizio Margaglio also came onboard as a consultant for a while.
In a poetic twist of fate, Shpilband brought on Margalio's former on-ice partner Barbara Fusar-Poli as his own coaching collaborator. It was fitting that ice dance's most high-profile coaching divorce would also involve the artists behind ice dance's most legendary death stare.
Some time after the divorce, Shpilband would take Zueva to court. The exact details are buried behind a mountain of non-disclosure agreements. The only information I could find was a reference in a Time Magazine article, where they mentioned that Davis and White were deposed as part of it, the case was settled out of court, and the acrimony remained.

The aftermath

There's a persistent rumour that USFS paid Zueva's legal bills during the whole mess. It's brought up as a possible explanation for her actions over the next two years, alongside the coach potentially wanting multiple Olympic champions on her CV, and her son Fedor's romantic relationship with Davis from 2012 onward.
We all know how this story ends. Davis/White would go on to win the world title in 2013 and Olympic gold in 2014, while Virtue/Moir battled injury and lost the ephemeral concept known as momentum to their rivals. The Canadians also felt as if they lost Zueva's favour: Virtue allegedly wanted to leave Arctic Edge after a disappointing 2012-13 season, and while Moir talked her out of it at the time, he would later publicly lambast Zueva for not being "in our corner" following their silver medal in Sochi. When Virtue/Moir announced their comeback in 2016, they would move to train with Dubreuil in Montreal, a school that would become an even more dominant force in the sport than Arctic Edge at their zenith.
Shpilband continuously failed to find an artistic collaborator capable of replacing Zueva, becoming known for the artistic bankruptcy of his choreography, and his star team Chock/Bates would only become world champions after leaving him for Dubreuil.
Zueva, meanwhile, had similar difficulties finding a technical expert who could fill Shpilband's shoes, and her teams would consistently bleed away points by missing levels. The Shibutani family would reportedly acquire a stake in Arctic Edge, and more pointed rumours say that they effectively bought Zueva's services as a de facto private coach for the Shibutani siblings as Pyeongchang 2018 approached. They would win Olympic bronze there - behind the Montreal-coached Virtue/Moir and Papadakis/Cizeron - but it would be Zueva's final bow as a top force in ice dance.
Maybe, some day, we'll learn what truly happened in 2012.

Hello figure skating fans, this year we celebrate the anniversaries of 5 Olympic games!
1924: 100 years ago (Chamonix, France) 1964: 60 years ago (Innsbruck, Austria) 1984: 40 years ago (Sarajevo, Yugoslavia) 1994: 30 years ago (Lillehammer, Norway) 2014: 10 years ago (Sochi, Russia)
If you have any memories from any of these Olympics feel free to share 😀
Medalists
1924 Ladies GOLD: Herma Szabo (AUT) SILVER: Beatrix Loughran (USA) BRONZE: Ethel Muckelt (GBR)
1924 Men GOLD: Gillis Grafström (SWE) SILVER: Willy Böckl (AUT) BRONZE: Georges Gautschi (SUI)
1924 Pairs GOLD: Helene Engelmann / Alfred Berger (AUT) SILVER: Ludowika Jakobsson / Walter Jakobsson (FIN) BRONZE: Andrée Joly / Pierre Brunet (FRA)
1964 Ladies GOLD: Sjoukje Dijkstra (Netherlands) SILVER: Regine Heitzer (Austria) BRONZE: Petra Burka (Canada)
1964 Men GOLD: Manfred Schnelldorfer (United Team of Germany) SILVER: Alain Calmat (France) BRONZE: Scott Allen(United States)
1964 Pairs GOLD: Liudmila Belousova / Oleg Protopopov (Soviet Union) SILVER: Marika Kilius / Hans-Jürgen Bäumler (United Team of Germany) SILVER: Debbi Wilkes / Guy Revell (Canada) BRONZE: Vivian Joseph / Ronald Joseph (United States)
1984 Ladies GOLD: Katarina Witt (East Germany) SILVER: Rosalynn Sumners (United States) BRONZE: Kira Ivanova (Soviet Union)
1984 Men GOLD: Scott Hamilton (United States) SILVER: Brian Orser (Canada) BRONZE: Jozef Sabovčík (Czechoslovakia)
1984 Pairs GOLD: Elena Valova / Oleg Vasiliev (Soviet Union) SILVER: Kitty Carruthers / Peter Carruthers (United States) BRONZE: Larisa Selezneva / Oleg Makarov (Soviet Union)
1984 Ice Dance GOLD: Jayne Torvill / Christopher Dean (Great Britain) SILVER: Natalia Bestemianova / Andrei Bukin (Soviet Union) BRONZE: Marina Klimova / Sergei Ponomarenko (Soviet Union)
1994 Men GOLD: Alexei Urmanov Russia) SILVER: Elvis Stojko (Canada) BRONZE: Philippe Candeloro (France)
1994 Ladies GOLD: Oksana Baiul (Ukraine) SILVER: Nancy Kerrigan (United States) BRONZE: Chen Lu (China)
1994 Pairs GOLD: Ekaterina Gordeeva and Sergei Grinkov (RUS) SILVER: Natalia Mishkutionok and Artur Dmitriev (RUS) BRONZE: Isabelle Brasseur and Lloyd Eisler (CAN)
1994 Ice dance GOLD: Oksana Grishukand Evgeni Platov (RUS) SILVER: Maya Usova and Alexander Zhulin (RUS) BRONZE: Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean (GBR)
2014 Men GOLD: Yuzuru Hanyu (Japan) SILVER: Patrick Chan (Canada) BRONZE: Denis Ten (Kazakhstan)
2014 Ladies GOLD: Adelina Sotnikova (Russia) SILVER: Kim Yuna (South Korea) BRONZE: Carolina Kostner (Italy)
2014 Pairs GOLD: Tatiana Volosozhar and Maxim Trankov (RUS) SILVER: Ksenia Stolbova and Fedor Klimov (RUS) BRONZE: Aljona Savchenko and Robin Szolkowy (GER)
2014 Ice Dance GOLD: Meryl Davis and Charlie White (USA) SILVER: Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir (CAN) BRONZE: Elena Ilinykh and Nikita Katsalapov (RUS)
2014 Team Event GOLD: Russia (RUS) Evgeni Plushenko. Yulia Lipnitskaya. Tatiana Volosozhar / Maxim Trankov. Ksenia Stolbova / Fedor Klimov. Ekaterina Bobrova / Dmitri Soloviev. Elena Ilinykh / Nikita Katsalapov
SILVER: Canada (CAN) Patrick Chan. Kevin Reynolds. Kaetlyn Osmond. Meagan Duhamel / Eric Radford. Kirsten Moore-Towers / Dylan Moscovitch. Tessa Virtue / Scott Moir
BRONZE: United States (USA) Jeremy Abbott. Jason Brown. Ashley Wagner. Gracie Gold. Marissa Castelli / Simon Shnapir. Meryl Davis / Charlie White

"It's a huge fight at every event. And it's not just us. Our coaches, Tatiana Tarasova and Alexei Mishin, fight against each other, too, using us as weapons." - Alexei Yagudin¹

One of the most amazing quirks of figure skating history is how a generation-defining rivalry featuring genuine accusations of witchcraft at the Winter Olympics didn't even come close to earning top billing that year.
Because this was 2002: the year where The French Judge and the pairs event scandal dominated the airwaves, day after day. The year where Michelle Kwan lost Olympic gold to an American teammate for the second time in a row. It was the year where figure skating decided to showcase its credentials as the most chaotic Olympic sport of them all.
It's fitting that this particular story occurred in Salt Lake City, since the losers are still salty about it to this day. Nobody here is a truly reliable narrator, but we can assemble a beautiful kaleidoscope of madness if we piece all the different fragments of the story together. The man in the blue suit is called the Black Magician, and he's at the core of a legendary figure skating conspiracy theory.
(A short content warning before we begin: there are brief references to abuse in this writeup, with those specific sections marked in advance.)

Magic Formula

The sport:

Figure skating might be the most famous sport at the Winter Olympics, despite the diabolical complexity behind it. It might also be the most dramatic, with storylines often ripped right from a soap opera.
This particular tale focuses on singles skating, perhaps the 'default' version of the sport in the minds of people who don't really follow it. To answer the immortal question, it's what Brian Boitano did to win his Olympic title (although he wasn't wearing a blindfold at the time). Katarina Witt, Michelle Kwan, Yuzuru Hanyu - if you think of them, you're thinking of singles skating.
Split into men's and women's events, the discipline requires athletes to blend iconic jumps - you may have heard of the triple axel, or the triple Lutz - with difficult bladework, complex spins and artistic choreography, all done in eye-catching costumes to accompanying music. When it's done right, it takes your breath away at how the athletes can make everything look so simple, and surpass the boundaries of sport to create moments of pure transcendence.
In 2002, the sport was scored on the famed 6.0 system - a comparative ranking system where you needed a majority of the nine judges on each panel to give you the highest overall marks to win gold. Competitions in singles skating were divided into two segments: a two-and-a-half-minute "short program" (SP), and a four-minute "free skate" (FS), or "long program".

The characters:

Our tale centres itself around two camps - both alike in indignity, in fair Salt Lake City, where we lay our scene.
In the red corner, working out of Saint Petersburg, Russia, we had:

• Evgeni Plushenko, the 2001 world champion. Considered one of the greatest jumpers the sport has ever seen, with one of its dodgiest haircuts. Often had some questionable choreography and stylistic choices for his programs, though he did have his own distinct personality on the ice. His gala program to “Sex Bomb” at 2001 Worlds involved a striptease, a nude muscle suit, and a golden speedo. I wish I made that sentence up.
  
• Alexei Mishin, the coach of the 1994 Olympic champion in men’s singles. Based out of Russia at the time. Known as “the Professor” by many in skating, both due to his massive technical knowledge and his position as an actual university lecturer. Renowned for his expertise on skating biomechanics and jumping technique, and for a generally stoic, droll attitude. Was once blacklisted by the KGB in the mid-1970s for assorted reasons.
  

And in the blue corner, working out of Simsbury, Connecticut, we had:

• Alexei Yagudin, the 1998, 1999 and 2000 world champion. Originally seen as merely a skater with big jumps, but went through a metamorphosis over the four-year leadup to Salt Lake City to become a nuanced artist, too. Also prone to some rather dismal exhibition gala decisions, such as a 1997 performance to African music in this dubious costume. Once rumoured to have had a fling with the openly-gay American skater Rudy Galindo (ask Galindo himself), the Chicago Tribune reported he was kicked off of Tom Collins’ Champions on Ice tour in 1999 for drunkenness and bad behaviour.
  
• Tatiana Tarasova, coach of the 1998 Olympic champion in men’s singles. First a coach of champion pairs skaters and ice dancers in the USSR, before moving to America for better training conditions in the mid-1990s, and successfully working with singles’ skaters too. An interesting figure known for her dramatic proclamations, her eye-catching number of fur coats, and her equally eye-catching choreography.
  
• Rudolf Zagainov, a notorious, controversial sports psychologist known for his work in the Soviet Union. Over several decades, he associated with athletes in an eclectic array of sports, ranging from track-and-field and cycling to chess and figure skating.
  

The Montagues and Capulets were probably more civil.

Destined Rivals

"You must be an artist, too. I still think Plushenko doesn't know what he's doing. Mishin says, 'Do this with your arms,' so he does it. But he doesn't feel the music." - Alexei Yagudin²

“I know Yagudin well, and he wants to be the center of attention even when he loses." – Evgeni Plushenko³

(Content warning: abuse)

The general outline of the story is the one that NBC gave us in their melodramatic Olympic fluff pieces (like this one): Yagudin and Plushenko used to be training partners at Mishin's Yubileiny rink in Russia, until Yagudin left Mishin after the Nagano Olympic season to train with Tatiana Tarasova in the United States. Yagudin couldn't forgive Mishin for favouring Plushenko, and Mishin would famously say that coaching the two was like trying to balance the affections of two wives at the same time. Yagudin and Plushenko would dominate the Salt Lake City Olympic cycle - Yagudin winning the 1999 and 2000 world titles, Plushenko winning the 2001 world title - and entered the 2002 Olympics as the two main contenders for gold.
What's not mentioned so much is that Yagudin would have had every right to despise Mishin. Any of Mishin's skaters would probably have every right to despise him. By all accounts, the training environment he oversaw was horrifically toxic for all involved. Mishin himself told Sport-Express about breaking a young Plushenko's finger in a fit of rage after catching the child playing with a ball while they were in Italy. Yagudin and Plushenko have both mentioned vicious, institutionalised, long-term hazing rituals, where older skaters were encouraged to torment the younger ones; in 2021 a former Yubileiny staff member spoke to fontanka.ru, recalling colleagues telling her that the young Yagudin was being "educated" by his rinkmates when the boy's screams echoed through the building. The dreadful atmosphere continues to this day, since 2022 Olympic pairs skater Alexander Galliamov reportedly received a detached retina from his training mates during his time training with Mishin.
Even putting aside the poisonous internal climate Mishin actively fostered at his rink, there was some real merit to Yagudin's accusations of coaching favouritism. In a Chicago Tribune article, a Yubileiny skater once recalled Tatiana Mishina (Mishin’s wife and coaching partner) saying that the newly-arrived Plushenko had "more ability than Yagudin". A 2001 New York Daily News article said that Mishin was telling people how Plushenko "would become the true star" as early as 1997, while Yagudin was still training with him. Mishin would later abandon the distraught Yagudin in the kiss-and-cry area after the 1998 Olympic free skate, disgusted with his student’s poor performance.
Following Yagudin's departure for Tarasova, Mishin would attempt to explain that moment in a late-1998 interview with Elena Vaitsekhovskaya, showcasing his typical levels of grace.

"Alexei was very well prepared. But after one of the practices, he took a shower and sat in the stands right under the ventilation pipe without buttoning up. As I found out later, Artur Dmitriev came to him first and advised him to move so he wouldn't get a cold. Then the same thing was said by Andrei Bushkov. Then Ekaterina Gordeeva, who was just passing by. Yagudin listened to no one. And on the eve of the start he had a temperature of 39.5. I was frightfully offended at that. I think that anyone can get sick or get injured, but I will never understand that anyone can be so stupid as to knowingly fail at the competition for the sake of which all this crazy work is being done. It's very hard to forgive."
Is that why your relationship has fractured? Or was Yagudin broken by internal competition?
"I've always been aware of the fact that it's very difficult to withstand the work in my group. And that someone could break. That, alas, is life. But I'm glad we parted with Yagudin without any fights or mudslinging. After all, I made him the world champion and he made me the coach of the champion."

Yagudin, for his part, categorically denied all of this. But it's interesting that Mishin praised the lack of mutual mudslinging directly after calling Yagudin "stupid" for supposedly choosing to sabotage his own Olympics on purpose.
Russian Figure Skating Federation (FFKKR) president Valentin Piseev threatened that Yagudin would never win anything if he left Russia to train with Tarasova in the US; Russian Nationals became the only major competition Yagudin would never win, and both he and Tarasova were fully aware of their comparative pariah status in the eyes of Piseev and the federation. Swathes of the FFKKR and Russian media viewed Yagudin as a traitor for leaving to train in America, and his mother told Moskovskij Komsomolets in 2002 that “cheering for Yagudin was considered bad form” in Russia. On the eve of Salt Lake City, Yagudin would tell ESPN that the federation's dislike of him was "pretty sad".
Tarasova and Mishin were predictably at one another's throats, due to that and other reasons. Mishin was rather contemptuous of Tarasova and everything she represented: Vaitsekhovskaya wrote (in her memoir Tears On Ice) that even after Ilya Kulik won the 1998 Olympic gold medal under Tarasova's tutelage, Mishin didn't see Tarasova as a "serious opponent" in men's skating until the turn of the millennium. Whereas Tarasova was primarily known for her work as a coach and choreographer for ice dancers, and once walked away from Olympic competition altogether in the late-1980s to lead a touring ice ballet, Mishin told Vaitsekhovskaya that the idea of bringing "music to life on the ice" was the childish prattling of coaches who weren't thinking about the "one goal in sport - to win".
Naturally, all of this provided the fuel for a vicious rivalry. Vaitsekhovskaya recalled Mishin making disparaging remarks in the 1999-2000 season about how Yagudin’s programs disguised poor technique with ostentatious artistry, and he only upped the intensity of his scorn as the Olympics approached. In 2001, Plushenko told the Chicago Tribune that he learned nothing from Yagudin while they were training together, and Yagudin compared the situation between them to that of Michelle Kwan and Tara Lipinski four years earlier.
And then the hypnotist arrived.

The Black Magician

Yagudin actually contemplated walking away from figure skating in the lead-up to the Olympics, after losing the world title to Plushenko in April 2001, and having a calamitous performance at September’s Goodwill Games. Tarasova talked him out of it, and decided that her star pupil needed a sports psychologist to make sure he was in the right frame of mind to achieve his Olympic dream.
Enter Rudolf Maximovich Zagainov, psychologist to the stars.
Or, as many people in the Russian sporting world dubbed him, the Black Magician.
Zagainov’s grasp of the concept of professional ethics was nonexistent. He would help his clients, and then publish tell-all books detailing exactly what he did and what his clients needed. Vaitsekhovskaya called his personality “odious”, and she was far from alone in thinking so. His former client Sergei Bubka – who broke with him in acrimonious fashion – said Zagainov demanded every client adhere to three guiding principles:

1) You must hate your opponent; never give him a hand when you meet him.
2) One should strive for wealth, because wealth is power.
3) Go to the goal by any means, without regard to morality.

In the eyes of many, what turned Zagainov from an ordinary sports psychologist into a diabolical figure of Rasputinian malevolence was his reputation, and the stories of witchcraft that trailed in his wake. After Zagainov began publicly working with Yagudin, Plushenko recalled in his memoir Another Show that he received concerned letters from people, and that his mother was warned about the prospect of him being hexed by the psychologist’s magical powers. According to Vaitsekhovskaya, Zagainov's reputation derived from his involvement in the Soviet chess scene, where he became known as “the magician who hypnotised Anatoly Karpov” during his world title matches.⁴ At various points, he reportedly worked with top Soviet grandmasters Karpov, Viktor Korchnoi, Boris Spassky and Garry Kasparov, where he'd take the secrets of his past clients to his new employer for the right price.
Crucially, Plushenko’s coach actually believed that Zagainov had genuine magical powers. Mishin discussed why he thought so in his 2021 memoir The Secrets of the Ice:

"One incident allowed me to believe in Zagainov's extraordinary abilities. Many years ago, at a training camp in Leselidze, my eldest son Andrei suddenly developed a fever of 40°C. We did not know what to do. Rudolf Maximovich, who was at the training camp at that time, found out about it and volunteered to help. He sat down over Andrei and began to say something or make some gestures with his hands. As a result, the child's temperature dropped to normal in half an hour.”

