Step by step: Lajoie and Lagha are focusing on the now in the Olympic season
Marjorie Lajoie and Zachary Lagha are all too familiar with the highs and lows of figure skating.
The highs include being world junior ice dance champions in 2019, making their Olympic debut three years later at Beijing 2022, and two years after that, cracking the top-five at the 2024 ISU World Figure Skating Championships on home ice in Montreal.
The lows include a concussion to Lajoie that she only just recovered from in time to compete at those world championships and then dropping down the standings to seventh place one year later when they had hoped to be making a push for the podium.
But no matter how last season ended, they would have entered this one with the same attitude: chapter closed.
“Whatever, man. We live in the present. Okay it ended the way it ended. And so whatever, bro, we focus on now,” Lagha said during Skate Canada’s High Performance camp at the end of August.
At the moment, the “now” is the ISU Grand Prix Series. After winning bronze at Skate Canada International, they are set to compete at Skate America. They’ll be up against two top American couples: three-time reigning world champions Madison Chock and Evan Bates as well as Christina Carreira and Anthony Ponomarenko, who were fifth at the 2025 World Championships and finished one spot behind Lajoie and Lagha at Skate Canada.
It wasn’t the easiest of off-seasons for Lajoie and Lagha. They went through multiple options for program music, finding something they thought could work only to learn that the rights to licence the music were too expensive or that another ice dance team was already using it.
For the rhythm dance, all teams must use music from the 1990s. They settled on a selection of sport anthems, songs that are often played at hockey games and soccer matches.
“I think it’s fun to do [a sports theme] for the Olympics,” said Lajoie. “And show that skating [is] a sport, not just an art. It’s nice not to just wear a pretty dress. That’s the point of this program. It’s more like showing the sporty part of the sport.”
After choreographing a free dance to a pair of pieces by Bach, they pleasantly surprised many figure skating fans when they decided instead to bring back a much beloved program from the 2022-23 season. “Nureyev” from the soundtrack of The White Crow, a movie about the life and career of the celebrated ballet dancer, had been a breakout vehicle for them, but they didn’t get the chance to perform it at the world championships that season. They’re now preparing to showcase it on the biggest stage in winter sport.
Milano Cortina 2026 will be a much different experience than their first Olympic Games, where they competed amidst intense COVID-related restrictions without their family and friends present. But they still learned a lot that they’ve taken forward into this Olympic season.
“You learn to even just see the Olympic rings. Just having this experience in the books of seeing them and it’s like, ‘Oh my God, we’re at the Olympics.’ And having the whole world watching you, because we have the figure skating fans that are following, but then at the Olympics it’s everybody looking and everybody’s messaging you. So I think it’s just getting this experience and this learning of just managing the stress and the pressure,” said Lajoie.
But she says they are also conscious of not looking solely at that big competition in February.
“If we’re just focused about the Olympics, then the whole season is long,” Lajoie explained. “So we want to approach it [by] focusing on every competition, step by step.
“It’s there. We know it’s there. It’s in the back of our mind, but we’ll approach it like every other season, try to get better and that’s it.”
Lajoie and Lagha train at the Ice Academy of Montreal, arguably the best known ice dance school in the world. Sharing the ice every day with teams such as Chock and Bates does have its pros and cons.
“It can be motivating. You know, when you see your competitors working hard and then you have to work hard. But it can also be stressful. So that’s also a challenge, right? Because when things don’t necessarily go well for you, but for some people it’s going very well,” said Lagha. “So yeah, there’s a lot of teams and you have to just stop looking at them and just be like, focus on yourself. That’s it. It is the only way.”
They already got a chance to experience the next Olympic host city when they performed in their first series of international skating shows in Europe. They took in many sights in Milan, literally stoking their appetite for a few months from now.
“I tried some nice chocolate and stuff. I’m excited to go back,” said Lajoie.
Rapid Fire with Marjorie Lajoie and Zachary Lagha
What is your first memory of watching the Olympic Games?
ZL: Plushenko, 2006. That is the first one that I watched.
ML: For me, it’s for sure not my first, but I remember watching Joannie Rochette and got very inspired by her story that even if you have a hard time in your life, that you can still perform and do good results. So I probably watched the Olympics before that, but that was like my first big memory.
