http://www.skatecanada.ca/2014/12/next-stop-barcelona/
(*More on the second paragraph below.)
This distortion of the facts that claims injury, rather than finishing behind a superior team at the qualifying event of 2014 Canadian Nationals, is what prevented Gilles/Poirier from attending Sochi has appeared several times this fall, but appears to be increasing in audaciousness.
"Training was something that was clearly in short supply during the Olympic season. Poirier spent the entire summer leading into it off the ice after suffering a severe ankle injury that required three plates and 13 screws to repair. It was a perpetual race to catch up throughout the fall after missing three months of crucial training time." International Figure Skating, Oct 28/14
Fair enough. The injury was serious, and three months is certainly a significant amount of time to lose. The article also does mention Gilles/Poirier finishing fourth at Nationals behind Paul/Islam. At times, however, it has felt like the emphasis various outlets have placed on G/P's accident disregard the fact that this is not an uncommon situation for a team to deal with. As a comparison, Kaitlyn Weaver broke her ankle in the middle of the 2012-13 season, but Weaver/Poje were still able to finish 5th at Worlds, even with reworked programs. You would think a team so promising that Piper's citizenship had to be fast-tracked for special services to Canada would be capable of pulling it together enough to maintain their status as Canada's #3.
ROD BLACK: First of our two remaining Canadian teams, and again, this team denied a chance to go to the Olympic Games—really had a lot of injuries last year, including Paul basically shattered his ankle and had to recover. But they went to the Worlds, finished in eighth.
- TSN, 2014 Skate Canada Short Dance
(TSN's coverage of the dance events at 2014 Skate Canada International might as well have been called The Piper & Paul Show, so inappropriately did it prioritize them above the other competitors, particularly the Canadian 2014 World silver medallists Weaver/Poje, who won their first Grand Prix gold at this event. This, and other out-of-proportion media coverage of G/P, has been chronicled by the waymorefun blog.)
In this quote by Rod Black, a direct relationship between being injured and missing the team is implied. Also, to my knowledge, the team only dealt with the one injury, although Paul had a false alarm of appendicitis prior to Worlds.
"She and her partner Paul Poirier were the alternates for Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir. An injury to Poirier kept them from training enough before the Canadian Olympic trials."
The Eye Opener, Nov 12/14
The direct relationship is no longer implied, but stated outright: more training time would have meant a spot on the team. (The first sentence is likely in reference to the fact they replaced Virtue/Moir at Worlds, but is an interestingly grandiose phrasing for a team that finished 4th at Nationals all the same.) Despite being healed enough to compete three times during the fall season - the SD at the 2013 Octoberfest competition, and then completing both of their Grand Prix assigments (NHK Trophy and Rostelecom Cup) in November - the team was apparently so unprepared for the Olympic trials in January that they skated obviously below the level they were capable of. Perhaps it was just a hologram of Paul that skated the entire fall season. Still, this is not a skating publication and it well could have been relying exclusively on the team's personal view of what had happened. It appears, however, that G/P's version is moderate in comparison to Skate Canada's, because this is what was published as fact by the federation's official news outlet:
"...after missing the Olympics because of a severe leg fracture for Poirier"
Did G/P even skate the qualifying event in this alternate version of reality? Did they qualify ahead of P/I, but suffer a relapse days before leaving for Sochi? Because otherwise this statement means that the gulf between P/I and G/P is so great that the only possible reason P/I could have outskated them was G/P being injured. Otherwise, there was apparently no chance that G/P wouldn't have deserved that berth.
Let's look at the logic of this assertion.