Despite his own private beliefs about Zagainov's magical powers, Mishin was still publicly disdainful about Yagudin hiring him. Nevasport recalled how Mishin, as Salt Lake City approached, said that athletes who needed a psychologist were weak and didn't belong in elite sport.
By November 2001’s Cup of Russia, rumours were already swirling about how Zagainov’s appointment may have been a deliberate ploy by Tarasova to destabilise Yagudin’s greatest opposition. In a contemporary article, journalist Anna Raikova said that a possible explanation for Plushenko’s subpar long program performance may have been Zagainov trying “his charms” on Plushenko.
When asked about the Black Magician’s presence, Tarasova was more circumspect. She told Vaitsekhovskaya that she just needed someone who could enter the men’s locker room and be with Yagudin before competitions, and dismissively waved away the rumours without a care in the world:

“Let them talk.”

Black Magic Ritual

Salt Lake City 2002 arrived, and it was considered a foregone conclusion that Russia’s two leading men would be the only real contenders for the gold medal.
Skating to a medley of four different Michael Jackson songs within two minutes and forty seconds – “Earth Song”, “Childhood”, “Billie Jean” and “They Don’t Care About Us” – the most consistent jumper in the world promptly botched his first jump, crashing to the floor. Or crashing to Earth.
Plushenko gave a dramatic retelling of the moment in his memoir.

"I fell on a quadruple jump, which I know as well as the Lord's Prayer. It seems to me: you can wake me up in the middle of the night and I'll jump it without a single mistake.
Everything went great in training. And suddenly... going out for a quadruple jump, I saw Zagainov's silhouette. He was right across from me. I caught his heavy gaze.
I pushed off very well and flew out smoothly. But then something inexplicable happened.
It was as if someone ordered me: "Open up! Go to the landing!" And I obeyed, although it was still early. I still can't figure out where this signal came from, how it reached my brain.
After the Olympics, I replayed the video many times, my fall from the quadruple jump. In fact, I was in great shape at that moment. And I have never had such falls in my life. In any case, I couldn't turn around the wrong way. And I still have the feeling that I was dragged along by an incomprehensible force.”

The judges ultimately placed Plushenko in fourth after the short program, with several field-leading 5.9 marks for presentation, which some felt was excessively generous. American coach Frank Carroll snidely asked the Chicago Tribune whether it meant you could now get a 6.0 by simply standing up.
Plushenko would recover to finish in the silver medal position - fitting, given his shiny silver short program bodysuit - but Yagudin took the gold, with clean, difficult, well-executed, artistic performances to "Winter" in the short program and The Man In The Iron Mask in the long program. Zagainov sat with his client and Tarasova in the kiss-and-cry area, in place of choreographer Nikolai Morozov due to the official limit of two companions per performer. According to Tarasova, Zagainov had blackmailed her into allowing this, threatening to abandon Yagudin on the eve of the competition altogether if she didn't allow him to be present by the skater at all times.
It was this sort of behaviour that led to Tarasova's growing unease about Zagainov's methods: reportedly, she felt her job was to ensure that Yagudin was strong enough to always be in the right frame of mind for competition, while Zagainov wanted Yagudin to rely completely upon him.
Yagudin definitely embodied Zagainov's first maxim after the competition was over.

Bond Between Teacher And Student

It’s standard procedure for an Olympic event to be followed by a press conference, where the medalists answer questions. Usually, these are pretty low-key affairs – but usually, the media aren’t covering figure skating. So in a recipe for pure, undiluted chaos, the 2002 Olympics decided that this conference would be attended by each of the medalists and their respective coaches.
Predictably, it degenerated into a Russian farce from the moment it got underway. Throughout the whole press conference, ESPN noted bronze medalist Tim Goebel exchanging baffled looks with his coach Carroll, perhaps wondering if they'd both stumbled into a Chekhov play.
Yagudin had an axe to grind, after the years of pain, mudslinging and general scorn that his former coach had sent his way. He spoke at length to the world’s media about unnamed figures who didn’t believe in him, and how much he felt he’d improved as a skater since leaving Mishin – who he refused to mention by name – for Tarasova.
Mishin tried claiming a slice of the credit for Yagudin's triumph, saying that the audience could judge how much of the medal was owed to him and how much was owed to Tarasova, and that he was proud to have "two of my skaters" on the podium. Yagudin instantly shut that down, cutting in to say the medal belonged entirely to himself and Tarasova.
When asked about his emotions after the free program, Yagudin was less than conciliatory, as quoted in ESPN:

"I was like in a good dream. I just remembered how many hard times and happy times I had for four years. And how much crap was thrown in my face about how I am not such a good skater. I was keeping that within myself until I won. It was really hard, but that's what was in my life for four years. And I am so lucky to have such a good coach who changed me."

And asked by a Russian reporter for Express Gazeta whether he could forgive and forget, and make up with Plushenko and Mishin, Yagudin simply said “probably not, because my coach is Tatiana now.” That reporter wrote of later being accosted by Zagainov, who asked him “How much did Mishin pay you for this question?”
The Russian Olympic Committee planned to hold a celebration afterwards, to honour their new medalists and the coaches who worked with them. Supposedly, Yagudin made his excuses and didn’t show up. His actions were understandable, for Tarasova told Vaitsekhovskaya that Yagudin's triumph was considered an embarrassment for the FFKKR, and that foreigners literally asked her why the Russians would have preferred a non-Russian to win if it meant Yagudin didn't.
According to Zagainov (talking to Express Gazeta), a toast was made in honour of the triumphant Tarasova, who had celebrated her 55th birthday that week. Everyone up to and including Piseev stood, with the exception of Mishin – who gestured for Plushenko to remain seated too, as the entire room applauded Tarasova’s success. Zagainov and Mishin allegedly almost came to blows afterward, between what the psychologist saw as Mishin’s disrespect, and what the coach saw as Zagainov’s responsibility for Plushenko not winning gold.

Magical Dimension

The reason for Mishin’s rage can actually be seen in the Olympic broadcast: the unexpected presence of Zagainov rinkside, during Plushenko’s short program.
According to Yagudin, quoted in a 2020 Sport24 article, there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for this:

“Mishin claimed that in the short program Zagainov hypnotised Plushenko to make Zhenya fall on the quadruple jump. This is complete nonsense! Here's what happened. After my skate in the second warm-up, we were backstage. And when Zhenya was called onto the ice, we didn't know where to run to watch the performance of our main competitor.
We didn't have time to get up to the grandstands. So Tarasova ran in one direction to find the television, and Zagainov ran in the other and jumped out beside the rink, where the ice resurfacers came out during the break. He just happened to be in that spot. You know, accidentally!
Nevertheless, Zhenya and his entourage now had a logical reason to blame someone else for their troubles. What can I say? For God's sake, say what you want, if you really believe it and it makes you feel better."

According to Mishin, Zagainov’s presence was evidence of a diabolical plot by the perfidious psychologist to undermine Plushenko. Express Gazeta reported that Mishin complained to FFKKR president Piseev after the short program, who later spoke with Zagainov at length and at volume; Zagainov was subsequently absent from the rinkside during Plushenko’s free program. In a 2002 interview with Sport-Express, Tarasova mentioned that both Plushenko and Mishin were saying "they were influenced by the psychologist Zagainov".
In Mishin's own memoir two decades later, he still maintained that Zagainov was to blame for Plushenko’s defeat, in a very “I could say it, but…” fashion.

"I can't say with certainty that Plushenko's mistake, completely uncharacteristic of him, occurred because of the hypnotic influence of this man. But the episode, in which Zagainov stood behind Evgeni when he stepped onto the ice and continued to stand in that position for the entire program, raises questions. It is telling that his charge Alexei Yagudin had already performed and there was no reason for him to stay near the rink.
Only God may know what exactly happened then. Either the young psyche failed, or it was the pernicious influence of Zagainov, but Evgeni made a mistake, which was uncharacteristic for him. Never before had Plushenko performed a quadruple toe loop in such a way - as well as afterwards, by the way. I can only say one thing: being in the flight, at a good, confident push, for some reason he changed his mind to continue spinning, regrouped and fell face-first.”

In a way, Plushenko was probably fortunate that such a convenient scapegoat existed for his failure to win gold. Based on how Mishin handled Yagudin's Olympic errors in 1998, the coach might have otherwise told the press that Plushenko was an imbecile who chose to screw up on purpose.
Per Sport24, Yagudin thought that Mishin's whining about Zagainov's malignant presence was the sign of a hypocritical sore loser who couldn't handle his own tricks being turned against him.

"In fact, I can also tell you something about the evil spells with which my former coach tried to entangle me. This was the case, for example, at the 2000 European Championships in Vienna, which I lost to Zhenya via the vote of the Russian judge. After warming up, Zhenya skated first, and after a certain period of time - me. When I went into the locker room to not hear the noise of the stands and to get away from it all, I saw Mishin there. He, too, came into the locker room, sat across from me and, staring uninterruptedly into my eyes, moved his lips like a shaman. Every time I did a quadruple jump at all the competitions where Plushenko took part, Mishin stood by the boards. It was only at the Olympics that I noticed Mishin in his usual place and smiled at him."

As for the psychologist himself, he was even less charitable.

Thousand Knives

In April 2002, Zagainov publicly flayed Mishin in a merciless interview with Express Gazeta, giving what can only be described as a gloating monologue.

“But I never got tired of repeating that Plushenko is not a machine, and as soon as he starts to fall, he will break at once. Knowing perfectly well that psychologically Mishin is not able to support his athlete in a difficult situation, because he belongs to the category of cowardly coaches.”
Apparently, you are not too ‘gentle’ towards Alexei Mishin.
“On the contrary, I am extremely grateful to him. It was his amazing illiteracy that helped me set Yagudin up for victory. Professor Mishin's main mistake was that he frightened Plushenko... with me. When Alexei Nikolaevich found out that Tarasova turned to me, he said literally the following in one of his interviews: ‘We know the psychologist Zagainov from the Karpov-Kasparov matches, during which he was removed from the hall for hypnotizing his ward's opponent...’ When I read that, I laughed for a long time. And I told Lesha [Yagudin] that we have almost no reason to worry now. In my opinion, Mishin should have either not answered such a question at all, or turned everything into a joke.
I'm pretty sure, by the way, that it's time for Mishin to finish his coaching career. Today he's more of a businessman than an expert in figure skating. I saw his pupil at four tournaments this year, and not once was Plushenko at the peak of his form. And that is the art of coaching.
I don't see any particular results in the 30 years he has been in charge of Leningrad figure skating. What did a man who always had his own ice, a [university] department, and who has the most talented skaters from all over the country sent to him every year, manage to achieve? Raised the Olympic champion Urmanov, who only won because all his opponents fell? Raised the insanely gifted Evgeni Plushenko, who became world champion but won nothing in his Olympic season? Reached the point where Yagudin left him?”

In comparison, Tarasova's own public comments on the affair were tame.
And she didn't even hold back. When interviewed by Vaitsekhovskaya, Tarasova suggested several decidedly non-supernatural factors were responsible for Plushenko losing to Yagudin, including:

• Mishin's deliberate efforts to throw petrol on the Plushenko/Yagudin rivalry, culminating in daily interviews about Yagudin's flawed skating, which Tarasova felt were indicative of a "coaching psychosis" that Plushenko found "impossible to withstand".
  
• Poor Olympic season preparation from Mishin's team, as exemplified in the saga of Plushenko's long programs. The initial one - set to a medley featuring "El Tango de Roxanne" from Moulin Rouge! - was prepared "too late", before they went back to the drawing board and designed a new program to Carmen for Salt Lake City.⁵
  
• Mishin's myopic focus on intimidating the opposition through Plushenko's jumping superiority and rumoured quadruple Lutz jump, while ignoring what Tarasova observed to be consistent technical flaws in his jumping. Plushenko didn't perform the quadruple Lutz in either Olympic program.
  

Tarasova then offered a few final thoughts to Sport-Express, tinged with glacial disdain.

"In principle, it's not for me to discuss their work. I always respect other people's work. But I don't like it when they blaspheme mine. Each of us does what we can do. We did better. But they tried too. Although it was a complete defeat. Plushenko did not go to the European or World Championships. And as far as I know, he will go to Collins' tour where he will perform 90 times. And it is unlikely that he will refer to injuries."

Amazingly, it's still - by far - the most level-headed perspective among the three non-skaters, even with her calling Plushenko's season a total failure from start to finish.

Dark Magic Curtain

(Content warning: abuse)

Yagudin won the season-ending World Championships in Plushenko's absence, but it was the last competition he'd ever win. Chronic hip problems led to his retirement several months later. His reputation would be shattered among skating fans in the social media age, when he made some viciously bigoted public remarks about openly-queer skaters. One of his targets - America's Jason Brown - idolised Yagudin so much growing up that he once competed in an homage to Yagudin's "Winter" costume.
2002 was the last time Tarasova would coach an Olympic champion, and she gradually faded away from competitive relevance over time. The years have definitely loosened her tongue, and now she's skating's equivalent of the one loud-mouthed grandmother you have at every family gathering, interjecting her opinion on everything whether you want to hear it or not. This year alone, she's busied herself with speculation about the romantic status of a teenage girl and whether ice dancer Tessa Virtue wants to murder people.
Plushenko would remain with Mishin for his entire career, going on to win Olympic gold in 2006, and silver in 2010 (not "platinum"). According to Vaitsekhovskaya, Zagainov tried offering his services to Plushenko and Mishin in the lead-up to the 2006 Games, despite having called Mishin a hack and Plushenko a failure - he was turned down, and Plushenko took gold without the psychologist's assistance. He'd ultimately retire after the 2014 Olympics, and now works as a coach at the modestly-named "Angels of Plushenko" academy. His wife, Yana Rudkovskaya, has deep connections in the Russian underworld, making him a cross between a trophy husband and a mob wife; they're also hideously abusive parents to their son.
In 2007, Zagainov's reputation went up in smoke after a horrific scandal involving the death of one of his patients - 24-year-old cyclist Yulia Aroustamova - who was also the 67-year-old Zagainov's live-in domestic partner at the time. Vaitsekhovskaya said that it wasn't the first time Zagainov had preyed on one of his clients, mentioning a patient who lived with him in a civil marriage back in the mid-1980s. He would die in 2014, largely forgotten and unmourned.
Mishin is still relevant in Russian skating, despite being well into his eighties, and coaches the most recent Russian national men's champion. Fittingly, that skater's name is also Evgeni.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Endnotes

