France’s Viral Ice Dancing Team Has A Dark Backstory

Blink and you might not have caught it. On Monday, Guillaume Cizeron and Laurence Fournier Beaudry took to the rink and staked their claim to the ice dancing gold medal. Dancing to Madonna's "Vogue," complete with Blond Ambition–inspired costumes and voguing arms, their routine already is popular online. But the performance isn't the thing you might have missed. It was the explanation beforehand, from NBC's Terry Gannon, about the formation of the new skating partnership that was notably brief for all it conveyed.

Cizeron and Fournier Beaudry are a relatively new duo, formed less than a year ago. Recently, Cizeron's former partner, Gabriella Papadakis, published a memoir in which she called him "controlling, demanding, and critical," Gannon said. As for Fournier Beaudry, her former partner, Nikolaj Sørensen, was "suspended in a sexual maltreatment case that is still not resolved," Gannon said. The broadcast then segued to the natural conclusion: They are the biggest challenge to the United State ice dancing team for first place.

These type of glancing summaries are typical of how, if at all, figure skating coverage has discussed what brought Cizeron and Fournier Beaudry together. They might or might not mention how Cizeron's former partner with whom he won gold, Papadakis, was dropped by NBC for what she said. Or how the sexual misconduct case against Sørensen, Fournier Beaudry's longtime boyfriend and former partner, has been dragging on for more than two years, and how Fournier Beaudry has defended Sørensen through it all. The closest thing to a person with a big platform speaking out is retired U.S. figure skater Adam Rippon in the Netflix documentary Glitter & Gold: Ice Dancing—he tells us "there is some sinister energy around the partnership"—before the show has both skaters suggest to us that they are really victims.