The French Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron today won gold in ice dance at the Beijing 2022 Winter Gamesin a final in which Adrián Díaz and Olivia Smart won the first Spanish Olympic diploma in this discipline.
Díaz and Smart, who performed to the rhythm of the soundtrack of El Zorro, improved the best Spanish record to datethe twelfth place achieved by Sara Hurtado and Kirill Jalyavin in PyeongChang 2018, and they finished eighth close to 200 points (199.11).
It was the Olympic debut for the Spanish couple, but already in the rhythmic dance program last Saturday they recognized that they had felt “very comfortable” skating and that they had had a “very good” time on the track.
For its part, the French couple, silver in 2018 and four-time world champion, achieved 136.15 points in this program of free dance, which catapulted their accumulated to 226.98 integers that allowed them to win gold.
The Gauls, who have been skating together for ten years and get along perfectly, they received a standing ovation from the restricted audience at the Capital Indoor Stadium in Beijing after his artistic interpretation.
russian stumble
The pair of the Russian team formed by Viktoria Sinitsina and Nikita Katsalapov, current world champions, was the other great favorite, but their elegant execution, to the sound of their compatriot Rachmaninov, it was somewhat marred by a slip by Sinitsina down the stretch.
Despite this, they achieved silver with a cumulative score of 220.51slightly above that achieved by the Americans Madison Hubbell and Zach Donohue, who took the bronze with 218.02 points thanks to a performance after which they merged into a heartfelt hug in which Hubbell was visibly moved.
The couple thus compensates for their disappointment in the past PyeongChang 2018 Olympic Games, in which they stayed by the minimum out of the podium.
this discipline is almost completely dominated by Europeans and North Americans since you have to go to twelfth position to find the first Asian representatives, the Chinese Wang Shiyue and Liu Xinyu.