1: From a February 2002 ESPN article.
2: From a February 2002 Sports Illustrated article.
3: From a February 2002 ESPN article.
4: Zagainov was not the infamous hypnotist among Karpov’s delegation during the 1978 World Chess Championship in Baguio, however; that was Vladimir Zukhar. Hypnotism was clearly in fashion back then. Korchnoi's chosen defence against such threats was a pair of mirrored glasses, which would have been somewhat impractical in figure skating.
5: Tarasova doesn't explicitly mention this, but for context, Plushenko's Moulin Rouge! program got an abysmal reception when it was unveiled. Scrapping a planned Olympic program entirely and making a new one is always a decision of last resort, because it takes valuable time for athletes to train and become comfortable with performing it. Carmen was very much a "break glass in case of emergency" concept, with Mishin picking the safest of safe ideas for the Olympics after his first plan failed. Ironically, Yagudin (speaking to Vaitsekhovskaya in 2000) practically predicted this when he said it was inevitable that Mishin's skaters would perform to Carmen at some point; his own program to Bizet's opera was in the 1996-97 season.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9
It’s funny, in the age of the internet, the notion that a skating pair came out of nowhere is almost never a legitimate one. People who had followed ice dance in the Olympic season were already pointing to a young pair of Gabriella Papadakis/Guillaume Cizeron as ones to watch given their youth and promise. And really, by being featured in Virtue/Moir’s reality show nearly colliding with the Canadian pair, they already had exposure to the masses (please please note the heavy sarcasm in that sentence LOL)! The two had made a name for themselves on the junior circuit when they earned silver at junior worlds in 2013. They had a slightly slower rise up the junior ranks than the two couples who had been dominating dance on the senior level at the same time (they didn’t make it to the free dance portion of the 2010 Junior Worlds) but their steady improvements over their 4 junior seasons had some paying attention when they made their senior debut in the Olympic season. They later placed second at French nationals in the absence of French pair Pernelle Carron/Lloyd Jones before the Olympics. Although the young French pair tried to make the case that they should be sent to the Olympics instead, Didier’s disapproval of their coaching situation left them off the plane and with the threat of diverting funds away. Papadakis/Cizeron stuck to their guns though and followed when their coach Romain Haguenauer decided to leave Boucher-Zazoui and go to Montreal to join Dubreuil/Lauzon in establishing their burgeoning school.
Dubreuil, for her part, had been getting steady choreography requests, choreographing for Delobel/Schoenfelder and show programs for Virtue/Moir (I Want to Hold Your Hand for 2010-2011, Top Hat and Tails for 2014, Good Kisser for 2014-2015) among others. She and Lauzon were starting to also accrue some students, their most notable Sara Hurtado/Adria Diaz of Spain, who placed thirteenth at the Olympics. But Marie-France was lacking a little in a muse for her choreography to shine on the competitive scene. Papadakis/Cizeron came at the perfect time in that regard.
I think something that should be noted in the influence of how Papadakis/Cizeron would look on the ice was both the couple’s and Dubreuil’s admiration of Virtue/Moir. Dubreuil at the time had done an interview stating that her favorite skaters were Torvill/Dean, Gordeeva/Grinkov and Virtue/Moir; Cizeron himself did an interview where he said his favorite program of all time was Virtue/Moir’s “Great Gig in the Sky” (and their Pink Floyd junior free dance had to be the most obvious sign of this). Papadakis/Cizeron also reportedly watched the 2012 GPF from the stands to see Davis/White and Virtue/Moir skate in person; Haguenauer would later say that the French pair expressed appreciation for both couples but wanted to do something different on ice (fair enough). And when taken through that lens, most of their early styling and packaging makes sense.
Let’s take a moment to reflect on 2014 Worlds, which was just its own insanity. Davis/White and Virtue/Moir decided to bow out of those Worlds, which left Ilinykh/Katsalapov as pretty heavy favorites going in. Pechalat/Bourzat, who had previously claimed that the Olympics were going to be their last competition, also decided to hang on for Worlds in the effort to get a gold medal. In what ended up being a fail of epic proportions, Katsalapov just completely noped out of the twizzle section of the SD, which left Ilinykh/Katsalapov in a distant 5th going into the FD due to the element being invalidated. Instead, it was Cappellini/Lanotte in front (with a level 2 finnstep? I’d like to cry now) with WeavePoje in second and Pechalat/Bourzat in third, all separated by a combined point and a half. The free dance was somehow even more of a mess, with Ilinykh/Katsalapov pulling out a FD win that did not elevate them to the podium, Pechalat/Bourzat coming in a close second in the FD that did not change their placement at all, WeavePoje landing in third in the FD and second overall, and Cappellini/Lanotte somehow getting 4th in the FD and first overall by a mere 0.02 over WeavePoje and 0.06 over Pechalat/Bourzat. I’m sure you can imagine how happy Nathalie Pechalat was.
That said, the big news of the offseason was the split of Ilinykh/Katsalapov after a disappointing finish at Worlds that year. Even at Worlds, rumors had started to swirl about an incoming split but it wasn’t until a week after they placed off the podium that, according to Ilinykh, Katsalapov told her that he wanted to move on and thanked her for her contribution (direct quote btw). The couple proceeded to pair off with the respective halves of the split Victoria Sinitsina/Ruslan Zhiganshin pair. Everyone cried (it was me, I was the crier). Apparently the general director of RusFed was not at all pleased about the split.
On top of that, the ISU had voted to eliminate one of the compulsory sequences from the short dance, replacing it instead with a generic partial step sequence that would make up the remainder of the circle around the ice.
A fun subplot of the previous cycle was the American rivalry occurring for the second and third spots in the pecking order. Chock/Bates and the Shibutanis had been jostling to be considered the second-best dance team in America, with the added benefit of also being a competition between the former coaching partners of Shpilband and Zueva respectively. The post-Davis/White cycle caused this tense rivalry to come to a head early.
The beginning of the 2014-2015 season saw an incredible power vacuum, as the top four in Sochi had all either retired or split and Bobrova/Soloviev had to sit out the season due to her knee surgery. Pairs who had placed sixth through tenth at the Olympics were soon competing to be considered the top of the pile. It was the perfect environment for a team to go from buried in the lineup to the podium.
It was Chock/Bates and WeavePoje who appeared to rise to the top of the crop. Both couples had won their Grand Prix assignments and went into the Grand Prix Finals with the implication that whoever won would be the favorite for the World title. So when WeavePoje won their first major competition in a resounding 14 point win, most took that to mean that the Canadians would go into Worlds as the favorites. The real surprise came in Papadakis/Cizeron rising to bronze after a fifth-place finish in the short dance. And even as the gap closed considerably between WeavePoje and Chock/Bates at Four Continents, an alternative winner never really crossed the mind.
The Worlds in Shanghai were set to be a bit chaotic with the way the point gaps had closed, the ordinal shifting, and just the general post-Olympic power grab. But no one really was prepared for Chock/Bates to be leading the short dance. The team had thus far mostly been known for her presence on the ice, Chock able to embody characters with seeming ease. Their lifts were also incredibly innovative, following in the footsteps of the American team before them. Unfortunately though, their skating skills were not known to be the best, often struggling through step sequences, especially on her end when she’d struggle to maintain a deeper edge. Even with the move from requiring two compulsory sequences to just one, Chock/Bates as the leaders was…questionable. Papadakis/Cizeron, for their part, were down in fourth as their skating skills also came under scrutiny, WeavePoje got a lovely level 2 in their Paso Doble section, and Cappellini/Lanotte, whose edges were often shallow, were sitting in third. So truly, high standards abounded in this competition.
WeavePoje performed their “Four Seasons” free dance to compete for the gold. A criticism for the couple was that they appeared to be trying too hard to compose programs that fit what they believed to be World champion programs and abandoned their style in the process. Their free dance was lovely, truly; it was well skated in the step sequences and had great lifts. But the transitions were often side by side and the bland idea did them no favors. Of course, what really killed them was the extended lift. WeavePoje would earn their second World medal, and it would be bronze.
Chock/Bates did a free dance to “An American in Paris” that was able to cater to Chock’s strengths specifically in carrying the performance. The lifts throughout, especially that opening one, were brilliant. But a huge twizzle error, giving them a point lower in base score and poor GOEs (though somehow still all positive? Never change judges, never change), ruined the moment and their score, falling to second overall.
So it was with both surprise and shock that it was the 19 and 20 year old Papadakis/Cizeron skating to Mozart that won the World title. They scored six points higher with completely out of sync twizzles which really…just about sums up that Worlds. That said, their step sequences featured the close holds that Chock/Bates and WeavePoje had more or less neglected. Dubreuil was able to mask a lot of their weaknesses in her choreography, so kudos to that. There was a lot of room to improve for this team still: growing stronger in step sequences and incorporating more difficult lifts/the polish of said lifts. But it was easily the best of the night and was a huge promise of the potential for the team to come out with a free dance that seemed to take Virtue/Moir’s Mahler and put it through a contemporary lens. Dubreuil had finally found her own muses.
Which naturally meant that we wouldn’t see them skate again until Europeans the next year. Because really, when has a team done a lyrical type program in the IJS without us having to stop seeing them for months on end? A concussion for Papadakis left the top French team out of competition for nearly a year while she recovered, leaving the rest of the field to scramble to solidify themselves at second place.
At first, it looked like the results would be much of the same from the previous year, with the other skaters from the top 4 from Worlds all earning medals at Grand Prix Final. But all of that seemed to change at Four Continents, when WeavePoje slipped to third and it was the Shibutanis who took away the title. And while I don’t necessarily think one had to do with the other, the fact that WeavePoje had their worst performance of the season right after Virtue/Moir announced their comeback has to be one of the funniest damn coincidences of ice dance history.
Chock/Bates continued to stay near the top, their more lyrical free dance to “Concerto No. 2” the vehicle they were hoping would lead them to a World title. It was not to be though when they found themselves in third going into the free. By now, circular step sequences had started to cover the entirety of the rink rather than just a central circle as had been done in the previous year (leading me to believe there may have been a rules change? I’m not as well versed in that) which was not a help to Chock/Bates at all. Her skating looked especially weaker with more room that they would have to cover and their speed got exceptionally slower. The free also didn’t play to Chock’s strength as a performer and wound up feeling a little bland as a result. They would walk away with a bronze here, more or less happy.
The Shibutanis were on the come-up after nabbing a fifth place finish at 2015 Worlds (in costumes that looked like they raided 2007 Virtue/Moir’s closets, for shame Zueva). The 2015-2016 season saw them skating a free dance to the first part of what they claimed was a trilogy set to Coldplay music. A team that seemed to struggle with being siblings when it came to program concepts, hovering somewhere between it being too juniorish or too campy, finally hit their creative sweet spot with this free dance. The dance was emotionally mature, finally representing them as adults skating rather than a brother and his kid sister. They skated a little further apart than was normal, their speed was a little slow, but their twizzles and clean edges gave them the edge over Chock/Bates that year, marking the first time the siblings had finished ahead of their American rivals at Worlds.
It was Papadakis/Cizeron’s free dance to “To Build a Home” that would take home the World title that year though. It was a brilliant program that incorporated more contemporary dance into ice dance and of course their fluidity over the ice just improved the way that the choreography could be performed on ice. It’s honestly one of my favorites for the way that contemporary dance was incorporated into the step sequences that had had such preconceived ideas of how they were to be performed. That said…it boggles my mind how easy this program is compared with past World champion skates since the IJS had been introduced. In the past in the IJS, all skaters had done their one-foot skating section together, both in the diagonal and in the circular step, as it increased the difficulty for both skaters to generate speed while both were exclusively on one foot and would earn GOEs. Dubreuil’s choreography ended that, splitting the one-foot sections for both pairs onto two separate halves of the circular step (i.e. Papadakis did her one foot section first, they stroked a little together near the judges, then Cizeron did his one foot section) and then eliminating the one-foot section from the diagonal/midline step altogether (no really, this is an actual thing that happened, I don’t know how it was allowed). This obviously decreased the difficulty as speed would be easier to maintain if your partner was able to do easier stroking next to you (and if you’re doing easier steps yourself). On top of that, Cizeron skated two-footed for a good deal of the diagonal step, which isn’t disallowed but certainly colored my perception of the difficulty of this program when I noticed. When a skater was doing a twizzle during step sequences, their partner would often be at least a foot away, making the twizzle easier to complete without a close presence on the ice (and before someone argues, please tell me that this twizzle isn’t done while they’re at least a foot apart in the diagonal step). And the lifts were simpler by and large, but most of us can pick that out on a first watch.
And believe me, this isn’t a criticism of Papadakis/Cizeron specifically, it’s a criticism of the ways in which Dubreuil made choreography simpler at the expense of skating skills being the number one concern in ice dance (this goes for her choreography with Virtue/Moir too, believe me). A team that struggled with a Finnstep just two years prior would simply not have this meteoric rise if corners weren’t cut somewhere. But Papadakis/Cizeron were benefiting from it in spades, which colored the rest of the cycle and the programs to come. (I want to make it very clear, TBAH is honestly one of my favorite FDs of all time. This isn’t an attack, just an observation of the way skating difficulty was valued going forward in the form of Papadakis/Cizeron taking the top of the podium.)
At the Worlds presser after the win, a journalist asked all the medalists what they thought of Virtue/Moir coming back to the competitive ice: Shibutanis claimed they were only concerned with themselves, Chock stated that they were excited to see Virtue/Moir back on the ice but ultimately could only focus on themselves, and Papadakis expressed an endearing excitement at getting to skate in the same rink as the skaters she admired when she was young. Which more or less sums up the vibes of Virtue/Moir’s return to competitive ice.
Virtue/Moir decided to return to the competitive scene, announcing it on February 20, 2016, as a nod to the date that the free dance would be competed at the Olympics. They announced a new training site, opting to go with their former mentors at Gadbois. The move would put both World Champion winning skaters in the same rink, along with Hubbell/Donohue, who were competing to be America’s top skaters. And really, isn’t time always cyclical?
Excitement to see what Virtue/Moir would do on the competitive circuit rose when they debuted their short dance to Prince at Autumn Classic. The theme of the year, Hip Hop/Blues, was a new one and some didn’t know how it would work. And while Papadakis/Cizeron opted instead for a blues/lindy hop, Virtue/Moir embraced the challenge of doing something that they hadn’t done on competitive ice before. And it paid off big time, their short dance being the most acclaimed of the year and earning praise from audiences, commentators, coaches, and former competitors alike.
The return to competitive ice did not go smoothly however. After a loss to Chock/Bates in the free of Skate Canada (yes that’s a real result and it still boggles my ever-living skull), Virtue/Moir reportedly went to Dubreuil/Lauzon to express their disappointment, only to be reminded it was literally their first major competition back; Virtue/Moir backed off. Audiences were primarily excited to see Virtue/Moir and Papadakis/Cizeron face off at NHK Trophy but it wound up being more of a blowout than had been anticipated. Major errors in both portions of the competition left Papadakis/Cizeron a full 9 points behind Virtue/Moir when all was said and done (even Victoria Sinitsina’s blade slicing into Virtue’s calf couldn’t stop them).
The Grand Prix Final was much of the same, with Virtue/Moir earning the win over the French team after major errors followed them on the step sequences. Whether it was because the French team were nervous or just had a string of bad luck wasn’t certain, but it certainly wasn’t helping their case to be considered alongside Virtue/Moir. Also of note, the Grand Prix Final featured three American teams in the ranks, representing the close competition between the top three in the country.
After a Four Continents win, Virtue/Moir came into the Worlds riding high as heavy favorites. Their Prince SD broke the then-World record and, after a twizzle mistake from Cizeron, Virtue/Moir were in the lead by nearly 6 points, leading many to believe they had more or less locked up a third World title.
And of course, chaos reigned per usual. Hubbell/Donohue had been having a solid season, breaking into the top flight at Worlds for the first time in their careers and going into the free dance in a solid third (after a short dance to a mash-up of hip hop selections…my word their packaging choices). They were set to skate to a medley of love songs to try to earn their first ever World medal. The two were primarily known for their deep edges, their sizzling chemistry (honed by being exes), and for Hubbell’s strong power on the ice that kept in the North American tradition. Their move to Gadbois before the 2015-2016 season had given the pair life and a legitimate shot at being a top team in the World. But unfortunately, they were also headcases, stumbling at the biggest moments, as was the case here when Donohue fell towards the end of their skate in their twizzle sequence, effectively taking them out of medal contention as soon as the conversation for their inclusion had begun.
The Shibutanis meanwhile had been in fifth after the short dance, behind both Hubbell/Donohue and Chock/Bates. But with both teams making mistakes in their twizzle section, the consistency of the Shibutanis shone through. Their free dance to “Evolution” was admittedly a little too similar to their previous free dance to really stand out in my mind but the sure placement of each of their skates throughout the program and their clean twizzles (looking at you Americans) were able to earn just enough to bring home the bronze medal (somehow Bobrova/Soloviev were third in the free dance? What the actual…).
Papadakis/Cizeron rebounded from a tough season with a beautiful free dance set to “Stillness” which was in a similar vein as their previous two free dances. If I had to separate them out, I’d say this one was more avant garde? Like the free itself had a more abstract theme going for it compared with their other free dances at the time. The style of movement was similar however, which prompted some critics to question if they would ever do something a little different. I don’t think Moonlight Sonata really helped the case.
Virtue/Moir meanwhile entered the free dance with a lead so great, many thought that they would coast to a victory. Which of course is the kiss of death. The audience gasped as Moir stumbled out of the final twizzle in their circular step portion of their “Latch” free dance, splitting the judges on whether the stumble should count as a part of the circular step or as part of the transition, as the stumble was on the step out of circular step. Either way, Virtue/Moir rightfully lost the free dance but hung on for the overall gold, completing their first undefeated season in their careers. Virtue/Moir were going into the Olympic season looking stronger than ever, at least in winning perception.
The French…uh, the French were not happy. Papadakis was found liking tweets questioning, in French I might add, how a couple who “fell” could get the gold (she must have been conveniently forgetting that Cizeron cut his hand open the previous day when he couldn’t grab his blade for the twizzles). French federation president Didier vowed that Papadakis/Cizeron would be getting the gold in Pyeongchang, making some people nervous about judge fixing from the legend in judge fixing himself.
It was also around this time that Papadakis/Cizeron started to form their own narrative to take to the Olympics, likely to avoid the inevitable “legends vs the ones they inspired” narrative that would’ve taken root if they had continued to say that they grew up watching Virtue/Moir. So instead, the narrative soon became that they “didn’t really watch figure skating” growing up, didn’t even know Gordeeva/Grinkov when Dubreuil mentioned them, and instead were inspired by ballroom dancers in the contemporary sphere. I mean, hey, I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t want the aforementioned narrative either.
The Olympics were fast approaching and new programs were being constructed. The battle for bronze and the top American spot started to heat up between the Shibutanis and Hubbell/Donohue. Hubbell/Donohue’s skating skills were slightly superior, and they had easier choreography to showcase it (I jest a little. By this time the Shibs had started to mimic the Montreal construction of step sequences after having the Canton “one foot sections together” construction as late as 2016), which had some thinking that they could surpass the Shibutanis by the Olympics. But until that point, the Shibutanis seemed to be easing their way to an Olympic bronze. That was, until their free dance at Grand Prix Final was ranked last, earning them the bronze by a mere 0.6 over Hubbell/Donohue. The race was officially on.
The top two meanwhile were having their own battle. The two traded world records in combined score but small mistakes from Moir at NHK and small mistakes in the step sequences from Virtue left them unable to break the 200-point mark, ceding momentum to Papadakis/Cizeron in the process. Virtue/Moir decided that they would completely revamp their “Moulin Rouge” free dance to get more of an emotional impact and better contrast with the French free dance to Moonlight Sonata. Not gonna lie though, I actually really like the original version (and the fact that Virtue decided to fix Moir’s hair in the beginning of their diagonal step randomly).
The narrative that Virtue/Moir were more experienced and athletic skaters with musicality compared with the French team who were more fluid and lyrical had started the previous year but was gaining steam before the Olympics (Sandra Bezic at some point said Virtue/Moir were more fire and earth to Papadakis/Cizeron’s water and air and that feels apt). The Olympic competition was shaping up to be a battle of the legends vs the new, and everyone was fully prepared for a competition that legitimately could go either way (or you know, be influenced by Didier, who knows!).
The team event was competed for the second time. Controversy over the Shibutanis getting to perform both parts of the team event put both Hubbell/Donohue and Chock/Bates in sour moods, especially since Hubbell/Donohue were reigning national champs (but on a side note, why were either of these teams upset when they royally screwed up in their last major competition? Get consistent and you’ll get a look, geez). Virtue/Moir meanwhile got a huge boost in momentum from the media, who were enraptured by their free dance. The competitors with the closest battles were getting the exposure they needed before the big event.
But of course, we couldn’t have a clean and fun time. Virtue/Moir’s short dance was their best performance of it for the year, skating to a rock medley for their Latin rhythm (I blame them and P/C for this past season). A new World record score put the pressure on Papadakis/Cizeron. But the French would have a no good very bad time when Papadakis’ costume came undone around the neck. And because of new rules that gave deductions to a stopped program, the French pair soldiered on, both heavily distracted by what was happening (for obvious reasons). Props to NBC by the way for cutting extremely far away when it became obvious that Papadakis’ chest was on display; it’s the bare minimum but still. But outrage soon occurred by casuals and fans alike when the score came up, only 1.76 points separating the French from the Canadians; the highlight for me was Papadakis/Cizeron receiving +2s and three +3s (from the French, Russian and Ukrainian judges, surprise surprise) in GOE on twizzles that were visibly out of sync and featured a stumble. Fans became increasingly concerned that Didier’s threat the previous year was coming to fruition. Meanwhile Hubbell/Donohue beat the Shibutanis by a narrow 0.02 to claim third in the short dance; the Shibutanis earning only a level 2 on their rhumba is likely the place to point. My favorite part of the NBCSN coverage of the event, by the way, was a rare Tanith Belbin-White rant where she questioned why the technical panel was suddenly less strict on rhumba levels than they had been in the team event. We love you Tanith.
The free dance came with lots of pressure. Virtue/Moir exclaimed in an interview with NBC that they were somewhat shocked at the scoring given what they saw on the ice but said that they just had to focus on themselves. Papadakis exclaimed that the short dance was her absolute nightmare (and holy shit what a nightmare, so many props to her for pushing through that dance) meanwhile Hubbell/Donohue said that they would be going for the gold. So all teams in medal contention were going into the free dance with something to prove.
At the time, the order of the skaters would be randomly drawn, with the possible starting slot determined by where you placed (so for example, the top five skaters after the short dance could only skate in the last five slots but could skate anywhere from first to fifth in that group). So it was the Shibutanis who stepped onto the ice first among the medal contenders. Skating to the last program in their Coldplay trilogy, “Paradise,” the siblings had the skate of their life in both performance and skating. The program highlighted, in a lot of ways, how much they’d grown since the previous Olympics, able to properly convey emotional depths that they hadn’t prior. The twizzles toward the end of the free dance acted as an emotional high that brought the audience with them in their final elements. The building free dance proved to be effective for the Olympic moment but their free dance score was not a season’s best. They would have to wait out Hubbell/Donohue to know their fate.
Papadakis/Cizeron performed a free dance to “Moonlight Sonata,” which makes so much sense in the context of Dubreuil’s love of Gordeeva/Grinkov and her idea that Papadakis/Cizeron could be her own Gordeeva/Grinkov. Either way though, the free dance was brilliantly constructed (I’ll not continue my rant on the easier choreography because I’ll just yell until I’m red in the face talking about how Cizeron and Moir were two-foot skating the first half of the circular step and most of the back half of their midline/diagonal steps), hitting all of the major and subtle musical moments in the piece through the movement of their limbs, even outside of the movement of their blades. The lifts were simple but effective within the context of the rest of the dance. If there’s anything to critique in their portrayal though, it’s that they seemed a little too young to be doing something as heavy as Moonlight Sonata. I can’t help but think I’d rather have seen this free dance performed in Beijing. Either way though, the pair found their redemption from the previous day, creating their own Olympic moment for themselves. And the score reflected that, earning them a World record score that would put all the pressure on the Canadians.
It was very possible for Hubbell/Donohue to walk away with a medal when they stepped on the ice. Very possible. So possible in fact that it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when they proceeded to do everything in their power not to get that medal. Of course the story of their “Caught out in the Rain” program was Donohue’s fall at the absolute last possible moment. But minor errors in the twizzles, diagonal step, and stationary lift left points on the table that they couldn’t afford. Which is a shame really, since this one of the few programs that put the best of Hubbell/Donohue forward by emphasizing their power on the ice and exes energy. I think every day about an alternative reality where Hubbell/Donohue leaned more into this vibe with the rest of their programs. Alas. Either way, Hubbell/Donohue faced their scores with resigned smiles as it confirmed that they were 5 points behind the Shibutanis. The sibling pair were guaranteed a medal after a podium hiatus of 5 years between their first and second World medals. Life is weird sometimes.
Virtue/Moir came out onto the ice needing a score 3 points higher than they had ever scored before to win the gold medal and complete their comeback. No pressure. Their program to “Moulin Rouge” was already proving to be a hit with audiences but now they needed the judges to buy in too. And just as Virtue/Moir were prone to do, they delivered big on Olympic ice when it mattered the most. The two performed their best free dance of the season, skating as close as perfection as they could muster. The audience roar at the curve lift seemed to break the spell of tension that had overcome the rink and cheers rang out as Virtue and Moir looked at each other in disbelief after their ending pose. Side note, little 18-year-old me looked at the technical score in the corner and confidently concluded that they had done enough. And they had, with a personal best over 4 points higher than their score at Grand Prix Final, Virtue/Moir became only the second couple to earn two Olympic gold medals in ice dance, and the first to do it in non-consecutive Olympics. Articles calling them legends and the greatest of all time started circulating within minutes of the gold medals being placed around their necks.
