Russia has held the title in figure skating – ice dancing – for fifty years! That is a very long time. To topple a champion takes a lot of skill, practice and endurance. Canadian figure skaters Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir have what it takes. They proved that when they took the gold! They danced their way into history when they became the first North American team, not to mention the youngest ever, to grab the gold medal in ice dancing.
The sport was dominated by Russian skaters for fifty years. The world champions ended up with bronze and the US team took silver. The only prior ice dancing medal won by Canada was a bronze 22 years ago. We’ve come a long way, baby! But, we are a hockey nation, ice dancing is really not our thing.
Being so young (Virtue 20 and Moir 22), this was obviously the first Olympic games for this couple.
“We’ve dreamed about this for so long,” said Virtue, who had feared her career was over two years ago after surgery on her shins. “it’s been quite a journey – a bit rocky. There were times when we didn’t think we would get back on track and skating again, but this makes the victory even sweeter.”
Moir said: “We have such a special connection with Meryl and Charlie. We knew they would be tough competitors, that they were going to come here and lay it down. We wouldn’t be here without them.”
The two teams know each other quite well since they have trained together in Ontario for a long time under the tutelage of coaches Marina Zueva and Igor Shpilband . This led to the comment that the only way to recapture the title Russians have won all but three times since it was introduced in 1976 was “to bring all the Russian coaches back to Russia.”
Blame it on The Music
Russian ice dancers Domnina, 25, and Shabalin, 28, had led after Friday’s opening compulsory dance but their controversial Aboriginal-themed original dance backfired and left them trailing going into the final night.
Skating to the theme of ‘passion’ they finished over eight points behind the winners.
Shabalin said he did not regret their choice of original dance.
“It was a great choice,” he said. “We did everything we could. We didn’t expect Russian figure skating to go down.”
Russian figure skating isn’t going down. Canadians are just trying harder to be on top!

Time for a Break

All this excitement deserves a break. Head over to your hotel and rest up for tomorrow!

This entry was posted on Monday, February 22nd, 2010 at 12:57 pm and is filed under Whistler Village. 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.