P/I had shown themselves to be the stronger team - by what happened on the ice - on several occasions during the previous seasons. For G/P to have legitimately surpassed them, they would have had to improve by a massive amount, not simply maintain their previous level, with P/I not improving by enough to keep pace. It is extremely unlikely this specific scenario would have happened, going by the previous demonstrations of potential and respective growth rates of the two teams, even if G/P had not had to contend with an injury. But regardless of whether it was likely or not, it is shockingly inappropriate for a federation to dismiss how the teams actually skated at the qualifying event - that is, after all, the nature of sporting competitions - and make such a public judgment about how the teams would have ranked theoretically if one had not dealt with serious injury and been fully allowed to improve.**
Of course, the intended message is not that G/P would have improved enough to overtake P/I, but that all the previous times they had outscored P/I in the past were legitimate, and that G/P were so visibly hobbled by undertraining and/or Paul's continued state of injury that they were unable to outskate a team considered weaker than them. But the interim between the 2012-13 and 2013-14 seasons is in fact the period in which G/P did show some improvement. Piper made some modest gains in her basic skating skills, and they showed up and performed at Nationals considerably better than they had in the past. Further, despite what the bizarrely clueless Eurosport commentators think, Piper is, and has been widely acknowledged to be, the weaker half of the partnership in nearly every respect. Why does it matter at all that Paul had been injured? Paul, despite being the one who sustained the injury, skated better than Piper in January. It is her performance at the competition which was the biggest roadblock to being on par with P/I, and a team is supposed to be awarded scores based on the weaker execution of the two skaters. How did Poirier's injury result in her execution as a skater - not just their performance as a team, which could be affected by lack of mileage - being weaker than that of their opponents? It is common practice for the healthy skater to do everything possible in their own training to compensate for the injured partner's time off-ice. She didn't lose three months on ice. Injury does not explain why G/P were unable to beat a supposedly weaker team when they skated better than they had the previous year, nor does it explain why Piper's skating was still their biggest flaw as a team.
At the qualifying event of 2014 Canadian Nationals, G/P simply were not good enough to outskate P/I. Nor were they good enough after training for an additional two months at Worlds where they placed ahead of P/I. They are still not good enough this fall, despite having had a whole summer to train and Paul's ankle apparently being in 'limited but unlimited' health. G/P finishing four TEB places, two Grand Prix medals and one GPF slot ahead of P/I is based on nothing more than this sport becoming increasingly corrupt and partisan. Per the ISU's own literally hundreds of pages of guidelines, Paul/Islam are without question the strongest team behind W/P in Canada, but instead are being placed internationally thus far behind several teams whose core skills are weaker and whose mistakes in execution are being ignored.
This raises the question of why Skate Canada allowed the marks to reflect what happened on the ice on this solitary occasion last season, when they and the international panels never had in the case of these two teams previously, and why they are now trying to backtrack from a fair decision they never had to make in the first place. Whatever the reason, they seem serious about correcting the narrative. Which brings us to the reason for this post. The following comment is apparently too subversive to allow on their site.
Note the date on the comment awaiting moderation, and the later date of the comment that has been approved and made public.
*The second paragraph also has an impressive amount of inaccuracy. Gilles/Poirier have not shown substantial improvement since 2014 Worlds, and they did not surpass Hubbell/Donohue this fall in any way except in protocols. "Neck and neck" is also an interesting description when a chronically injured Hubbell/Donohue beat them last season by an average of 13.72 total points during the Grand Prix and 4.54 points at their only matchup during 2014 Four Continents. Still, as inappropriate as it is, it is only to be expected that a federation might stretch the truth on its own website in order to make the nation's teams look better. To mislead about the standing of Canadian teams demonstrates the existence of an especially disturbing type of corruption.
**Especially when Skate Canada has previously shown themselves to be disinclined to factor injury into making decisions about a team's worth. Paul/Islam had dealt with multiple injuries throughout the 2011-12 season, but were not given the consideration of Skate Canada's Grand Prix host pick for the 2012-13 season, despite the promise they had shown in their first two seasons together (National Junior Champions, a silver at Junior Worlds, 2nd in the FD at their first Senior Grand Prix, and a bronze medal at Nats - 4th if V/M had been in attendance). Gilles/Poirier were the recipient of this host pick, bringing their total assignments to two, on the basis of some incredibly cringeworthy skating at 2012 Nationals.