With Gadbois’ gold and silver Olympic medals and gold and silver Worlds medals just a month later, they became the new nexus of ice dance talent after having just two teams of note four years prior (depending on how you view Hurtado/Diaz I suppose). The school had ushered in a new style of dance that leaned more heavily into contemporary movement, inspired by free dances of the past that had previously married fluidity and the IJS system. The school would soon become flooded with skaters looking to match the success of Papadakis/Cizeron and, to a lesser extent, Virtue/Moir and Hubbell/Donohue (I say lesser because Virtue/Moir’s success can be more attributed to the reputation built prior to them joining Gadbois).
Virtue/Moir retired as legends of the sport. And while I still put my ring into the hat of Torvill/Dean being the greatest ice dancers of all time, there’s no doubt the heavy, heavy imprint that Virtue/Moir left on IJS dance. The way that IJS dance has been approached, the way that fluidity and athleticism has been married, the way that quality of skating has gone up, all can be traced back to the Canadian couple. And while I wouldn’t say it was the end of an era in ice dance, as I feel that Virtue/Moir more just kept going into a new era, I would say their departure along with so many others that year marked the last of the couples who had influenced IJS dance the most, leaving the ice dance field entirely to the new generation of skaters. And I think that that’s a perfect way to conclude this history: acknowledging the legends of the past for their contributions to the sport while looking ahead to new faces emerging each year.
​
So that’s the end. I’ve decided 2019-2022 is simply too close to give a firm retrospective on. Plus how much COVID completely marred the cycle makes it difficult to really take too much away from it at this stage. So I’ll leave it at that. Thank you all so much for reading this passion project and for humoring me. Twas a fun ride. I want to thank all those who read this before I posted it (namely u/HopeofAkira for making historical fixes and u/AlternateVanity for making grammatical ones), all those who commented any small corrections that I hadn't known about, and for all those who engaged with this long, long post in the first place. For now, I am fin.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8
So, let me be clear here. The notion that America and Canada didn’t politic to get skaters of theirs to the top is…naïve. Since the ’98 and ’02 Olympics, the North American countries had been putting their skaters in places that would get them seen and get them respect. Making sure Belbin/Agosto stayed in Canton and had a good choreographer in Zueva to guide them? Not a coincidence. Virtue/Moir moving from their juniors coach to train in Michigan? Not a coincidence. Virtue/Moir being featured in a damn ISU compulsories video as novice skaters?! Not a dang coincidence. America and Canada had laid the groundwork for this moment, had built this from dust, and they were going to reap the rewards and maintain their newfound lead on the ice dance field, no matter what it took.
And that “maintain their lead no matter the cost” part came almost immediately. Whispers that the compulsory dance would be eliminated in the post-Olympic season started circulating double-time in the 2009-2010 season. Journalists worth their cookies asked for skaters’ thoughts throughout the season on whether they would enjoy that. As early as Trophee Eric Bompard in 2009, Tessa Virtue was giving her thoughts, stating that it would be weird to not have to train a compulsory but it would be “a nice treat” if compulsories didn’t have to be trained. By Worlds, journalists were asking all 3 medalists for a quote. Massimo Scali, who had just won the bronze medal at the 2010 Worlds (a full 25 points behind Davis/White if you can even believe that), said that he wasn’t a fan of the official vote to get rid of compulsories, stating that he’d miss them the next season. Moir and White, meanwhile, showed enthusiastic support, feeling that compulsories didn’t have particular place in senior competition, when footwork mastery should be assumed. And we can see each of their motivations: Moir wanting to eliminate compulsories to keep Virtue on the ice longer, White wanting them gone to close the gap on Virtue/Moir. But whatever their motivations, the compulsory dance was officially done going into the 2010-2011 season, and the results of combining the compulsory and original dances were fascinating.
One of the first glimpses of this new short dance was when Virtue/Moir performed theirs (albeit cutting out most of the specified Golden Waltz compulsory) at All That Skate LA in October 2010. The preview, coming a couple weeks before the Grand Prix season officially started, gave a glimpse at how the premiere coaches and skaters in the world were thinking of incorporating the compulsory in, with the sequences in order. This was not followed by everyone throughout the season though, as some skaters opted to start the compulsory at the second sequence, which was not the usual order of the Golden Waltz and often looked disjointed.
Of course, the preview of that short dance would be the last time that it would be performed for a while, as Virtue/Moir announced that a second leg surgery would keep Virtue out for the majority of the season. This time, however, Moir would also take a break from skating since both of them had skated throughout the summer in shows. Moir would later train with Emily Samuelson, who was waiting on Evan Bates to return to the ice from his own injury.
While Virtue/Moir were out, Davis/White leapt at the opportunity that was before them. Without another pair at their level, Davis/White rode an undefeated streak into Four Continents, which would serve as the first time the top North American teams would face off that season. Although Virtue/Moir won the short dance in their first outing of it all season, they had to withdraw in the free dance due to tightness in Virtue’s quad, leaving Davis/White to take home the victory and the momentum going into Worlds.
On top of an already transitional season, the 2011 Worlds were delayed and pushed to late April due to the tsunami in Japan making the original location of the Worlds impossible. The Worlds were moved to Moscow and the competition resumed. Virtue/Moir later said that the postponement had made the already long season for them feel even longer, leaving them near out of gas by the time the Worlds rolled around.
So let’s talk about the short dance for a second here because I think it is endlessly fascinating what some of these teams did. Virtue/Moir’s short dance that year won the two times it was performed in competition and Davis/White’s short dance either won or came second in its competitions, leading us to believe that these were the standards. And if there’s anything to take away in terms of their similarities, it is the incorporation of the full Golden Waltz sequence as it used to be performed in compulsories, the closed holds in transitions, and the seamless integration of the compulsory sections into the overall dance. A podcast from Flutzes and Waxels once pointed out that the short dance, as a whole, was nearly a failure because so many skaters and choreographers were just not mixing the two dances together well enough; but Davis/White and Virtue/Moir’s short dances became bastions, proof that the compulsory could very much coexist with the rest of the original dance requirements.
Around the rest of the field, Pechalat/Bourzat and Kaitlyn WeaveAndrew Poje incorporated their Golden Waltz by starting with the second sequence, starting and ending on the left side of the rink. The idea of starting a compulsory on the second sequence was not done again for the rest of the cycle (unless we’re counting the rhumba of the next year but the pattern is a repeating one done on each side of the rink…so not sure how reliant it is on order). The Russian pairs of Ekaterina Bobrova/Dmitiri Soloviev and new senior team Elena Ilinykh/Nikita Katsalapov incorporated their Golden Waltz in a really over the top way, skating to insanely dramatic music that had obvious musical cues for each movement…that also didn’t really match up with the rest of the programs. So basically, it was chaos out there.
Below the top two, Pechalat/Bourzat were making a case for themselves to be considered the third best team in the world. Their Grand Prix Final bronze in 2009 and silver in 2010 made them heavy favorites to grab the bronze behind the North American skaters, assuming everyone skated clean. The pair skated to a Charlie Chaplin medley to make their case for the bronze. The two were primarily known for their more avant garde and out of the box free dances as well as for their technical skill, their blades running over the ice with ease. They were unfortunately also known for their incredible inconsistency, which reared its head when the pair fell halfway through their circular step sequence. Ready to pounce on the mistake though, were the American pair making their senior debut, siblings Maia and Alex Shibutani.
How do I say this…the Shibutani free dance felt very juniorish as they skated to “Smile”…ironically also by Charlie Chaplin. There was no denying the difficulty for sure, but it’s almost as if Zueva/Shpilband weren’t anticipating the couple to be competing for a medal here given their packaging, almost presenting them as two kids having fun dancing together. But it was clean and the Shibutanis walked away from their Worlds debut with a medal in hand, medaling by a mere 0.24.
Virtue/Moir, meanwhile, were debuting their free dance on the biggest stage of the year, competing their Samba free dance in front of all judges and audiences to attempt the unthinkable: winning a World title at their first full competition of the year. There were so many innovative ideas here; the opening choreography and the circular twizzles were inspired, the rotational lift an idea lifted from Khokhlova/Novitski if we’re being honest. But Virtue/Moir sputtered out about halfway through, their lack of training and competition showing as the free dance with no real chance to receive criticism lost momentum just as Virtue/Moir themselves looked like they’d collapse on the ice. They took the silver medal, probably glad that the season that felt it would never end had finally come to a close.
Davis/White were competing not just for themselves but also for American history, aiming to be the first American ice dancers to win a World title. The pressure was high as they took the ice to perform their Tango free dance. The free was dynamic, as was their strength, while also helping them to build their emotional depth in the minds of the judges. Davis/White are nothing if not incredibly consistent and trained and this was a free dance that did not come with visible exhaustion halfway through. The program was also incredibly difficult, with the two skaters rarely separating in transitions and skating inches apart from each other in everything except where necessary (hi twizzles). Davis/White earned their long-awaited World title with smiles, both joy and relief etched on their faces. Not only was this the first time an American had won a World title, it was also the first time one coach had swept the podium and the first time North Americans had swept the podium. It was a statement much akin to the 1992 Worlds. Except this time, it appeared to mark the beginning of an era rather than the tail end of it. And speaking of statements, Virtue/Moir’s overall score of 181 was a full 18 points ahead of the bronze medalists. If ever a statement were to be made, the top North Americans clearing the rest of their competition away would certainly be one of them.
In the offseason, both Evan Bates and Paul Poirier split from their partners (and we never saw Emily Samuelson’s beautiful pointed toe again, I’ll never forgive you Evan) at just about the same time that Madi Hubbell split her partnership with her brother and the partnership of Piper Gilles/Zach Donohue fell apart (though Donohue had a brief partner in the 2010-2011 season). A game of musical partners took place that summer, as 2009 World Junior champion Madison Chock/Bates, Gilles/Poirier and Hubbell/Donohue all debuted on the senior ranks in the 2011-2012 season. Chock/Bates wound up in Canton while Hubbell/Donohue started training with Krylova and Pasquale Carmerlengo at Detroit Skating Club in Michigan, where Pechalat/Bourzat and WeavePoje were also training.
It was also during this time that the Fedor Andreev merry-go-round stopped at Meryl Davis, and the two were linked as early as that summer. For those less in the know, Andreev was Marina Zueva’s son and is famous for dating all of the top women in Canton, linked to Belbin around 2005 and Virtue around 2008. The going rumor is that Zueva tended to favor the woman currently dating her son and the years kinda to match up. I don’t really know how one maintains a friendship with your…partner-in-law (?) (How do you even describe the girlfriend of your skating partner, what’s that relationship?) and chief competitive rival during this but hey, we’re about to find out if she can maintain both relationships!
Virtue/Moir and Davis/White went into the 2011-2012 season as odds on favorites for medals. But now perception made it difficult to predict who would come out on top. At the 2011 Grand Prix Final, it was Davis/White who prevailed beating Virtue/Moir in the short dance after a Canadian fall and originally believed they had beaten the Canadian pair in the free dance as well. This was later rectified though, as a calculation error had misattributed the free dance win to Davis/White. The free dance result didn’t change the overall result though, and Davis/White went into Four Continents and Worlds with a slight edge.
Worth mentioning here, it was around this time that the ISU had had to have a chat with the judges as the number of 10s awarded in PCS was, in their opinion, growing to be absurd. The two pairs had earned 22 10s between them during the free dance at the Grand Prix Final, which was decidedly more than had been awarded to them at the 2010 Olympics (5 combined). It’s very easy to point fingers at the two couples for starting the craze of 10s thrown about in ice dance, with Virtue/Moir specifically being the first to ever earn a 10 at Skate Canada in 2009, and it honestly wouldn’t be wrong to do so. The two couples seemed to inspire all judges to willfully give out 10s like they were candy, and ice dance hasn’t really recovered in that department since. In any event, the judges seemed to heed the warning at Four Continents and Worlds that year but the warning mostly went out the window by the following season.
After a Virtue/Moir win at Four Continents, the World title was again up for grabs. The short dance at Worlds left Virtue/Moir in front by a hair with a performance that felt a little less erratic than Davis/White’s, with a Golden Skate article from the time calling Virtue/Moir’s skating “a class apart—even from their perennial rivals.” (side note, but both of them had circular non-touch midlines that year and I feel it isn’t used enough, that’s all) The margin was close though that it was anyone’s to win going into the free.
A fierce battle for bronze was occurring below the top two North American teams, as training mates WeavePoje and Pechalat/Bourzat skated it out. The Shibutanis had been dropped hard by the judges which allowed WeavePoje to have a breakout year of their own. Previously held behind Crone/Poirier, the separation of that partnership had allowed WeavePoje to finally make a bigger mark on the World stage. Their performance to “Je Suis Malade” was a signature moment for them, capitalizing on their chemistry and emotional skating. But the combination of a North American sweep just the previous year and the Worlds taking place in France was just too much to overcome. Pechalat/Bourzat took home the bronze medal by performing…it was campy alright, there’s no getting around camp in a free dance that requires the woman to be dressed as a mummy to her partner’s Pharaoh-like costume. But it was fun French camp and Pechalat/Bourzat were the stronger skaters when push came to shove. And honestly it feels like Pechalat may have deserved it for skating with a broken nose.
Davis/White skated a waltz free dance set to “Die Fledermaus” to attempt another “come from behind” win of the World title. The free dance was a bit of a departure for them, as the free dance required a little less emotional heavy-lifting than their previous free dances. But the style worked for them, as it didn’t require them to play off each other as much (oh my God someone’s gonna kill me for that one but it’s kinda true) and both were really able to capture the light-heartedness of the dance. They skated well, but both appeared confused when the score came up and it was well below their season’s best. Virtue/Moir took the ice after, skating to a free dance set to the music from “Funny Face” as a tribute to Tessa’s love of Audrey Hepburn. The free featured choreography meant to call to mind the movie musicals of the era. The free…was not the cleanest if we’re being straight up honest here. Stumbles by both Virtue and Moir in separate transitions (albeit ones where both simply needed to take an extra step to keep balance) gave an overall sloppier appearance than what one would expect from the winning free dance of the night. One need only look at the protocols to see the main reason Virtue/Moir pulled ahead: one extra level 4 in the diagonal step sequence, which gave them an extra 1.5 points in their base score. Even still, some were surprised that Virtue/Moir ended up a full 3 points ahead of Davis/White in the free dance when all was said and done.
Fractures in the Virtue/Moir and Davis/White friendship began to show after a couple years where it appeared healthy enough. At Grand Prix Final in 2011, Moir expressed his frustration at losing in the PCS marks, going on record saying that he thought he and Virtue were the most artistic ice dancers of the past 5 years. An article from Reuters was run in 2013 that implied that Davis/White were robbed of the 2012 World title but were too classy to say anything, in which both implied that they heavily disagreed with the results. But even with all that, they apparently still watched each other’s equipment during competitions. The duality of a rivalry truly.
On top of that, the Zueva/Shpilband partnership ended as most of their skaters were away for the summer holidays (which is what makes the timing of it all wilder). The split, which came in early June, was initially blamed on the “kids” of the rink (i.e. Virtue/Moir, Davis/White, Shibutanis) feeling that Igor wasn’t there for them anymore. But this was proved incorrect when it got out that Zueva and Shpilband’s relationship had started to go sour, to the point that the US Fed had been informed of the situation in April of that year. Zueva claimed that Igor wanted to open his own school without her; Shpilband claimed Zueva was no longer consulting him on practice times. But Shpilband was blindsided by his firing from the rink. Meanwhile, Charlie White’s mother claimed on Facebook (oh my god this is the most 21st century thing I’ve written since this series started, we’re truly in the modern age) that Zueva and Shpilband were using the couples as pawns in cross-fighting. Zueva claimed the top students in the rink, keeping both Davis/White and Virtue/Moir under her wings as well as the younger Shibutanis while Shpilband kept Chock/Bates. Rumors that USFS were funding Zueva’s legal bills swirled, with some suggesting that it may lead to preferential treatment for her top American couple.
Both couples went into the pre-Olympic season with something to prove, either in trying to reclaim a title or through keeping it when competing in their hometown. A second Battle of the Carmens was revealed as both Virtue/Moir and the Shpilband-coached Cappellini/Lanotte announced that they’d be skating to music from the ballet. Seeking outside help for their choreography, Virtue/Moir made sure it wasn’t really a battle.
The debut of the “Carmen” free dance was a mess and a half. When Virtue/Moir competed at Skate Canada in 2012, they won the short dance by a mere 0.01 points and stumbled several times through their free dance. While they would later attribute this to a lapse in retraining their muscles to keep Virtue on the ice longer, it was not a pretty sight. The free dance itself though, especially in its earliest form, was such an incredibly innovative free in terms of its step sequences, the bending of lift rules to play with the time limit for men lifting their hands above their shoulders, side-by-side choreography that felt like an early precursor to the choreographic sequence (for better or for worse) and the implied sexuality that was not something that had been seen in the top skaters. However, the free proved too difficult on Tessa’s legs and the step sequences were simplified in construction by the end of the year (by this, I mean the one-foot part of the diagonal step was switched to the middle rather than the end to prevent tired legs). I still mourn Skate Canada Carmen.
But as is implied with that description, Virtue/Moir were simply not even close to their best this season and it showed in every single competition, coming to a head when Virtue stopped halfway through their free dance at Four Continents from a leg injury after having a short dance lead. Davis/White meanwhile were hitting their stride and gaining momentum, winning every competition in the lead up to Worlds. Their free dance to “Hunchback of Notre Dame” was a bit of a return to form for them, going back to their warhorse roots. But now, their growth in conveying emotion on ice was apparent in the three years since they had done a more dramatic selection. And their consistency throughout all competitions was earning them the respect of the judges, who gave Davis/White the benefit of the doubt where Virtue/Moir were no longer. And it lead to the Americans nabbing a second World title in the town that their Canadian rivals were born in, as if to add salt to the wound. Davis/White were showing year over year improvements in all aspects of their skating where Virtue/Moir had plateaued, giving the Americans all of the momentum going into the Olympic year.
Further down, Bobrova/Soloviev earned a surprise bronze at Worlds. Coached by Zhulin, they skated to “The Man with the Harmonica” to give Russians some sense of hope that they could still medal at their home Olympics. I think it goes without saying though that Bobrova/Soloviev were not the strongest skaters at that event, skating incredibly far apart from each other during their step sequences, leaving many to wonder if the medal had more to do with politics than anything else. Cappellini/Lanotte’s “Carmen” placed fourth at this Worlds; although the Carmen was incredibly different, it was overall an enjoyable take. That said, their edges in step sequences were not the deepest, which is an interesting statement to make about an Igor team. It was around this time that the 2010 World Junior Champions Ilinykh/Katsalapov were starting to generate buzz as a team to watch after nearly beating Bobrova/Soloviev at Europeans. Ilinykh had previously trained in Canton by herself while she and Katsalapov split the first time and there’s a little bit of that influence in her (as well as the couple’s general love of Virtue/Moir shining in some aspects). Their free to “Ghost” maybe isn’t the best representation of their skill but their presence on the ice and overall skating skills were unmatched in their generation. The team featured beautiful knee bend…and let’s be real also Ilinykh, she was a goddamn star.
A disappointing Worlds left Virtue/Moir at a crossroads. Feeling like they were losing momentum going into Sochi, Virtue asked Zueva if she thought the pair could win another gold; Zueva couldn’t answer. At this point desperate, Virtue attempted to sway Moir to leave Canton for Dubreuil/Lauzon’s new camp. Moir dismissed the idea, feeling that their best chance at gold was with Zueva. The two also agreed to film the most campy and insane reality show in existence to try to reclaim their narrative; everyone needs to watch it. On another note, Tanith Belbin was suddenly left off the commentating team for NBC going into the Olympics after commentating through the 2011-2012 and 2012-2013 seasons. She was replaced by Tara and Johnny on NBCSN, likely in the interest of avoiding a very obvious conflict of interest. We were all the worse for it.
In other things happening in the background, after a slip down the rankings in 2013, Pechalat/Bourzat, who had by this time moved to Shpilband on French President Didier Gailhaguet’s insistence, were aiming to claim the bronze at the Olympics. However, a strong free dance from Ilinykh/Katsalapov was making the Russians a significant threat to that dream. It was at Trophee Eric Bompard, when Ilinykh/Katsalapov beat Pechalat/Bourzat in their home country, that the tide had officially shifted, regardless of what the Grand Prix Final standings were.
The debut of the team event at the Olympics allowed the major podium contenders in ice dance to take the ice ahead of the event and either gain or lose momentum in quick fashion. Pechalat/Bourzat’s no good very bad season continued when they scored behind Bobrova/Soloviev in the short dance of the team event…which is just such a choice. Virtue/Moir’s no good very bad Olympic cycle continued when Virtue’s huge twizzle error highlighted a short dance that scored 3 points behind Davis/White. The writing felt like it was on the wall when Virtue/Moir scored a whole 7 points behind Davis/White in the free dance.
The battle for the bronze commenced, with Ilinykh/Katsalapov, Pechalat/Bourzat, and Bobrova/Soloviev seeming to have the best chances. However, Bobrova/Soloviev ended up scoring well behind both pairs in the short dance, effectively taking them out of a clean competition. Pechalat/Bourzat’s free dance to “Le Petit Prince” was a bit of an obscure choice. But their skating skills and lifts, as well as charming choreography, made an obscure free dance into an enjoyable affair. Also have to admire the choice of green tights to appear more like a flower; would not recommend but I appreciate the dedication. Unfortunately for them though, even with such superior skating skills, the medal moment belonged to Ilinykh/Katsalapov. Their free dance to “Swan Lake” brought down the rink of Russian supporters with their innovative choreography to represent the ballet and striking lifts. Their youth, in a lot of ways, played against them here, as the depth of Swan Lake couldn’t be as appropriately conveyed as an older couple may have been able to do; their step sequences were also a tad on the slower side. But man if they weren’t an attention-grabbing pair. The free dance felt like a promise of the future for this team, almost insisting that they were not going to be a pair to be ignored. Of course…that future would never come (can you tell how upset I am about this every damn day of my life?).
Prior to the Olympics, Zueva insisted that her top students skate to Russian composers. So it was after many a struggle that Virtue/Moir settled on Alexander Glazunov’s “Seasons” to be their second Olympic moment. Let me get this out of the way, the free dance was beautifully skated. Their step sequences were as good as they could be, their lifts were solid, it was the quality of an Olympic champion. Belinda Noonan even concluded on air that she thought the Canadians were the better skaters, but wondered if their program would be enough. To which I say that this free dance was bland as all hell and a disservice to the team that skated it. This was a silver medal winning skate, and unfortunately the Canadians knew it. The Canadian media attempted to push the story that judging deals had been made prior to the competition but, frankly, most people with eyes would score this free dance lower on PCS alone. Virtue/Moir would later claim that they felt Zueva had abandoned them in the lead up to the Olympics…this free dance alone would probably drive me to believe it.
In contrast, Davis/White skated to “Scheherazade,” using this music in a tribute to Blumberg/Seibert before them and shaping it to be a free dance of victory rather than the bittersweet feeling that a missed podium had clouded the previous program with. This program was brilliantly constructed, the choreography just so insanely perfect it boggles the mind that the same woman choreographed both the silver and gold medalists’ programs. An article said it best: you never questioned whether or not Davis/White would make a mistake and you never questioned the overall quality and cleanliness. Their consistency had bought them the respect of the judges and their free dance with perfectly timed choreography, unbelievable athleticism, and fantastic interpretation was deserving of the gold medal.
(Also shout out to the Russians for not only giving the two North American couples lukewarm applause when their scores came up but also playing Ilinykh/Katsalapov’s music for most of Virtue/Moir’s entrance to the rink for the Victory Ceremony and the first few moments of Davis/White’s entrance. So classy.)
I’m also of the opinion that this free dance was the last of a sort of bygone era of warhorse, dramatic free dances akin to that of the late 90s and early 00s. There’s likely a reason that the styling of Davis/White never really took root in anyone following them. And I’ve concluded that it’s likely due to how dated the concept is in dance both on and off the ice. Davis/White’s free dance seemed like an homage to Tarasova and Linichuk’s styling, almost dated as soon as they skated it, with repeated movements making up the transitions as best as they could in a system that didn’t allow that same freedom. Perhaps some couples concluded they couldn’t perform a type of warhorse in the same way and avoided it; perhaps the ice dance field had gone past the need for those types of free dances. Who knows really.
When Virtue/Moir and Davis/White dipped out of Worlds and Cappellini/Lanotte stood on top of the podium in their place. It felt like the end of an era. An era that will likely never see its equal in North American dance representation. There aren’t really enough ways to say how much Davis/White and Virtue/Moir shaped the sport in the four biggest years of their rivalry. They set the standard for athleticism and performance quality in IJS ice dance, clearing most of their competitors by 20 points at Worlds each year and forcing everyone to either follow suit or be left behind. Their striving for both perfection and innovation was admired. They never did the same thing twice, never took a year off of mixing up their elements, their program concepts, or both (and yes of course Zueva had a huge hand in this too, it was a collaborative effort). And while none of their records stand anymore, there is simply no skater today who can say that they are completely without the influence of either couple. And in a sport that was so heavily dominated by Russians for most of its history, I think that’s beautiful.

