Jessica Dube Loves Scott Moir

Virtue and Moir attempting one of
Papadakis & Cizeron's L4 competitive lifts.

Virtue and Moir in the Globe and Mail

Concluding paragraph.

They’ll have other projects to announce soon, they said, and new collaborations to begin. The next act for Canada’s Tessa and Scott may look a lot different from what we’ve seen so far.

These bitches. No it won't. Even if they decide to lift the veil on their more compelling unseen collaborations, new is not the word for any of them.

I'm discussing this article out of order because I did like this part near the end:

Moir and Virtue are a little less eager to do their own choreography. They skated one of their pieces at Pyeongchang – a flowing, elegiac tribute to Gord Downie, set to The Tragically Hip’s Long Time Running. But “we tend to steal from ourselves,” Moir said; and when working alone, they miss the perspective of what Virtue calls “the outside eye.”

Good. Long Time Running was, to me, as meh as most of their show dances, and the Gord Downie backstory was no help.

The article's author, Robert Everett-Green, observes that ice dance inhibits dancing, because you can't "stop and dance."

No worries. Ice dance rules and criteria have worked hard to get us to where teams are mostly stopping and "dancing". Our current world champions, Papadakis & Cizeron, seem to feel that the skating part of what they do is a pretty unfair expectation of Olympic athletes as extraordinary as themselves. That's for show boaty, cheap ass vulgarian panderers like Virtue and Moir (right, Madison Hubbell?).

Ice dance rules and regulations have developed to where teams are incentived to ignore as much as possible the fact that the medium is ice. Ice dance has eaten its own tail at this point.

Tessa says:

The impetus for our movement as a pair should be quite similar to that of the ballroom world. But we have just that forward-backward plane of motion with our blades. It’s very tough to transfer ballroom technique onto the ice, to give the illusion of the proper hip motion and position, with the speed and glide of the blade.

I don't know why Tessa bothers. Except that Virtue Moir have to execute proper technique to have a prayer, and other teams do not. Well, the Shibs have to do it too.* If it's not done perfectly, we hear from analysts - who have just cribbed the info from something they've overheard - that the reason the Shibs and/or Virtue and Moir didn't win was flawed execution of a technical detail. Other teams can ignore the whole translate dance into that forward/backward plane of motion bit, and break world records. Other teams win via creating "a special feeling." Virtue and Moir had to perform per archaic technical standards that don't apply to ice dance anymore, that have been stripped from the game.

When Virtue and Moir were not awarded the gold medal they won at the Sochi Olympics in 2014, we heard that they were artists, but Davis White were the technicians. When, via a magical, perfect storm that thwarted political intent, they crushed the field in 2018 Pyeongchang and were allowed to eek out a win, the narrative positioned Papadakis Cizeron as perhaps not the strongest technicians, but divinely gifted artists. Denied acknowledgment of both technical and "artistic" high cards over the course of 8 years, Virtue and Moir are currently positioned as cunning performers who win by hiding careless execution behind a cold, bold, and somehow unfair confidence. They're scary. And kind of cheating. They're practically Russian.

I don't think Virtue and Moir care, though. They have the gold, they won gold, even though it's the only gold medal win I can think of that is both deserved, and sticks in the craw. It's pretty much living in my craw.

You have to figure out how to incorporate the lateral movement and still keep the flow and integrity of the skating,” she said. “We try to give the effect of ballroom, but we often have to get there through very different means.

Well, they have to. Others, no.

Article:

In dance terms, their Moulin Rouge routine had a ballroom base, a lot of balletic movement in the arms and bits that looked more contemporary. It’s the last category – the one least favoured by the conservative standards of their sport – that they most want to expand in their non-competitive ice dancing.

"Bits that looked more contemporary" is one of my favorite ice dance terms.

Those are descriptive generalizations. But, as we all know, ice dance is now whatever you want it to be, as is only proper in an elite Olympic sport. Conservative, it ain't. If the right deals are in place, you can slop it up out there however you want.

P.S. - are we still describing Papadakis & Cizeron as humble flower childy skaters too sensitive for the competitive world who somehow win because they summon magic, but it's all about the feeling for them, or can we jump on ahead to where they actually are - we deserve it all, and any contrary result is inherently unfair?


*Which makes them both better off than a number of other teams who are never going to get on the podium no matter what they do.