One of their routines gives a retrospective nod to their brilliant amateur career, the other gives us a peek into one of the ways they escaped the emotional tyranny of it.
Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, the greatest Olympic figure skaters Canada has ever produced, will be at FirstOntario Centre on Saturday night for the annual Hamilton stop of Stars on Ice.
In Stars, designed by Canadian world champion Jeffrey Buttle, the triple Olympic medallists unveil the first program they’ve fully choreographed themselves.
Into the Mystic, a haunting but soothing spiritual released by Van Morrison 44 years ago, became what Virtue calls their “go-to piece” for relaxation during the intense Sochi Olympic season. It was a mercurial season which ended with their controversial silver medal, as longtime training partners Meryl Davis and Charlie White of the U.S. won the gold the Canadians had taken four years earlier.
“We’ve always had major input into our choreography,” Virtue said. “We had a vision for this. We’d dance around in Scott’s kitchen, playing the song. The choreography came much easier than anticipated, for people who’d never done it before.”
The double silver medallists (team event) from Sochi will also skate to Top Hat, choreographed by former Canadian champions Marie-France Dubreuil and Patrice Lauzon. It’s reminiscent of their 2013 short dance tribute to Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong and includes Cheek to Cheek, the final movement of that transcendent program. For the ice dance pioneers, it is a loving look in the rear-view mirror at their competitive career.
And what a career it was: 17 years, so far, holding each other’s hand; the first North Americans to break Europe’s vicelike grip on both the Olympic and world championship ice dancing gold medals; two world championships; two silver medals at Sochi for a total of three Olympic podium appearances; and a secure place in skating history as the revolutionaries who made the long-snubbed “North American school” of ice dancing not only acceptable, but preferable.
They brought supreme athleticism, lower body dynamism and a disdain for phoney theatrics to ice dancing.
We speak in the past tense here because we’re assuming Virtue and Moir are through competing.
They have yet to announce concrete plans for their futures: together and individually. But Moir says that’s probably coming before autumn, after the spring’s cross-Canada Stars tour and a summer tour through China.
“I think we owe people answers,” Moir said this week. “There’ll come a time soon when we find them for ourselves, and when we do, we’ll share them.”
In the meantime, they’re enjoying the respite from competition-induced stress and from the pressure and whims of a judging panel.
“I’m feeling a renewed passion for performing, with the focus for so long being on competing,” Virtue said. “It’s a huge sense of relief since the Olympics, for sure. We knew we were under pressure, and we put that pressure on ourselves, but I guess I didn’t fully realize the depth of it.
“People who’ve seen us say, ‘You look different, you sound different.'”
If Into the Mystic was their musical escape, it was an escape from not only the white heat of trying to repeat as Olympic champions but from the vague sense something had been stacked against them from the start. By the opening ceremonies, a French newspaper had reported that the U.S. and Russians had joined forces against the Canadians.
Whether there was a deal or whether it was collective mindset or general stupidity, some of the marking at Sochi — especially the incomprehensible ice dance component scores — was a major setback for an already-struggling sport.
“I don’t know where I’ve put that,” Moir says with candour. “The controversy, the politics, the marks are probably the last things about Sochi that comes to mind. It was the memories we made for ourselves and being part of an Olympic team that was so special. It was life-altering.”
Just as their contribution to figure skating has been game-altering.
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