Senior:

Men: Dmitry Aliev, Petr Gumennik, Artem Kovalev, Andrey Mozalev, Alexander Samarin and Evgeny Semenenko.
Reserve: Mark Kondratyuk, Makar Ignatov.
Women: Sofia Akatieva, Kamila Valieva, Anastasia Zinina, Sofia Muravieva, Adelia Petrosyan, Elizaveta Tuktamysheva.
Reserve: (Haven't published)
Pair skating: Alexandra Boikova/Dmitry Kozlovsky, Anastasia Mishina/Alexander Gallyamov, Evgenia Tarasova/Vladimir Morozov, Yasmina Kadyrova/Valery Kolesov, Natalia Khabibullina/Ilya Knyazhuk, Ekaterina Chikmareva/Matvei Yanchenkov.
Reserve: Yulia Artemyeva/Alexey Bryukhanov, Maria Dybkova/Alexey Khvalko, Elizaveta Osokina/Artem Gritsaenko.
Ice dancing: Elizaveta Khudaiberdieva/Egor Bazin, Vasilisa Kaganovskaya/Valery Angelopol, Ekaterina Mironova/Evgeny Ustenko, Elizaveta Pasechnik/Maxim Nekrasov, Sofya Tyutyunina/Andrey Bagin, Elizaveta Shanaeva/Pavel Drozd.
Reserve: Sophia Leontieva/Daniil Gorelkin, Alexandra Prokopets/Alexander Vaskovich.

Junior:

Women: Alina Gorbacheva, Maria Gordeeva, Veronika Zhilina, Nadezhda Ponteleenko, Lyubov Rubtsova, Sofia Titova.

It is interesting to look back over the last 40 years and how often the first World Champion of a quadrennial held on to win the Olympic Gold.
1981 to 1984-
Scott Hamilton- yes
Denise Biellmann- no, retired soon after worlds
Vorobieva & Lisovski- no, retired before 1984 Olympics. dropped to 5th at 1982 worlds as well.
Torvill & Dean- yes
​
1985 to 1988-
Alexander Fadeev- no, came 4th at 88 Olympics
Katarina Witt- yes
Valova & Vasiliev- no, came 2nd at 88 Olympics
Bestiamanova & Bukin- yes
​
1989 to 1992-
Kurt Browning- no, came 6th at 92 Olympics skating injured
Midori Ito- no, came 2nd at 92 Olympics
Gordeeva & Grinkov- no, retired temporarily after 1990 worlds
Klimova & Ponomarenko- yes
​
1993 to 1994-
Kurt Browning- no, came 5th at 94 Olympics
Oksana Baiul- yes
Brasseur & Eisler- no, came 3rd at 94 Olympics behind 2 reinstated pros, so possible (tho not certain) they win under normal circumstances.
Usova & Zhulin- no, came 2nd at 94 Olympics
​
1995 to 1998-
Elvis Stojko- no came 2nd at 98 Olympics
Lu Chen- no, came 3rd at 98 Olympics
Kovarikova & Novotny- no, retired soon after 95 worlds
Gritschuk & Platov- yes
​
1999 to 2002-
Alexei Yagudin- yes
Maria Butyrskaya- no, came 6th at 2002 Olympics
Berezhnaya & Sikhardlidze- yes
Krylova & Ovsiannikov- no, retired soon after worlds due to her back injury.
​
2003 to 2006-
Evgeny Plushenko- yes
Michelle Kwan- no, withdrew from 2006 Olympics injured
Shen & Zhao- no, came 3rd at 2006 Olympics
Bourne & Kraatz- no, retired soon after 2003 worlds.
​
2007 to 2010-
Brian Joubert- no, had a disaeterous finish at 2010 Olympics
Miki Ando- no, came 5th at 2010 Olympics
Shen & Zhao- yes
Denkova & Stayviski- no, retired soon after 2007 worlds
​
2011 to 2014-
Patrick Chan- no, came 2nd at 2014 Olympics
Miki Ando- no, came 6th at Japanese Nationals and failed to make Olympic team
Savchenko & Szolkowy- no, came 3rd at 2014 Olympics
Davis & White- yes
​
2015 to 2018-
Javier Fernandez- no, came 3rd at 2018 Olympics
Elizaveta Tuktamysheva- no, finished way down in pack at 2018 Russian Nationals and did not make Olympic team
Duhamel & Radford- no, came 3rd at 2018 Olympics
Papadakis & Cizeron- no, came 2nd at 2018 Olympics
​
2019 to 2022-
Nathan Chen- yes
Alina Zagitova- no, retired about a year later.
Sui & Han- yes
Papadakis & Cizeron- yes
​
So 14 of 44 managed it.

Merry Christmas everyone! And with Japanese and Russian Nationals over, the next exciting events on the horizon are Canadian and American Nationals!
I would argue that US Ice Dance is the most exciting discipline this season, and u/summerjoe45 already did a great overview at the possible rankings, but I wanted to do a deeper dive into each of the teams. It would be impossible to give an adequate understanding of ice dance without talking about the coaches and politics behind it, so this is part one of the series on US Ice Dance, covering the coaches and a bit of the history of US Ice Dance.

Arctic Edge - Canton, Michigan: Marina Zueva and Igor Shpilband (Defunct)

Past Notable Teams: Tanith Belbin / Ben Agosto, Tessa Virtue / Scott Moir, Meryl Davis / Charlie White, Maia Shibutani / Alex Shibutani
Starting the list off with the now-defunct school of Marina and Igor. Even though this school no longer exists, any guide to American ice dance would be wholly incomplete without describing the school that turned it into a powerhouse in the first place.
Marina Zueva rose to fame in Russia for choreographing programs for Ekaterina Gordeeva / Sergei Grinkov, and she's widely seen as one of the best choreographers in the sport. As many say, "Marina Zueva programs are forever." Some of her masterpieces include Virtue/Moir's 2010 Mahler Olympic Free Dance, Virtue/Moir's 2008 Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Davis/White's 2014 Scheherazade, and many many more. She started coaching in the United States in the 90s, but the era really kicked off when she teamed up with Igor Shpilband in the early 2000s.
They had their major breakthrough with Tanith Belbin / Ben Agosto. Belbin/Agosto put American ice dance on the map, as they were the first American ice dance team to medal at Worlds and won silver at the 2006 Olympics. They were almost unable to go to the Olympics because Tanith is Canadian, and it required special Congressional approval with the backing of one of Michigan's senators to get Tanith citizenship in time.
At the same time that Belbin/Agosto were succeeding at the senior level, Marina and Igor also had two extremely promising junior teams, the American team of Meryl Davis/Charlie White and the Canadian team of Tessa Virtue/Scott Moir. Both these teams became incredibly successful, with the two teams occupying the top two spots on the 2010 Olympic podium. Not only did they have their marquee senior teams, Marina and Igor also had many junior teams who were achieving great success, including Madison Chock/Greg Zuerlein and the Shibutanis. Arctic Edge reached the peak of its power at 2011 Worlds, where their teams occupied all three spots on the podium.
Things came crashing down quickly, as in June 2012, Marina abruptly fired Igor. It's still incredibly unclear as to what was happening between the coaches for everything to get so icy. Their relationship was so toxic that Igor later sued Marina, and several of their skaters were deposed in the lawsuit. Everyone involved signed NDAs, so we will never really know exactly what happened.
After Igor left Canton, Marina continued as the main coach for Davis/White, Virtue/Moir, and the Shibutanis. Davis/White won the 2014 Olympics and retired, while Virtue/Moir felt like Marina wasn't in their corner and did not return to her during their comeback. The Shibutanis won bronze at the 2018 Olympics, and Marina moved from Michigan to Florida. Now, Marina is essentially soft-retired, as her only senior team is the Japanese team of Kana Muramoto/Daisuke Takahashi.
The success of the Arctic Edge training camp is what made American ice dance relevant and their streak of successful teams inspired many other American skaters to switch to ice dance. Despite all this success, it's super important to mention that Marina and Igor ran an incredibly toxic training environment. Each coach is known for picking favorites. Marina's son, Fedor, dated Tanith, Tessa, and is now married to Meryl. It was pretty disturbing to see how Marina's favored team switched from Belbin/Agosto to Virtue/Moir to Davis/White depending on which partner her son was dating at the moment. The teams that were out of favor were given worse programs and just generally less attention.
They were also incredibly toxic towards the women in their school. Tessa Virtue has an eating disorder while training with Marina and Igor. They were very much subscribers to the idea that ice dance women should be as thin as possible. After Belbin/Agosto left Marina and Igor, Tanith was told by their new coaches to gain muscle, which improved their skating skills and made lifts easier for Ben because Tanith was more capable of holding herself up.
Marina and Igor's Arctic Edge Academy is dead, and it's probably for the better that it is, considering how toxic the training environment was, but it has also left an undeniable legacy on US ice dance. None of the other coaches on this list or any of the current teams be where they are without the legacy of Arctic Edge.

IAM - Montreal: Marie-France Dubreuil, Patrice Lauzon, and Romain Haguenauer

Current American Teams: Madison Chock / Evan Bates, Kaitlin Hawayek / Jean-Luc Baker
Past American Teams: Madison Hubbell / Zachary Donohue
The most powerful and famous school on this list, it would be hard to follow ice dance without getting to know the Ice Academy of Montreal. Ice dance fans have affectionately dubbed the coaches as jacket collectors, since they have team jackets from seemingly ever single federation. They got on the map when Papadakis/Cizeron won their surprise World title in 2015, and gained even more attention when Virtue/Moir came back to competition in 2016 and chose to train with them. Hubbell/Donohue also switched to training at IAM in 2016.
After their success at the 2018 Olympics, where they almost swept the Olympic podium, IAM really became the United Nations. So many teams announced that they were moving to Montreal that it almost became a meme format. Having teams from every federation really helped push Montreal ahead in the political game. Just looking at SkatingScores.com gives a pretty clear picture as to which judges favor Montreal teams, and it lines up almost identically with teams from federations who are coached by IAM.
With the additions of Chock/Bates and Hawayek/Baker, IAM swept the top 3 places of the US podium for the entire quad after 2018. Despite all this success, there is of course some backlash to IAM. The most common complaint is that they aren't good at teaching the technical side of ice dance. The technically proficient teams at IAM are generally the teams who were strong technically before moving.
IAM also commonly face the complaint that they have too many teams and thus aren't able to truly devote their time to all of them. This is not something that any IAM team has complained about, and IAM has managed to avoid the favoritism problems that come up when one coaching team has so many teams. They are very transparent to their teams about ice-time and coach-time, which is probably a major reason why this has not been an issue. However, even if time is divided evenly, it is humanly impossible for all thirty teams to get precisely equal attention from their coaches, and it is often clear from the program quality when the coaches felt more inspired by certain teams compared to others.
IAM is also undeniably one of the healthiest coaching environments that has come out of skating (which admittedly isn't saying much). Many of the female ice dancers have talked about feeling more secure in their bodies and just gained so much more self-confidence from training at IAM and the philosophy that the coaches have. It is also very sweet that many of the skaters at the school are close friends despite being direct competition (see Madi Chock and Madi Hubbell getting matching tattoos).
However, IAM is obviously still not perfect. In a documentary earlier this year, Gabi Papadakis talked about how unsupported she felt by the coaching team and her partner during a really tough time for her mental health. IAM has also had a somewhat disturbing amount of concussions among their female ice dancers (both Madison Chock and Kaitlin Hawayek have had concussions while training in Montreal, though Madi Chock's wasn't a training injury).
If you're interested in learning more about IAM, because what I wrote only scratches the surface, the Olympic channel filmed a docuseries called On Edge which followed 6 of the IAM teams (Papadakis/Cizeron, Hubbell/Donohue, Chock/Bates, FeaGibson, Fournier-Beaudry/Sorensen, and Smart/Diaz) across their Olympic journey in the 21-22 season. It's a great look into their training/competitive lives.

