MILAN — While the United States figure skating ice dance team of Madison Chock and Evan Bates has racked up numerous accolades during their illustrious career as a pair, the ultimate prize has eluded them: an individual Olympic gold.
That could finally change Wednesday night.
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After a second-place showing with their rhythm dance routine, Chock and Bates will skate for gold in the ice dance final. Though Chock and Bates have won three straight world championships and three straight Grand Prix Finals, they’ve never finished better than fourth as an ice dance pair at the Winter Games.
Standing in the way of Chock and Bates will be the French team of Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron, who finished with the best rhythm dance score on Monday. The margin between the rival duos is blade-thin — the pairs are separated by only 0.46 points.
Adding another layer of intrigue to the showdown? Chock and Bates and Fournier Beaudry and Cizeron both studied under the same coaches: the trio of Patrice Lauzon, Marie-France Dubreuil and Romain Haguenauer, who run the renowned Ice Academy of Montreal.
When asked by NBC News before the Olympics how they ensure they receive enough time with their coaches compared with their competitors, Chock said it's incumbent on her and Bates to advocate for themselves.
“I think the coaches do their very best to ensure that everyone has what they need and feel supported. And if there’s something that we need, we can just ask,” Chock said. “They’re very open. We have a great relationship with them, and at this point in our careers, we are the biggest advocates for ourselves, more so than anyone else, because we know what we need, we know how we feel, and to just take ownership and responsibility over that, to be able to speak up to the coaches and tell them if there’s something that we want to work on or we want to adjust, we really take that upon ourselves and into our own hands.”
While Cizeron is the defending gold medalist in ice dance — albeit with a different partner — his appearance with Fournier Beaudry in these Olympics is a bit of a surprise, considering Cizeron announced his retirement from the sport with then-partner Gabriella Papadakis in December 2024.
Cizeron returned to figure skating with Fournier Beaudry as his new partner last March, and their subsequent training at the Ice Academy left Chock and Bates “surprised and blindsided.”
“Like pretty much every instance when they take on a new high-level team, they have been very open and have communicated it, and we’ll usually hop on a Zoom call and they’ll tell us about it,” Chock said. “In the instance with Guillaume and Laurence, however, we were a little bit more surprised. We really didn’t get much forewarning that they were coming back and teaming up.”
She added: “We didn’t know they were thinking about that, and then they told us I think the day before they came to officially start training, and it was a lot to digest at first, because we just didn’t know what to make of it. We were wondering, like, how this would affect us, how it changes anything. And then once we realized that it doesn’t change anything for us, it doesn’t change our goals and how we are going to work to set out and to achieve those goals.”
Chock’s and Bates’ goals are not only in front of them, they are well within reach if they can skate a successful free dance Wednesday night in Milan. They’ll just have to go through their classmates to earn the only major first-place finish they haven’t claimed yet.
