Olivia Smart shouts, pure excitement and relief: “Let’s go!” Skating dance has as much artistic expression, originality, a tendency to transcendence and emotion as it does technical difficulty, the ability to introduce curves and arabesques in a design so strictly regulated, and contacts measured to the second, and the final of the Olympic Games on the Milan rink is, more than anything, a fight of sensibilities and will, avant-garde against stale tradition, elegance against clichés. That is, Olivia Smart-Tim Dieck or Laurence Fournier-Guillaume Cizeron, and the rest.
It is the need to go one step further, to break, that guides the Spanish couple, who perform Dune II, with music from the film, one of the best exercises of the night (the sixth), and only the small errors on Monday in the rhythmic dance condemned them to be ninth in the end, one place, and only 2.19 points, from eighth, which gives status as a finalist and would have allowed Smart to equal the one achieved in Beijing 22 by partnering with Adrián Díaz.
It is the same risk that leads the French, trained in Montreal like the Spanish and many more by the great dance guru, the Frenchman Romain Haguenauer. For the Spanish, the ¡Vamos! Smart’s happiness reflects the liberation of having nailed the extraordinary program, from which more tenths could not be squeezed: 201.49 points, a Spanish record. For the French, their extremely elegant and extremely complicated interpretation (what an impossible curve elevation) to the hypnotic rhythm of the music from the film The Whale, the minimal victory (by just over one point: 225.82 against 224.39) over what has always been seen represented by the interpretation of flamenco, bulls, castanets and stylized olés, by the North Americans Madison Chock and Evan Bates, world champions for the last three years, to the rhythm of a version of the Paint it Black of the Rolling and armed with the teachings, sleight of hand and racial inspiration of the Spanish choreographer Antonio Najarro. Chock’s skirt is a crutch that subjugates and defeats the bull, so macho. A Carmen in a certain way, a folklore that always triumphs.
Olympic champion in Beijing with Gabriela Papadakis, Cizeron becomes the first skater to win gold with two different pairs. The one achieved with Fournier has come in a single year of working together. Fournier, a Canadian who has competed before representing Denmark and Canada, performing an artistic duo with his partner in daily life, Nikolaj Sorensen, was released when he was sanctioned following a complaint of sexual harassment by another skater. Cizeron had previously broken up with Papadakis, with whom he had been skating since he was a child. The happy relationship, the intimate rapport, that is shown on the ice contrasts with the relationship of power and true representation, Papadakis explained in a book, in which he reflects the mental problems that his work together with Cizeron caused him. As in the theater, all emotional torments lead, inexplicably, to the purest interpretation, and to instant and permanent emotion.