IAM - London, Ontario - Scott Moir, Madison Hubbell, and Adrian Diaz

Current American Teams: Christina Carreira / Anthony Ponomarenko
Most ice dance fans didn't quite know what to make of IAM - London when it was announced in early 2021. On the one hand, many fans were very excited to see how Scott Moir, arguably the greatest ice dancer of all time, would do as a coach. However, it did feel interesting that IAM - London was supposed to be a subsidiary school of the already well-known IAM - Montreal. Plus, Scott Moir had extremely limited coaching experience, and when IAM - London started, they didn't have any senior teams. At first, many perceived IAM - London to be somewhat of a feeder school for IAM - Montreal.
IAM - London got their first major senior ice dance team when Christina Carreira / Anthony Ponomarenko announced their switch to Scott Moir after the pandemic season. With the additions of Madison Hubbell and Adrian Diaz to the coaching team after the 21-22 season, IAM - London is starting to find its footing. It's still a very new school trying to find its identity, and its teams have not gotten the same political boost that the teams at the Montreal school get, but they're definitely on the right track.

MIDA - Canton, Michigan - Charlie White, Tanith White, and Greg Zuerlein

Current American Teams: Caroline Green / Michael Parsons, Emily Bratti / Ian Somerville, Katarina Wolfkostin / Jeffrey Chen, Molly Cesanek / Yehor Yehorov, Angela Ling / Caleb Wein
MIDA was announced in early 2022 to much fanfare and hype. They are located in the same arena where Marina and Igor had their legendary ice dance school, which catapulted North American ice dance into the spotlight. Tanith White is one half of the partnership which put American ice dance on the map, the first ever American ice dance team to medal at the Olympics. Charlie White is one half of the greatest American ice dance team of all time, winning gold at the 2014 Olympics. Greg Zuerlein may not have the same competitive accolades as Charlie and Tanith (though he's certainly no slouch, having won 2009 Junior Worlds with Madison Chock), but he's the most experienced coach of the three. After retiring, Greg coached with Igor Shpilband for years, before moving to coach at another school on this list that I will talk about later, WISA. Thanks to his year coaching at WISA, MIDA have been able to take many teams who have left the Maryland school.
Their first team was Bratti / Somerville, who found quick success in the American ice dance field last year, placing fifth and getting an assignment to Four Continents. In the off-season, they poached three more American ice dance teams, Cesanek/Yehorov, Wolfkostin/Chen, and their biggest coup, Green/Parsons.
Still, it's hard to know what to make of MIDA. They're such a new school that they don't have an identity yet. Obviously, many ice dance fans hold a lot of affection for the coaches from when they competed, but MIDA is really just one big question mark because it's still so new. The programs they've given their teams this season haven't been standout, but this is also their first full season. Overall, it's hard to know how MIDA is going to turn out.
They do look like the school that's most likely to challenge Montreal's dominance largely because they could be anything, and their coaches have such a strong competitive reputation. They also seem dedicated to providing a healthy coaching environment for their students, but again, it's too soon to say whether that's been created or not.

WISA - Leesburg, Virginia - Alexei Kiliakov and Elena Novak

Current American Teams: Lorraine McNamara / Anton Spiridonov, Diana Davis / Gleb Smolkin
Previous American Teams: Caroline Green / Michael Parsons, Molly Cesanek / Yehor Yehorov, Lorraine McNamara / Quinn Carpenter, Angela Ling / Caleb Wein, Katarina DelCamp / Ian Somerville, Rachael Parsons / Michael Parsons, Caroline Green / Gordon Green
This is the school that probably had the most off-season drama in the last year. For many years, the Wheaton Ice Skating Academy was located in Wheaton, Maryland. They moved to the Ion Training Center in Leesburg, Virginia a few years ago, but are still largely referred to as WISA by fans. WISA has been one North America's ice dance powerhouses, particularly in the junior field, for a while. However, this team is also known for failing to achieve senior success due to bad packaging and general mismanage.
The quintessential team that probably shows how they mismanage is Lorraine McNamara/Quinn Carpenter. A very talented junior team, they were the 2016 Junior World Champions. After this win, instead of moving up to seniors, they decided to stay in juniors for another season. This essentially killed any momentum that they had, as the next season, they finished 7th at Junior Worlds and were surpassed by their training mates, Rachael Parsons/Michael Parsons.
Despite bad packaging, they are able to train extremely technically skilled ice dancers. Some of the teams with the best skating skills in the USA come from WISA. WISA seemed to finally find senior success last season when Caroline Green / Michael Parsons won Four Continents with a creative and well-received free dance and almost made the Olympic team.
And then the drama of the summer happened. You may have noticed that Green/Parsons are no longer training at WISA and that Davis/Smolkin, a team who may or may not be American, are now listed as training with them. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Diana and Gleb were vocally opposed to the war, and since Diana was born in the United States, she has American citizenship. She and Gleb have always trained in America, and especially once the Russians were banned, there was a lot of speculation that Diana and Gleb were going to switch federations to represent USFSA.
They left Igor, and then went to train at WISA. Alexei Kiliakov is one of Eteri's old ice dance partners, which is probably why he was willing to take them despite the fact that Diana and Gleb are very controversial. There's speculation that part of the reason Caroline and Michael left WISA so late in the off-season is the Diana/Gleb drama. Regardless of why, it's definitely a massive blow to WISA that their marquee senior team left them.
As of now, Diana/Gleb have not switched federations, and they have vocally said that they are not going to. However, they did get married right after the invasion, leading to speculation that they're trying to get Gleb an American green card. They have also not competed at a single Russian competition this season. What Diana/Gleb plan to do is anyone's guess, but as many can probably tell from the number of teams in US Ice Dance, switching to USFS would probably be a strategic blunder.

Novi Ice Arena - Novi, Michigan - Igor Shpilband and Pasquale Camerlengo

Current American Teams: Eva Pate / Logan Bye, Emilea Zingas / Vadym Kolesnik
Previous American Teams: Madison Chock / Evan Bates, Christina Carreira / Anthony Ponomarenko, Katarina Wolfkostin / Jeffrey Chen, Diana Davis / Gleb Smolkin, Avonley Nguyen / Vadym Kolesnik
Marina may be retired, but Igor is still in the business. After getting fired by Marina in 2012, Igor set up shop down the street at Novi Ice Arena with some of the teams that chose him over Marina (most notably Chock/Bates). Getting fired by Marina didn't change any of Igor's training methods, and Igor has a very specific style of team that he tries to curate. He expects a small woman who is performing and is carried around the ice by a stronger male partner. This has created a pretty toxic environment at Novi as well, and the sheer list of teams which have left Igor over the years to find healthier training environments and more success is pretty staggering.
Igor also heavily plays favorites and is incapable of balancing the needs of all his teams. After splitting from Marina, his preferred team was Chock / Bates for years, until they left him in 2018. Carreira/Ponomarenko were then his focus for another year before he found the heir to the Chock/Bates style in Nguyen / Kolesnik. After N/K split, he went all in on his partnership with Eteri Tutberidze and is an underrated aspect of why Davis/Smolkin were able to get such crazy scores in the 21-22 season. Igor is still a political machine. Davis/Smolkin left him at the end of the 21-22 season, and he seems to have found his new favorites in Zingas/Kolesnik.
Ice dance fans also joke that Igor is very "eco-friendly". He loves to recycle programs from old teams, and while Marina Zueva programs may be forever, Igor is not a creative genius. Chock/Bates skated to Rachmaninoff in the 2015-16 season, and then in the 2019-20 season, he gave the Rachmaninoff piece to Nguyen/Kolesnik. Chock/Bates skated to Dr Zhivago in the 2012-13 season, and CPom showed up in 2020-21 skating to Dr Zhivago. He even copies from programs that he didn't help choreograph, as Davis/Smolkin showed up last season with a Moulin Rouge program just like Virtue/Moir's 2017-18 free dance. Any original programs he comes up with are hardly original, as it's usually just a warhorse.
In 2019, Pasquale Camerlengo joined the coaching team at Novi. Pasquale is also a famed ice dance coach, as he used to coach at the Detroit Figure Skating Club and was the coach of Hawayek / Baker. But, he's no better than Igor when it comes to body positivity or healthy coaching environments. I will definitely talk more about it in my deep dive on Hawayek / Baker, but Kaitlin Hawayek has talked about her old coaches would encourage her to lose weight.
There just aren't many positive things to say about Igor. His teams routinely leave him because of his vile training methods, and he's mostly useful because of his politicking, but he's nowhere near as powerful as he was in his heyday.

Hello everyone!
I created this forum for Ekaterina Gordeeva and Sergei Grinkov fans to unite and discuss their stunning figure skating!

Anyone have any good ice skating recommendations? I haven’t read one before. I just discovered the two gold Olympic wining pair skaters Sergei Grinkov and Ekaterina Gordeeva. Their love story is so beautiful but ended tragically. I just finished watching a film/documentary on their lives together and now I’m in tears. I need a good ice skating romance - happy ending is a must. Thank you!

I HAVE NOTHING is a show about amateur abilities and enormous ambitions. The returnable series follows Carolyn Taylor (BARONESS VON SKETCH) on her eternal quest to escape the familiar and pursue her wildest dreams. Even when she doesn’t have the talent or skills (or basic knowledge) to realize them.
Season One is fuelled by her (unhealthy) obsession with the 1988 Calgary Olympics. The season follows Carolyn on a quixotic quest to choreograph the perfect full length pairs figure skating routine to Whitney Houston’s 1992 iconic and hit song “I Have Nothing”. What begins as a light hearted, nostalgic comedy quickly morphs into a high stakes, real life mission - with a few wild detours along the way. The season culminates in an exhibition performance of Carolyn’s routine, performed by professional skaters in front of an audience of discerning figure skating fans and Olympic heavyweights.
Skating legends such as Sandra Bezic, Brian Orser, Kurt Browning, Paul Martini, Barbara Underhill, Katarina Witt, Tara Lipinski, Kristi Yamaguchi, Adam Rippon, David Pelletier, Ekaterina Gordeeva, Elladj Baldé, Elizabeth Manley and other gold medalist athletes will be part of this show as well as award winning comedian, actor and writer Mae Martin.
WHEN? - NOVEMBER 3 2022 - EVENING TAPING TIMNG TBC (ESTIMATED 530PM - 8PM)
WHERE? CAA Centre - Sports and Entertainment Complex - BRAMPTON, ONTARIO
TICKETS ARE FREE!!
EMAIL [audience.team@blueantstudios.com](mailto:audience.team@blueantstudios.com) your name, how many tickets you would like to request!

Men: Gumennik, Kolyada, Kondratyuk, Mozalyov, Samarin, Semenenko.
Women: Valieva, Muravyeva, Petrosyan, Trusova, Tuktamysheva, Shcherbakova
Pair: Akopova\Rachmanin, Boykova\Kozlovsky, Mishina\Gallyamov, Pavlyuchenko\Khodykin, Tarasova\Morozov
Dance: Morozov\Narizhny, Sinitsina\Katsalapov, Stepanova\Bukin, Khavronina\Cirizano, Khudaiberdieva\Bazin, Davis\Smolkin
Reserve team:
Kostornaya, Usacheva, Khromykh,
Aliyev, Ignatov, Yerokhov,
Kadyrova\Kolesov, Mukhortova\Evgeniev,
Khabibullina\Knyazhuk, Tyutyunina\ Bagin.
Junior girls: Sofia Akatieva, Alisa Dvoeglazova, Veronika Zhilina, Elizaveta Kulikova, Sofia Samodelkina, Kseniia Sinitsyna, Gordeeva Maria Junior reserve Alina Gorbacheva, Anastasiia Zinina, Sofia Titova
Novice girls: Maria Zakharova, Taisiya Korobitsina, Lyubov Rubtsova, Taisiya Shcherbinina, Veronika Yametova Novice reserve Elizaveta Labutina, Nadezhda Ponteleenko
Junior boys: Artem Kovalev, Nikolai Kolesnikov, Gleb Lutfullin, Kirill Sarnovskiy, Nikolai Ugozhaev, Ilya Yablokov Junior reserve Andrei Anisimov, Vladislav Dikidzhi
Novice boys: Fedor Zonov, Lev Lazarev, Mikhail Polyanskiy, Ivan Ramzenkov, Grigory Fedorov, Arseniy Fedotov Novice Reserve Maksim Belyavskiy, Arseniy Dimitriev, Mikhail Tikhonov
Junior dance: Vasilisa Kaganovskaia/Valeriy Angelopol, Sofia Leonteva/Daniil Gorelkin, Alisa Ovsyankina/Matvei Samokhin, Ekaterina Rybakova/Ivan Makhenonosov, Elizaveta Pasechnik Junior reserve: Sofia Kachushkina, Mark Volkov, Ekaterina Mironova/Evgeni Ustenko
Novice dance: Sofia Aleksova/Ilya Vladimirov, Arina Gorshenina/Ilya Makarov, Anna Kolomenskaya/Artem Frolov, Elizaveta Maleina/Grigoriy Rodin, Anna Rumak/Gleb Goncharov, Alexandra Shinkarenko/Vladislav Mikhailov Novice reserve: Anna Shcherbakova/Egor Goncharov
Junior pairs: Anastasia Egorova/Rodion Marinskiy, Ekaterina Petushkova/Evgeni Malikov, Elizaveta Romanova/Valeri Nazarov, Varvara Cheremnykh/Daniil Butenko, Ekaterina Chikmareva/Matvei Yanchenkov, Maiia Shegai/Igor Shamshurov Junior Reserve: Sofia Marinina/Nikita Finokhin, Alisa Rodionova/Alexei Karpov

Competição Internacional
Longas-Metragens
Freda Gessica Généus, França, fic., 2021, 93′ Ghost Song Nicolas Peduzzi, França, doc., 2021, 76′ El gran movimiento Kiro Russo, Bolívia / França / Suíça / Catar, fic., 2021, 85′ How to Save a Dead Friend Marusya Syroechkovskaya, Suécia / Noruega / França / Alemanha, doc., 2022, 90′ Kim Min-Young of the Report Card Jae-eun Lee / Jisun Lim, Coreia do Sul, fic., 2021, 94′ Mato Seco em Chamas Adirley Queirós / Joana Pimenta, Brasil / Portugal, fic./doc., 2022, 153′ Medusa Anita Rocha da Silveira, Brasil, fic., 2021, 127′ Pedro Natesh Hegde, Índia, fic., 2021, 109′ Proyecto fantasma Roberto Doveris, Chile, fic., 2022, 97′ Soy libre Laure Portier, França, doc., 2021, 78′ Unrueh Cyril Schäublin, Suíça, fic., 2022, 93′
Curtas-Metragens
Are We There Yet Lazar Ivanov, Suíça, fic./exp., 2021, 11′ Au revoir Jérôme! Adam Sillard / Chloé Farr / Gabrielle Selnet, França, anim., 2021, 8′ Le Boug Doug Théo Jollet, França, fic., 2020, 26′ Can Gardell Florencia Aliberti / Sílvia Subirós, Espanha, fic., 2021, 22′ El día que volaron la montaña Alba Bresolí, Espanha, doc., 2022, 28′ Displaced Samir Karahoda, Kosovo, fic./doc., 2021, 15′ Dog’s Field Michalina Musialik, Polónia, anim., 2020, 12′ Escasso Gabriela Gaia Meirelles / Clara Anastácia, Brasil, fic., 2022, 16′ Fantasma Neon Leonardo Martinelli, Brasil, fic., 2021, 20′ Five Minutes Older Sara Szymańska, Polónia, anim., 2021, 6′ Handbook Pavel Mozhar, Alemanha / Bielorrússia, doc., 2021, 26′ Handstand Ovsanna Shekoyan, Arménia, fic., 2021, 15′ Have a Nice Day Forever Tatiana Delaunay, Noruega, fic., 2021, 20′ Hierophany Maria Nitek, Polónia, anim., 2021, 4′ I Am Trying to Remember Pegah Ahangarani, Irão / República Checa, doc., 2021, 16′ Intermezzo Kim Lêa Sakkal, Alemanha, 2021, 49′ Jeudi, Vendredi, Samedi Arthur Cahn, França, fic., 2021, 19′ Lucienne dans un monde sans solitude Geordy Couturiau, França, fic., 2021, 31′ Mistida Falcão Nhaga, Portugal, fic., 2022, 30′ Un mois après la nuit Héloïse Fressoz, França, fic., 2021, 22′ North Pole Marija Apcevska, Macedónia do Norte / Sérvia, fic., 2021, 15′ The Parent’s Room Diego Marcon, Itália, anim., 2021, 10′ Precautionary Measure Ika Schwander / Lizzy Deacon, Reino Unido, fic./exp., 2021, 14′ Sierra Sander Joon, Estónia, anim., 2022, 16′ Some Kind of Intimacy Toby Bull, Reino Unido / França, doc., 2021, 6′ Starfuckers Antonio Marziale, Estados Unidos, fic., 2021, 15′ Steakhouse Špela Čadež, Eslovénia / Alemanha / França, anim., 2021, 10′ Upwards Tide Daniela Zahlner, Áustria / Reino Unido, exp., 2021, 6′ Urban Solutions Arne Hector / Luciana Mazeto / Minze Tummescheit, Alemanha, doc./exp., 2022, 30′ The Watchers Sandro Souladze, Geórgia, fic., 2021, 27′
Competição Nacional
Longas-Metragens
Águas do Pastaza Inês T. Alves, Portugal, doc., 2022, 61′ Atrás Dessas Paredes Manuel Mozos, Portugal, doc., 2022, 64′ Frágil Pedro Henrique, Portugal, fic., 2022, 99′ Mato Seco em Chamas Adirley Queirós / Joana Pimenta, Brasil, Portugal, fic., doc., 2022, 153 Rua dos Anjos Maria Roxo / Renata Ferraz, Portugal, doc., 2022, 84′ Super Natural Jorge Jácome, Portugal, fic./doc./exp., 2022, 85′ O Trio em Mi Bemol Rita Azevedo Gomes, Portugal / Espanha, fic., 2022, 127′ Périphérique Nord Paulo Carneiro, Portugal / Suíça / Uruguai, doc./fic., 2022, 72′ Viagem ao Sol Ansgar Schaefer / Susana De Sousa Dias, Portugal, doc., 2021, 107′
Curtas-Metragens
Antes de Mim, o Fim Inês Luís, Portugal, doc., 2022, 30′ Às Vezes os Dias, às Vezes a Vida Janine Gonçalves, Portugal, fic., 2022, 26′ Azul Ágata de Pinho, Portugal, fic./doc., 2022, 20′ O Banho Maria Inês Gonçalves, Portugal, doc., 2022, 7′ By Flávio Pedro Cabeleira, Portugal, fic., 2022, 27′ Um Caroço de Abacate Ary Zara, Portugal, fic., 2021, 20′ Cemitério Vermelho Francisco Lacerda, Portugal, fic., 2022, 10′ Comezainas Mafalda Salgueiro, Portugal, doc./anim., 2022, 12′ Domy + Ailucha, Cenas Kets! Ico Costa, França / Portugal, doc., 2022, 30′ Idade Óssea – Um Filme em Sete Quadros Isabel Aboim Inglez, Portugal, anim./exp., 2022, 20′ Mistida Falcão Nhaga, Portugal, fic., 2022, 30′ Ocelot Bernardo De Jeurissen, Portugal / França, fic., 2021, 21′ Presente Francisco Valente, Portugal, fic., 2022, 14′ Raquel Duarte Amaral Netto, Portugal, doc., 2021, 16′ Subir e Sumir Francisco Queimadela / Mariana Caló, Portugal, exp., 2022, 16′ Tornar-se um Homem na Idade Média Pedro Neves Marques, Portugal, fic., 2022, 22′

