About a year and a half ago, I fell completely in love with Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir – a team of Canadian ice dancers. In light of their gold medal victory, I feel completely justified as many of my friends have expressed their awe after watching them. Personally, I also find it hard NOT to love them – I mean, they’ve skated together since they were 7 and 9, it’s obvious that there’s a lot of love and joy in their skating, they’re skilled, beautiful to watch and after meeting them at Skate Canada, I can say that they are wonderfully congenial people. In any case, let’s recap what they did at the Olympics, how they won gold and what their win means in the grander scheme of things.

2-1-1

No, this is not a mathematical formula for anything, 2-1-1 is their ranking for each portion of the competition. Tessa and Scott scored 42.74 in the compulsory dance (CD), the portion of the competition where all skaters skate the same routine on the ice so judges can get an idea of the teams’ skating skills. The compulsory dance at the Olympics was the Tango Romantica – a lyrical tango with intricate steps. As part of their training leading up to the Games, Tessa and Scott (along with their training mates and main rivals Meryl Davis and Charlie White of the U.S.A) trained briefly with Elena Tchaikovskaya, who choreographed the Tango Romantica. Nevertheless, it was the Russian team of Oksana Domnina and Maxim Shabalin who won the CD, outscoring Tessa and Scott by 1.02 points. The Russians (as well as the French team, Isabelle Delobel and Olivier Schoenfelder) are known for their good CDs in which speed and power and crucial. Personally, I wasn’t very surprised or worried about the results and their chances at Olympic gold. In a normal competition, this would be a slight lead, although in Olympic competition with inflated scores, this lead was very very minute.

However, I was slightly worried that they would stay in second place after the Original Dance (OD) – the second part of the competition and is sort of the equivalent of the short program in the other disciplines. Each year, the International Skating Union (ISU) sets a theme and a rhythm for the music for the ODs. This year, the theme was a folk dance and Tessa and Scott chose to do a fiery flamenco. Tessa and Scott are sometimes weak in the OD – I was so afraid they’d stumble like they did at Skate Canada -  not to mention that Davis and White have a fabulous Bollywood-inspired program this year. The fear at this point was that the Americans were going to overtake Tessa and Scott for first, while the Russians would rank below the Canadians with their controversial, poorly-received and somewhat offensive Australian Aboriginal dance. Wonderfully enough, Tessa and Scott took the lead in this portion of the competition with a solid performance and the Americans took second place over the Russians.

One interesting fact about Tessa and Scott’s OD was that they were given a stack of about 20 CDs of flamenco music by their choreographer and coach, Marina Zoueva and they decided to skate to Farrucas by Pepe Romero. This was the same music that legendary pairs skaters Ekaterina Gordeeva and Sergei Grinkov (who were also choreographed by Zoueva) used in the short program in the 1994 Olympics – they won gold.

The final part of the competition was the free dance (FD) - also Tessa and Scott’s biggest strength. Elegant, beautiful and touching, they delivered a breathtaking performance to Adagietto, the 4th movement to Gustav Mahler’s 5th Symphony. I could go on about their lines and free legs but I think all that needs to be said is that they delivered a golden performance with a program that was pure gold in itself. A few highlights – a lovely dance spin that was simple and uncluttered – a rarity that night, the bit when Tessa does an arabesque while holding onto Scott and of course, the “Goose” lift where she balances on Scott’s thigh and then falls into his arms. I hope they do the original version of that lift in their Gala performance – Tessa actually does a revolution off Scott’s leg to dismount, which is really incredible in light of the fact that she had to have surgery on her shins and go through a painful rehab process last year.

Another fun(ny) fact: Scott decided to prank Tessa after the Russians (the last of the night) skated. Apparently Tessa looks only at the rankings and not the scores, so Scott told her, “So that’s second,” after seeing the Russians’ free dance score. Tessa was graciously accepting the fact that they were going to win silver until Scott interjected, “But we still won.”

A Historic Gold

In winning gold, Tessa and Scott made history. Firstly, they are the youngest team (Tessa is 20 and Scott, 22) to win an Olympic gold medal in ice dance. Secondly, they are the first Canadian ice dance team to win gold as well as the first North American team. On a perhaps smaller note, this gold medal was also one that marked the end of the reign of coach and choreographer Natalia Linichuk whose teams include the Russian bronze medalists and 4th place finishers, Tanith Belbin and Benjamin Agosto. Linichuk had coached a string of world champions and podium finishers in recent years. (In the 2009 World Championships, the gold and silver team were coached and choreographed by Linichuk.) However the top two teams on the Olympic podium are trained and choreographed by Marina Zoueva and Igor Shpilband. Although the win ultimately belonged to Tessa and Scott, let us not forget those who brought them to gold.

One more fun fact – Tessa and Scott are also one of the few pairs that have broken the Russian dominance in the discipline, the others being Marina Anissina and Gwendal Peizerat of France and the legendary Jane Torvill and Christopher Dean – the British dancers who are considered to be the best in ice dance history since they were the only ones  to have ever gotten straight 6.0s (a mark of perfection) under the old 6.0 judging system. Tessa and Scott are now being compared to Torvill and Dean with some claiming that they are even better.

I totally agree. You?

Congratulations on your Olympic victory, Tessa and Scott!

Pictures from the daylife photo bank.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 10:35 am and is filed under Athletics & Health, Entertainment, General, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.