Gilles & Poirier in podium position after rhythm dance at figure skating worlds
Another day, another Canadian duo is in position to strike the podium at the 2024 ISU World Figure Skating Championships in Montreal.
After a day that saw the Bell Centre rocking to the music of the 1980s for the rhythm dance, Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier are in third place while teammates Marjorie Lajoie and Zachary Lagha aren’t far behind in fifth place.
Gilles and Poirier, who are seeking the third world championship medal of their careers, earned 86.51 points for their program to “No More I Love You’s” and Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love”.
“I think we had a great time today. We really skated our best that we could do today and really enjoyed it for the Canadian crowd,” said Gilles.
“I felt like there were little things during the performance that just kind of woke me up and it’s not necessarily a bad thing,” added Poirier. “It wasn’t one of those where I was kind of on autopilot the entire time but I think everything just skated so nicely, exactly how we’ve trained it. We’ve done so many repetitions of everything in this program and I think that’s what carried us through today.”
Once again, the Canadian crowd was exuberant with their cheers and applause, though Gilles tried to instead focus on the job at hand.
“I did hear them in little parts, but not in the places that I actually expected them to be,” she said. “I felt the energy throughout the whole time but they weren’t too disturbing today.”
Lajoie and Lagha, who finished 11th in their last appearance at the world championships in 2022, posted a personal best score of 82.30 for their performance to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”.
It was their first competition since the Grand Prix Final in December. They had to withdraw from both the Canadian championships in January and the ISU Four Continents Championships in February while Lajoie recovered from a concussion.
An important thing she wanted people to be aware of is that concussions can happen even if the head doesn’t take a direct hit. In her case, she fell hard enough on her butt that she suffered whiplash. It wasn’t until two days later that the symptoms showed.
“It’s my worst injury I’ve had in my life. I was out for a full month, then back for a month before [coming] here,” she explained. “I had some ups, I could train and it was really good. And then some very big downs. […] I would say a week and a half before [the worlds], even just a week, I was stopping having those downs.
“To skate like this, it was like the best case scenario. We’re really happy for us.”
While his partner was sidelined, Lagha did what he could do on his own for the betterment of the team.
“I had some things I had to work on to improve myself,” he said of taking advantage of the opportunity to have solo time with their coaches to focus on some parts of his skating he felt were a weakness.
The defending champions, Madison Chock and Evan Bates of the United States, sit in first place with 90.08 points while last year’s silver medallists, Charlene Guignard and Marco Fabbri of Italy, are again in second place with 87.52 points.
The two Canadian teams are sandwiched around Great Britain’s Lilah Fear and Lewis Gibson who scored 84.60.
Canada’s third team, Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Nikolaj Soerensen, are in 10th place with 75.79 points after a costly error on their side-by-side twizzles and low levels on their diagonal step sequence.
The ice dance competition will conclude on Saturday with the free dance. Gilles is looking forward to having more opportunity to perform their Wuthering Heights program.
“I think for tomorrow, Paul and I just want to continue telling stories. I think that’s something that we’ve done well since the beginning of our career and I think we want to continue to tell our story here in Canada and just make people believe what we do and fall in love with it.
“I think it’s going to be a special moment […] We’re really looking forward to just doing everything that we can and laying everything on the table tomorrow.”