Novíssimos
A Monte Mariana Guarda, Portugal, fic., 2020, 26′ Broto a Broto Óscar Alexandre Da Silva, Portugal, exp., 2021, 6′ Catástrofes Naturais Margarida Pinto da Fonseca, Portugal, exp., 2021, 6′ Fiquei na Praia Francisca Alarcão, Portugal, fic., 2022, 12′ Iara Carolina Rosendo, Portugal, fic., 2021, 8′ Mapa Lourenço Crespo, Portugal, fic., 2022, 10′ Milagre de Agualva-Cacém Ricardo Guimarães, Portugal, doc./exp., 2021, 13′ Morrer à Beira do Rio Miriam Pedrozo, Portugal, anim., 2022, 3′ Mulher da Minha Gente Nicole Noia, Portugal, doc., 30′ Registos Lourenço Ferreira Pinheiro, Portugal, doc./exp., 2021, 14′ Sónia Maria Moreira, Portugal, doc., 2022, 13′ Tindergraf Júlia Barata, Portugal, fic./anim., 2021, 28′

Silvestre
Longas-Metragens
1970 Tomasz Wolski, Polónia, doc., 2021, 70′ Camuflaje Jonathan Perel, Argentina, doc., 2022, 93′ Cette maison Miryam Charles, Canadá, fic., 2022, 76′ Convenience Store Michael Borodin, Rússia / Eslovénia / Turquia, fic., 2022, 106′ Lxs desobedientes Nadir Medina, Argentina, fic., 2022, 62′ Detours Ekaterina Selenkina, Rússia / Países Baixos, fic., 2021, 73′ The Girl From Dak Lak Mai Huyền Chi / Pedro Roman, Vietname / Espanha, fic., 2021, 86′ Nous, étudiants! Rafiki Fariala, República Centro-Africana / França / Congo / Arábia Saudita, doc., 2022, 83′ Red Africa Alexander Markov, Rússia / Portugal, doc., 2022, 65′ Saving One Who Was Dead Vaclav Kadrnka, República Checa, fic., 2021, 90′ Sonne Kurdwin Ayub, Áustria, fic., 2022, 87′
Fora de Competição
Coma Bertrand Bonello, França, fic., 2022, 80′ Cow Andrea Arnold, Reino Unido, doc., 2021, 94′ Incroyable mais vrai Quentin Dupieux, França / Bélgica, fic., 2022, 74′ Retour à Reims (Fragments) Jean-Gabriel Périot, França, doc., 2021, 84′ Rimini Ulrich Seidl, Áustria / França / Alemanha, fic., 2022, 114′ The Souvenir: Part II Joana Hogg, Reino Unido, fic., 2021, 107′
Curtas-Metragens
At Least I’ve Been Outside Jan Soldat, Áustria, doc./exp., 2021, 5′ Bird in the Peninsula Atsushi Wada, França / Japão, anim./exp., 2022, 16′ By Flávio Pedro Cabeleira, Portugal, fic., 2022, 27′ Churchill, Polar Bear Town Annabelle Amoros, França, doc., 2021, 38′ Constant Sasha Litvintseva / Beny Wagner, Alemanha / Reino Unido, doc./exp., 2021, 40′ Cucumbers Leonid Shmelkov, Rússia / França, anim., 2021, 16′ Une embuscade en suspens Simon Queheillard, França, exp., 2021, 17′ Glass Life Sara Cwynar, Estados Unidos, doc., 2022, 19′ How Do You Measure a Year? Jay Rosenblatt, Estados Unidos, doc., 2021, 29′ Iizuna Fair Sumito Sakakibara, Japão, anim./exp., 2021, 12′ Masques Olivier Smolders, Bélgica, doc./exp., 2021, 23′ Nosferasta: First Bite Adam Khalil / Bayley Sweitzer, Estados Unidos, fic./doc./exp., 2021, 33′ Penalty Shot Rok Biček, Croácia / Eslovénia / Áustria, fic., 2021, 15′ Punctured Sky Jon Rafman, Estados Unidos, fic., 2021, 21′ El sembrador de estrellas Lois Patiño, Espanha, exp., 2021, 25′ Sekundenarbeiten Christiana Perschon, Áustria, doc./exp., 2021, 14′ Sideral Carlos Segundo, Brasil / França, fic., 2021, 15′ Triforium Jayne Parker, Reino Unido, doc./exp., 2021, 8′ Will My Parents Come to See Me Mo Harawe, Alemanha / Áustria / Somália, fic., 2022, 28′
Foco Silvestre Light Cone
AI(Love) Takahiko Iimura, Japão, exp., 1963, 10′ All You Can Eat Michael Brynntrup, Alemanha, fic./exp., 1993, 5′ Allers venues Vivian Ostrovsky, França, doc./exp., 1984, 12′ Broadcuts Claudio Sinatti, Itália, 2000, 7′ The Catalogue Chris Oakley, Reino Unido, 2004, 5′ Classic Lesbian Films: Dyketactics Barbara Hammer, Estados Unidos, exp., 1974, 4′ Debris Giuseppe Boccasini, Itália / Alemanha, 2017, 11′ Dialogue: A Portrait of Slavoj Žižek Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, México, 2019, 8′ Dream Work Peter Tscherkassky, Áustria, 2001, 11′ Ecce Homo Jerry Tartaglia, Estados Unidos, exp., 1989, 7′ Eût-Elle été criminelle… Jean-Gabriel Périot, França, 2006, 9′ Fragmants Neozoon, Alemanha, 2019, 5′ Journal Intime Jean-Gabriel Périot, França, doc./exp., 2000, 3′ Journalités 1 Frédérique Devaux, França, doc./exp., 1995, 34′ Like a Passing Train 1 Kohei Ando, Japão, 1978, 3′ Miles Yann Beauvais, França, doc./exp., 1983, 3′ Mit Mir Kerstin Cmelka, Áustria, doc./exp., 2000, 3′ No Film Michael Brynntrup, Alemanha, 2000, 1′ Notebook Marie Menken, Estados Unidos, doc./exp., 1963, 10′ Or Anything at All Except the Dark Pavement Théodora Barat, França, 2011, 6′ Prelude [n:ja], Áustria, 2007, 3′ The Scary Movie Peggy Ahwesh, Estados Unidos, fic./exp., 1993, 9′ Sexe – Thym Nathalie Harran, França, doc./exp., 1993, 1′ Sleepy Haven Matthias Müller, Alemanha, fic./exp., 1993, 15′ Solitary Acts #4 Nazli Dinçel, Estados Unidos, exp., 2015, 8′ Steve Hates Fish John Smith, Reino Unido, 2015, 5′ Thank You, I Have Been Very Pleased Mara Mattuschka, Áustria, fic./exp., 1987, 2′ The Dieter Kovacic / Billy Roisz, Áustria, 2015, 13′ Thèmes et variations Germaine Dulac, França, doc./exp., 1928, 9′ The Very Eye of the Night Maya Deren, Estados Unidos, 1959, 15′ Walt Disney’s Ex Prod Olivier Fouchard, França, anim./exp., 1998, 3′ Yo-Yo Rated Derek Woolfenden, França, 2006, 20′ You Be Mother Sarah Pucill, Reino Unido, fic./exp., 1990, 7′

IndieMusic
Anonymous Club Danny Cohen, Austrália, doc., 2021, 83′ Batida Apresenta: The Almost Perfect Dj Pedro Coquenão, Portugal, doc./exp., 2021, 32′ Cesária Évora Ana Sofia Fonseca, Portugal, doc., 2022, 94′ A Escuta Inês Oliveira, Portugal, doc., 2022, 55′ Italo Disco. The Sparkling Sound of the 80s Alessandro Melazzini, Alemanha, doc., 2021, 62′ Laurent Garnier: Off the Record Gabin Rivoire, Bélgica / Reino Unido, doc., 2021, 89′ The Lost Record Alexandra Cabral / Ian F Svenonius, Estados Unidos, doc., 2021, 76′ Love, Deutschmarks and Death Cem Kaya, Alemanha, doc., 2022, 90′ Meet Me in the Bathroom Dylan Southern / Will Lovelace, Reino Unido, doc., 2021, 105′ Nothing Compares Kathryn Ferguson, Reino Unido / Irlanda, doc., 2022, 97′ Patti Smith, Electric Poet Sophie Peyrard / Anne Cutaia, França, doc., 2022, 53′ Rewind and Play Alain Gomis, Germany / França, doc., 2022, 65′ Songs for Drella Ed Lachman, Estados Unidos / Reino Unido, doc., 1990, 58′ Sonosfera Telectu Carlos Mendes / Ilda Teresa Castro / Vítor Rua / Vasco Bação, Portugal, doc., 2022, 110

IndieJúnior
Alasca Oxana Kuvaldina, Rússia, anim., 2020, 7′ L’amour en plan Claire Sichez, França, 2021, 15′ O Beijo Clemence Pogu, França, fic., 2021, 11′ Uma Casa Veronika Zacharová, República Checa, anim., 2016, 5′ Contos de Água Salgada Alexandra Petit / Antoine Carre / Martin Robic / Rodrigo Goulão de Sousa, Tamerlan Bekmurzayev, França, anim., 2021, 9′ Dentro Yann Chapotel, França, exp., 2021, 6′ Um Dia Lá Fora Ana Horvat, Croácia, anim., 2021, 11′ Estrelas no Mar Seung-Wook Jang, Coreia do Sul, anim., 2021, 6′ A Fantástica Competição de Voos John Croezen, Países Baixos, anim., 2021, 6′ O Fato de Mergulho de Klingert Artur Wyrzykowski, Polónia, anim., 2021, 20′ Guarda de Honra Edmunds Jansons, Letónia, anim., 2021, 6′ História de um Urso Gabriel Osorio, Chile, anim., 2014, 10′ Itchy o Camelo: Basquetebol Anders Beer / Ph Dallaire, Canadá, anim., 2021, 1′ Laços Toril Kove, Noruega, anim., 2017, 9′ Lobo Julia Ocker, Alemanha, anim., 2016, 4′ Luce e o Rochedo Britt Raes, Bélgica, anim., 2022, 13′ Mais Cedo ou Mais Tarde Jadwiga Kowalsa, Suíça, anim., 2007, 5′ O Ninho Sonja Rohleder, Alemanha, anim., 2019, 4′ O Nosso Porquinho Jaromír Plachý, República Checa, anim., 2021, 5′ Oktapodi Julien Bocabeille / François-Xavier Chanioux / Olivier Debarre, França, anim., 2007, 2′ Olá Estranho Julia Ocker, Alemanha, anim., 2021, 6′ Omar e Pincette Julien Sulser, Suíça, anim., 2021, 7′ Onda de Calor Fokion Xemos, Grécia, anim., 2019, 7′ O Papagaio de Papel Martin Smatana, República Checa, anim., 2019, 13′ Patrulha e as Sementes de Pára-Quedas Clémentine Campos / Inès Bernard-Espina / Mélody Boulissière, França, anim., 2021, 6′ O Pequeno Princípe Zoïa Trofimova, França, anim., 2002, 6′ Pêra em Queda Leonid Shmelkov, Estónia, anim., 2017, 2′ Pincéis de Cerda Quentin Haberham, Países Baixos, anim., 2021, 2′ Piratinha Ornella Macchia / Bruno Tondeur / Margot Reumont / Gwendoline Gamboa / Hippolythe Cuppilard, Bélgica, anim., 2017, 3′ Um Plano para o Amor Claire Sichez, Estónia, anim., 2021, 15′ O Polvo Julia Ocker, Alemanha, anim., 2016, 4′ Rino do Rock Verena Fels, Alemanha, anim., 2013, 2′ O Senhor Noite Tem um Dia de Folga Ignas Meilunas, Lituânia, anim., 2016, 2′ Ser Grande Da-young Jeon / Seo-a Han / Min-gyung Kim, Coreia do Sul, anim., 2019, 4′ Sobre uma Mãe Dina Velikovskaya, Rússia, anim., 2015, 8′ Sons da Realeza Filip Diviak, República Checa, anim., 2020, 15′ Sozinho no Elevador Anastasia Papadopoulou, Grécia, anim., 2021, 4′ Superpessoa Philip Watts, Austrália, anim., 2017, 1′ O Último Dia de Outono Marjolaine Perreten, Suíça, anim., 2019, 7′ URSA – A Canção da Aurora Boreal Natalia Malykhina, Noruega, anim., 2021, 10′ Ursinho Silencioso Māra Liniņa, Letónia, anim., 2021, 5′ Vermelho Chen Yang, Alemanha, anim., 2020, 7′ Os Viajantes Gauthier Ammeux / Valentine Baillon / Benjamin Chaumeny / Alexandre Dumez / Lea Finucci / Marina Roger, França, anim., 2017, 8′ Vizinhos Jonas Geirnaert, Bélgica, anim., 2004, 10′ Yaren e o Sol Renate Raman / Joren Slaets, Bélgica, fic., 2021, 19

Retrospectiva Doris Wishman
Another Day, Another Man Doris Wishman, Estados Unidos, fic., 1966, 71′ Bad Girls Go to Hell Doris Wishman, Estados Unidos, fic., 1965, 65′ Deadly Weapons Doris Wishman, Estados Unidos, fic., 1974, 75′ Diary of a Nudist Doris Wishman, Estados Unidos, fic., 1961, 72′ Double Agent 73 Doris Wishman, Estados Unidos, fic., 1974, 73′ The Immoral Three Doris Wishman, Estados Unidos, fic., 1975, 74′ Indecent Desires Doris Wishman, Estados Unidos, fic., 1968, 75′ Keyholes Are for Peeping Doris Wishman, Estados Unidos, fic., 1972, 70′ Let Me Die a Woman Doris Wishman, Estados Unidos, doc., 1974, 79′ Nude on the Moon Doris Wishman / Raymond Phelan, Estados Unidos, fic., 1961, 83′

Director’s Cut
Et j’aime à la fureur André Bonzel, França, doc., 2021, 97′ The History of the Civil War Dziga Vertov, Rússia, doc., 2021, 94′ Prisme Eléonore Yameogo / An van. Dienderen / Rosine Mbakam, Bélgica / Burkina Faso / Camarões, doc., 2021, 78′ Reconstrução Francisco Noronha, Portugal, 2022, 14′ Stranger Than Rotterdam with Sara Driver Lewie Kloster / Noah Kloster, Estados Unidos, doc./anim., 2021, 9′ Terra Femme Courtney Stephens, Estados Unidos, doc., 2021, 62′ The Timekeepers of Eternity Aristotelis Maragkos, Grécia, fic./exp., 2021, 62′

Boca do Inferno
Longas-Metragens
Arrebato Iván Zulueta, Espanha, fic., 1979, 155′ Coffin Homes Fruit Chan, Hong Kong, fic., 2021, 107′ Flux Gourmet Peter Strickland, Reino Unido / Estados Unidos / Hungria, fic., 2022, 111′ Kandisha Alexandre Bustillo, Julien Maury, França, fic., 2020, 85′ Holy Emy Araceli Lemos, Grécia / França / Estados Unidos, fic., 2021, 111′ She Will Charlotte Colbert, Reino Unido, fic., 2021, 95′ Strawberry Mansion Albert Birney / Kentucker Audley, Estados Unidos, fic., 2021, 91′
Curtas-Metragens
Baby Boom Thomas Lunde, Noruega, fic., 2021, 13′ Bear Nash Edgerton, Austrália, fic., 2010, 10’+ Fury Julia Siuda, Polónia, anim., 2021, 5′ Kerplunky! Robert Kleinschmidt, Estados Unidos, anim., 2021, 5′ Night of the Living Dicks Ilja Rautsi, Finlândia, fic., 2021, 19′ Shark Nash Edgerton, Austrália, fic., 2021, 14′ Spider Nash Edgerton, Austrália, fic., 2007, 9′ Sucking Diesel Sam McGrath, Irlanda, fic., 2021, 10′
Sessões Especiais
Um Filme em Forma de Assim João Botelho, Portugal, fic., 2022, 101′ O Jovem Cunhal João Botelho, Portugal, doc., 2022 Lisboa, Cidade Triste e Alegre João Trabulo, Portugal, doc., 2022, 90′ Um Nome Para o Que Sou Marta Pessoa, Portugal, doc., 2022, 116′ SITA – a Vida e o Tempo de Sita Valles Margarida Cardoso, Portugal, doc., 2022, 168′
Sessão de Abertura
Albufeira António de Macedo, 28′ Zéfiro José Álvaro de Morais, Portugal, 52′
Sessão de Encerramento
A Viagem de Pedro Laís Bodanzky, Brasil / Portugal, fic., 2021, 97′

Programa 5L
Cartas da Guerra Ivo Ferreira, Portugal / Alemanha, fic., 2016, 105′ Correspondências Rita Azevedo Gomes, Portugal, doc., 2016, 145′ News from Home Chantal Akerman, Bélgica / França / Alemanha, fic./doc., 1977, 90′
https://indielisboa.com/programa-indielisboa-2022/

I love Blank Check, and I also love figure skating. So, with the Beijing Olympics around the corner, I thought that I'd create a list of my favorite programs that use music from movies discussed on Blank Check. Programs are listed in episode/miniseries order, from Star Wars all the way to the this week's episode, The Piano.

