Olympic ice dance champions Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron announce end of competitive career
The French duo won gold at Beijing 2022 four years after claiming Olympic silver. The five-time world champs last competed at the World Championships in 2022.
Figure Skating
Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron have announced the end of their competitive figure skating careers.
The French ice dance duo claimed the gold at the Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022 four years after finishing runner-up at PyeongChang 2018, marking France's first figure skating gold at the Olympics since 2002.
Papadakis and Cizeron would go on to claim a fifth - and final - world title at home in France a few weeks after the Games, wowing a capacity crowd in Montpellier for a final time.
The duo has skated in exhibition shows since 2022, but has never set foot back on competitive ice.
"We couldn’t have dreamt of a greater career," the duo was credited saying in a press release on Tuesday (3 December), which has been translated from French by Olympics.com.
"[It's] with a huge gratitude that we decide to turn this page. A huge thanks to our fans for those joyful moments shared on the ice. We carry wonderful memories with us."
Papadakis and Cizeron exploded onto the scene at the World Championships in 2015, launching from 13th place a year prior to claim gold - nearly unheard of in figure skating and especially in ice dance.
But their success wasn't a one-off: They added their aforementnioned two Olympic medals and five world titles, and were a consistent force for some seven seasons. That period of dominance included five European championships, two Grand Prix Final victories and seven French national titles.
Only the great Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, the Canadian duo, would unseat Papadakis/Cizeron on the Olympic stage, edging out the French for gold in South Korea.
Leading up to Beijing 2022, Papadakis and Cizeron gave Olympic Channel exclusive access to their training process as part of the On Edge docu-series, along with other top teams in Montreal. You can watch it here.
Papadakis and Cizeron bid farewell to figure skating
The retirement news comes as no great shock in the figure skating community, with Milano Cortina 2026 now just 14 months away. Still, it puts a period on a chapter in ice dance that was authored largely by Papadakis, Cizeron and the team they surrounded themselves with.
"This career, we owe it to our coaches, parents, federation, choreographers, fitness and mental coaches, costume designers, agents, physiotherapists, doctors, fans, journalists," their statement said.
"Without them, we could never have reached the highest level of our arts."
Their style was always to push the sport forward both in their overall approach and in specific choreographical and artistic choices. Coach Romain Haguenauer brought them to Montreal to train in 2014, expanding the prowess of their skating centre, the Ice Academy of Montreal.
With Virtue/Moir's return in 2016, Papadakis/Cizeron won silver at the World Championships in 2017 heading into the Olympic season. What awaited them in PyeongChang was a nightmare no one could have predicted, however, as a hook on Gabriella's dress came undone at the outset of their rhythm dance. It distracted them throughout the performance.
They would settle for silver there, but over the next four seasons lost gold just once - at Europeans in 2020 to Victoria Sinitsina and Nikita Katsalapov - and went strictly golden in their Olympic year, capped off by Olympic gold - and a home world title.
Cizeron told Olympics.com after their win in Beijing that they had extra pride in how they bounced back for the Olympic victory.
“We wanted to rewrite this chapter of our career,” he said in a one-on-one sitdown. “It's more for the story than the actual medal. It was a disappointment to get the silver four years ago... We want history to say they didn't win four years ago, but they won this time. I think that's what we're thinking about.”