It just felt like coming home and having something I’m used to and I enjoy performing in.’’ “It just felt like what the program needed today. Seriously, these details matter, at least in the minds of the skaters. This slate was performed to an Elton John medley, Gilles reverting to the long pants version of her costume that she’d worn at nationals in Ottawa last month.
#Twizzle dresses free
But you know, it’s a new day on Monday’’ - the free dance - “and I’m excited to kind of have a fresh slate.’’ So Gilles admitted that misfit twizzle would be much on her mind when she got back to the athletes village, lying in bed. The slightest deficiency in execution, or too much space between the skaters, or lack of synchronicity and judges will make you pay for it. But twizzles - everybody gets twizzles, the most bedazzling trick in the ice dance repertoire. Ice dance is technically complex, much of which isn’t understood by a casual fan base which sees only no jumps and no throws and no spectacular lifts. “We had a small bobble on the twizzle,’’ granted Poirier. And it’s a long way up to the podium from sixth, for what had been considered Canada’s best shot at figure skating laurels, in a period of transition. On Saturday night, back in their matching tangerine onesies, the Canadian national champions weren’t quite so smiley about their performance, which drew a score of 83.52 - incremental improvement - yet knocked them down into sixth. They claimed to be pleased, although it’s hard to tell with this particular tandem who spent so many years skating in the long shadow cast by ice dance virtuosos Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, merely gold-silver-gold at the Winter Games.īut it was certainly useful to have a competitive skate under their belts, get their energetic program before the judges, sift through the entrails of their detailed scoring, what needed work, what had been rewarded. That’s not what Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier were hoping for in the rhythm dance section of the figure skating ice dance competition at the Olympics.Ī week earlier, in the team event - which might still find a medal winding its way to the Canadian squad, depending how the legal wrangling from a Russian positive drug test shakes out - the reigning world bronze duo racked up a score of 82.72 in the first phase of the competition, what used to be known as the original dance.