1. Adam Siao Him Fa 2021-22 SP (Star Wars)- We will actually be seeing this gentleman and his amazing lightsaber choreography at the Olympics. One of the best new programs of the season!
2. Satoko Miyahara 2016-17 FS (Star Wars)- We have a fun Star Wars program, and also an artsy fartsy Star Wars program. This program uses selections from the Gustav Holst's Planets, which inspired John Williams' score, before transitioning into Princess Leia's theme.
3. Elena Radionova, 2015-16 FS (Titanic)- Titanic is, unsurprisingly, very popular among figure skaters. But this Titanic program is my favorite. Radionova was teetering on the brink of irrelevance in the crowded Russian ladies field in 2015-16 season, but every time she skated this gloriously tacky program, she performed with blinding sincerity and charisma, and dared us all to write her off. When Celine Dion starts singing, and then when Kate whispers "I'll never let go" (yes, this program includes voiceovers!) as Elena performs to the rafters, I always get emotional. And if you felt like that program didn't include enough voiceovers, you should watch Jorick Henrcickx's equally iconic free skate from the same season. It truly tells the whole story, and covers several important scenes, complete with sound effects.
4. Kamila Valieva, 2021-22 Exhibition (Avatar)- I like Kamila Valieva, who, barring any acts of God or COVID, will win the ladies Olympic Gold Medal in a few weeks, but I do not like her programs. This lovely and rather nerdy Avatar exhibition is the exception. Fun fact: Valieva was 3 years old when Avatar came out.
5. Kaori Sakamoto, 2019-2021 FS (The Matrix)- This outstanding program includes bullet time choreography and an iconic moment in which Kaori almost slices off the judges heads (the resulting gif gets a lot of use on skating twitter).
6. Peng Cheng/Jin Yang, 2019-2021 FS (Cloud Atlas)- I think that choreographer Lori Nichol must have watched Cloud Atlas on Netflix in the summer of 2019 and fallen in love, since she choreographed 2 Cloud Atlas programs that year (the other one was for Vincent Zhou, and it's not as good but it used the M83 trailer music!). This program tells the story of Hae-Joo and Somni 451, and it is magnificent. One of my favorite programs of the past 4 years.
7. Aliona Savchenko/Robin Szolkowy, 2008-9 SP (Lost in Space)- 2018 Olympic champion Aliona and her former (and better) partner Robin had lots of weird and amazing programs over the years, and this program might be their weirdest. Worth a watch for the costumes alone.
8. Mandy Woetzel/Ingo Steuer, 1993-4 FS (Basic Instinct)- And here is Aliona and Robin's coach Ingo Steuer skating to Basic Instinct. Skating to Basic instinct in when it was nice and fresh in everyone's minds was quite a choice, and it foretold a career of big choices and awesome programs for Ingo, both as a skater and a choreographer.
9. Eun-Soo Lim, 2019-20 exhibition (Is That Alright, A Star is Born) There were so, so many A Star is Born programs in 2019. This one was the best.
10. Shawn Sawyer, 2010-11 FS (Alice in Wonderland)- Sawyer portrays the Mad Hatter in this incredible free skate, choreographed by Marie-France Dubreuil, who coaches about a third of the 2022 Olympic Ice Dance field. To say that it is merely better than the Tim Burton movie would damn a masterpiece with faint praise.
11. Keiji Tanaka, 2016-18 Exhibition (Spirited Away)- There have been quite a few Miyazaki programs over the years, but this is my favorite.
12. Josefin Taljegard, 2010-22 FS (Joker)- There have been a truly alarming number of Joker programs in the past few years. But this one from fan-favorite Swedish underdog Taljegard is definitely the most fun. And if she qualifies for the free skate, we'll get to see this program in Beijing!
13. Ekaterina Gordeeva/Sergei Grinkov (Aladdin)- Katia and Sergei skating to A Whole New World surrounded by fake snow and in full costume in Disneyland for the TV special Disney's Christmas Fantasy on Ice, costarring Bronson Pinchot as himself, was such a Moment in Time.
14. Kaori Sakamoto 2018-19 FS (The Piano)- Kaori is the only skater to appear on this list twice, with her gorgeous free skate to The Piano.
15. Alena Kostornaia, 2019-20 FS (Twilight)- I originally wasn't going to put programs from Patreon episodes on here, but I simply had to share Alena's Twilight free skate. She starts by skating to Desplat's score for New Moon and landing 2 triple axels, and then things just get more and more fun.

I actually edited this list down quite a bit, so if you want more recommendations for programs, Blank Check adjacent or not, I have them!

tl;dr: I measured a bunch of stats about novelties.
What is a novelty? A novelty is that exciting moment when a move is played that takes the game from a position that has been seen in previous games to a position that hasn't been seen before. One might say that this brings us to a completely new game.
If you think about this definition ("a move that takes the game from a known position to an unknown position"), you'll realize it means games can have multiple novelties. This is because after a game has reached a new position, it's possible to transpose back to a position which has been encountered in the past. And from there the game may proceed to another unknown position.
Let's call the number of novelties in a game its "Agadmator Index". Novelties are exciting, so perhaps games with a high Agadmator index will be exciting. We can measure some related stats, while we're at it - like which famous chess players play the most novelties.

What game has the highest Agadmator index?

Before uncovering the spoilers - take a guess. What do you think is the most novelties to occur in any one game?
Here are the three games with the highest Agadmator indices:

1. Rozen, Eytan v Efroimski, Marsel (2021.3.15, event: 40th ch-ISR 2021 @ Haifa ISR, round 9.12)
   This 233 move game, a Sicillian, has an Agadmator index of 32. The first novelty occurs on 14... Rd8, where black adds pressure on the d file. The 31 remaining novelties occur in the endgame. After move 68, white has a queen and 3 pawns vs black's queen and 2. White tries to convert his advantage, but another capture doesn't occur until move 218. That's 150 moves later! Ultimately black defends to a draw.
   The novelties occur on these half-moves: [28; 139; 141; 169; 171; 175; 177; 211; 237; 245; 247; 258; 273; 275; 293; 296; 300; 310; 314; 317; 319; 323; 331; 336; 339; 343; 355; 375; 387; 395; 454; 459]. (To convert a half-move index to a move number, add 1 and divide by 2 - so 28 becomes the first novelty at move 14.5, black's 14th move).
   
2. Girya, Olga v Stefanova, Antoaneta (2017.10.23, event: ch-EUR Women Blitz 2017 @ Monaco MNC, round 3.4)
   Agadmator index: 26.
   
3. Okhotnik, Vladimir v Wittmann, Walter (2011.11.19, event: 21. World Seniors @ Rijeka CRO, round 5.11)
   Agadmator index: 25.
   

Are these games exciting? Well, they are certainly long.
(A link for with the full top 10 and more detail on a few other stats below.)

Overall novelty stats

How exciting are chess games generally? How common are novelties?
Of 4,549,640 games in the database I used, 4,385,146 have at least one novelty. That's 96.38%!
The average game has an Agadmator index of 1.21. White is a tiny bit more likely than black to play at least one novelty (53.6% of games vs 52.9%).
We can also measure novelties by move, which is a little different. Of the 363,070,839 moves in the database, 5,498,187 were novelties. That's about 1.5 novelties every 100 moves.

Novelties by year

Are chess games more or less exciting now than they were in the past? Here are the stats by decade:
Novelties by decade
So it seems chess is more exciting today than ever!

Novelties by Player

How likely are individuals to play a novelty? Let's call the average number of novelties per game across a player's career that player's "Agadmator rating".

World Champions

Which world champion has the highest Agadmator rating? Magnus! Here are the stats:

Player	Agadmator Rating	Novelties / 100mvs	# games	% of gms w/ novelties by player
Carlsen, Magnus	0.633	1.39	4072	54.3%
Kasimdzhanov, Rustam	0.615	1.48	1746	54.4%
Topalov, Veselin	0.598	1.39	2667	54.5%
Karpov, Anatoly	0.581	1.40	2527	50.9%
Anand, Viswanathan	0.580	1.46	3654	53.3%
Capablanca, Jose	0.579	1.50	1116	52.3%
Ponomariov, Ruslan	0.570	1.30	2287	50.5%
Smyslov, Vasily	0.563	1.47	2965	51.4%
Botvinnik, Mikhail	0.563	1.35	1153	50.8%
Kramnik, Vladimir	0.557	1.35	3270	49.8%
Petrosian, Tigran	0.536	1.51	2191	47.2%
Spassky, Boris	0.533	1.55	2726	48.6%
Tal, Mikhail	0.524	1.47	2989	47.5%
Alekhine, Alexander	0.523	1.33	2187	47.7%
Kasparov, Garry	0.514	1.34	2560	46.9%
Euwe, Max	0.512	1.36	1500	46.4%
Fischer, Robert	0.508	1.28	1068	47.4%
Lasker, Emanuel	0.506	1.41	417	45.8%
Steinitz, Wilhelm	0.479	1.25	881	45.2%
Khalifman, Alexander	0.457	1.34	2552	42.2%

Chess Personalities

How about chess streamers, youtubers, and commentators? Here is a list, including some of the most watched folks and the people who were on the streams I happened to watch during the 2021 World Championship, again sorted by Agadmator rating:

Player	Agadmator Rating	Novelties / 100mvs	# games	% of gms w/ novelties by player
Botez, Andrea	0.714	1.76	14	64.3%
Botez, Alexandra	0.713	1.60	157	64.3%
Cramling, Anna	0.692	1.63	636	57.7%
Radic, Antonio	0.688	1.81	16	62.5%
Zhou, Qiyu	0.684	1.56	491	57.6%
Nakamura, Hikaru	0.661	1.41	4072	55.2%
Rensch, Daniel	0.659	1.55	331	60.1%
Rozman, Levy	0.656	1.49	544	59.0%
Hansen, Eric	0.655	1.49	1534	56.3%
Hess, Robert	0.633	1.44	873	55.4%
Rosen, Eric	0.631	1.37	461	51.4%
Hambleton, Aman	0.628	1.38	667	55.5%
Naroditsky, Daniel	0.626	1.44	1095	52.5%
Caruana, Fabiano	0.624	1.35	3014	54.7%
Howell, David	0.622	1.37	2135	54.5%
Rudolf, Anna	0.613	1.37	751	52.6%
Tania, Sachdev	0.605	1.41	1461	52.8%
Williams, Simon K	0.580	1.43	848	51.1%
Houska, Jovanka	0.580	1.31	1452	50.6%
Finegold, Benjamin	0.534	1.39	1156	47.8%

According to the data, the Botez sisters have a very creative playing style.

Top Overall

But which players in the whole database have the highest Agadmator rating? Among players with at least 250 games, the top 5 by Agadmator rating are:

Player	Agadmator Rating	Total games
Goltsev, Dmitry	0.807	606
Golubovskis, Maksims	0.803	290
Miroshnik, Ekaterina	0.797	335
Aslanov, Umid	0.792	361
Tharushi, T H D Niklesha	0.788	353

These are all young players today. The oldest, Goltsev, was born in 2000! The fact that only one of these players has over 500 games suggests that it is hard to sustain this level of novel play.
If those are the players who play the most novelties per game, we can also ask which players play the most novelties per move. Here are the top 5 among players with at least 250 games in the database.

Player	Novelties / 100 moves	Total games
Wall, Bill	2.682	422
NN	2.558	993
Mayer, Istvan	2.298	537
Vine, Elzbieta	2.172	250
Golubovskis, Maksims	2.140	290

One player, Golubovskis, appears on both lists.
Here we start to see some limitations of the data (more on methodology below). "NN" is an abbreviation for No Name, which occurs in the database when there is incomplete information for a game.
Also, Bill Wall (who you may know from his books and website) is listed here with only 422 games. However, there are a further 2976 games with the player name of just "Wall" that can't be easily disambiguated because it's too common of a last name. The vast majority of those games are surely Bill's. Stunningly, "Wall" is also very high in this list, coming in 9th with an average of 2.066 novelties / game, and is first among players with at least 1000 games. Bill's chess career demonstrates a stunning level of creativity.

Methodology and source code

I made a little webpage with slightly better formatting and a brief discussion of methodology (or lack thereof - obviously this is all pretty silly and shouldn't be taken too seriously).
I also put the (very bad) software I wrote to calculate this stuff up on github. The raw output of the tool, with additional stats, is here.

I have seen this video on TV before I am wondering if anyone knows where to get a higher resolution version of this?
Katia

(copied from stackexchange)
https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/36698/list-of-female-chess-players-by-peak-fide-rating-with-countries
PlayerName FedName MaxRating Period 1. Polgar, Judit Hungary 2735 2005/07 2. Hou, Yifan China 2686 2015/03 3. Koneru, Humpy India 2623 2009/07 4. Muzychuk, Anna Slovenia 2606 2012/07 5. Ju, Wenjun China 2604 2017/03 6. Goryachkina, Aleksandra Russia 2596 2021/06 7. Muzychuk, Anna Ukraine 2587 2012/10 8. Kosintseva, Tatiana Russia 2581 2010/11 9. Zhao, Xue China 2579 2013/09 10. Polgar, Zsuzsa Hungary 2577 2005/01 11. Kosintseva, Nadezhda Russia 2576 2010/11 12. Xie, Jun China 2574 2008/01 13. Dzagnidze, Nana Georgia 2573 2015/06 14. Muzychuk, Mariya Ukraine 2563 2016/03 15. Muzychuk, Mariya Ukraine 2563 2019/04 16. Kosteniuk, Alexandra Russia 2561 2018/01 17. Chiburdanidze, Maia USSR 2560 1988/01 18. Galliamova, Alisa Russia 2560 1998/07 19. Lahno, Kateryna Russia 2560 2018/12 20. Stefanova, Antoaneta Bulgaria 2560 2003/01 21. Lahno, Kateryna Ukraine 2557 2012/01 22. Chiburdanidze, Maia Georgia 2551 1999/01 23. Cramling, Pia Sweden 2550 2008/10 24. Gunina, Valentina Russia 2548 2015/06 25. Zhu, Chen Qatar 2548 2008/01 26. Lei, Tingjie China 2545 2018/03 27. Harika, Dronavalli India 2543 2016/11 28. Cmilyte, Viktorija Lithuania 2542 2017/06 29. Zhu, Chen China 2539 2000/07 30. Sebag, Marie France 2537 2013/03 31. Zatonskih, Anna United States 2537 2011/05 32. Khotenashvili, Bela Georgia 2531 2013/06 33. Tan, Zhongyi China 2530 2018/08 34. Batsiashvili, Nino Georgia 2528 2018/03 35. Danielian, Elina Armenia 2521 2011/07 36. Ioseliani, Nana Georgia 2520 1997/07 37. Saduakassova, Dinara Kazakhstan 2519 2020/01 38. Xu, Yuhua China 2517 2006/04 39. Paehtz, Elisabeth Germany 2513 2018/09 40. Wang, Lei China 2512 2001/10 41. Hoang, Thanh Trang Hungary 2511 2013/11 42. Pogonina, Natalija Russia 2508 2014/07 43. Kovalevskaya, Ekaterina Russia 2507 2001/07 44. Zhu, Jiner China 2507 2019/10 45. Arakhamia-Grant, Ketevan Scotland 2506 2009/07 46. Stefanova, Antoaneta FIDE 2506 2011/05 47. Wang, Pin China 2506 2000/10 48. Abdumalik, Zhansaya Kazakhstan 2505 2021/07 49. Girya, Olga Russia 2505 2017/09 50. Polgar, Sofia Hungary 2505 1998/07 51. Socko, Monika Poland 2505 2008/04 52. Mkrtchian, Lilit Armenia 2503 2010/01 53. Ruan, Lufei China 2503 2014/01 54. Krush, Irina United States 2502 2013/10 55. Matveeva, Svetlana Russia 2502 2004/01 56. Ushenina, Anna Ukraine 2502 2007/07 57. Qin, Kanying China 2501 2000/07 58. Skripchenko, Almira France 2501 2003/01 59. Javakhishvili, Lela Georgia 2500 2010/03 60. Zhukova, Natalia Ukraine 2499 2010/05 61. Skripchenko, Almira Moldova 2497 2001/10 62. Gaprindashvili, Nona USSR 2495 1987/07 63. Ioseliani, Nana USSR 2495 1988/07 64. Huang, Qian China 2494 2013/09 65. Kashlinskaya, Alina Russia 2494 2020/04 66. Khademalsharieh, Sarasadat Iran 2494 2020/01 67. Hoang, Thanh Trang Vietnam 2493 2000/10 68. Arakhamia-Grant, Ketevan Georgia 2490 1997/01 69. Nominerdene, Davaademberel Mongolia 2490 2016/04 70. Maric, Alisa Yugoslavia 2489 1999/07 71. Shuvalova, Polina Russia 2489 2021/06 72. Peptan, Corina-Isabela Romania 2485 2003/07 73. Vijayalakshmi, Subbaraman India 2485 2005/10 74. Dembo, Yelena Greece 2482 2009/09 75. Gaponenko, Inna Ukraine 2482 2005/04 76. Atalik, Ekaterina Turkey 2481 2011/09 77. Galliamova, Alisa Ukraine 2480 1996/01 78. Bodnaruk, Anastasia Russia 2479 2016/06 79. Shen, Yang China 2479 2016/09 80. Arakhamia-Grant, Ketevan USSR 2475 1991/07 81. Melia, Salome Georgia 2475 2014/08 82. Khurtsidze, Nino Georgia 2472 1999/07 83. Peng, Zhaoqin Netherlands 2472 2002/04 84. Moser, Eva Austria 2471 2012/07 85. Daulyte, Deimante Lithuania 2470 2018/07 86. Korbut, Ekaterina Russia 2467 2008/04 87. Munguntuul, Batkhuyag Mongolia 2467 2011/09 88. Romanko, Marina Russia 2466 2009/04 89. Kachiani-Gersinska, Ketino Germany 2465 2002/04 90. Rajlich, Iweta Poland 2465 2009/09 91. Hunt, Harriet V England 2463 2009/01 92. Alexandrova, Olga Ukraine 2462 2003/01 93. Guo, Qi China 2462 2014/03 94. Bojkovic, Natasa Yugoslavia 2460 1994/07 95. Mammadzada, Gunay Azerbaijan 2460 2021/07 96. Paikidze, Nazi Georgia 2455 2011/01 97. Tairova, Elena Russia 2455 2009/11 98. Padmini, Rout India 2454 2015/03 99. Bulmaga, Irina Romania 2453 2020/02 100. Ding, Yixin China 2451 2014/07 101. Khukhashvili, Sopiko Georgia 2451 2009/09 102. Stepovaia, Tatiana Russia 2451 2001/07