There's Something About "Proud Mary"

With some summer competitions now on the books, 2016-17 is officially underway in the world of ice dance!  And it seems fitting to start this season's analysis with a look at some choreography coming out of Gadbois, as for two seasons in a row, that camp has wreaked the most havoc on a sport that was already coming apart at the seams.

Choreography in itself is certainly of much less importance than the fraudulent scores that get assigned to favoured teams on an ongoing basis, but it is a relevant topic within the context of how that corruption gets justified.  Much of the narrative behind the undeserved rise of Papadakis/Cizeron (as well as the improved fortunes of several of their training mates) has been focused on how the vehicles themselves, particularly those produced by Marie-France Dubreuil, are worthy of praise (and points) for their groundbreaking ability to draw tears from the eyes of both judges and fans.

Now, many points can be made as a rebuttal of that wide-spread belief in Dubreuil's superiority as a choreographer:

that her work is in fact incredibly lacking in dimension and ingenuity;

that the 'soft, flowing edges' fans claim as her trademark are in reality a sign of no contrast, no speed and no intricacy;

that if she has the ability to find and utilize the nuances in a piece of music to create something unexpected, she has apparently chosen not to make use of it;

that any marginal effectiveness her programs possess comes from how the music itself, or the skating skill of the team^A, or the conspicuous displays of emotion^B by the skaters carry the lacklustre choreography rather than the other way around;

that as much as she claims that her teams have each been given sophisticated custom-painted styles that are distinct from one another, the movements and steps she proscribes have a characteristic look that is amazingly consistent across teams (something that the message boards are hesitantly starting to come to terms with).

But I'd like to explore another point  - that perhaps the reputation Dubreuil receives for creativity is undeserved based not only on her substandard body of work, but also the possibility that the rare fresh idea she does present might not in fact originate with her.  To be clear, I'm not claiming this is often the case, merely raising the question.  One program coming out of the Lake Placid competitions last week, Smart/Diaz's egregiously over-scored Tina Turner "Proud Mary" Short Dance, caught my attention for its similarities to another piece recently aired on television - and it turns out that is just the beginning of the story.

On the May 2, 2016 episode of Dancing with the Stars, Mark Ballas and his Season 22 partner Paige VanZant ^C performed a spectacular jive to this song. I was definitely a fan, especially of this thrilling display of precision and dance chemistry:

FYI - This is, generally speaking, what good dance connection looks like. pic.twitter.com/npVPAyaDWk

— Canada Blue (@canadablues) 3 May 2016

At least two other people from the ice dance world shared my enthusiasm - Alex Shibutani (who was in the audience with Maia) and journalist Jacquelyn Thayer (who identified the movement above as an advanced figure called the "Jive Tollgate" and who also appears to have noticed the similarities in S/D's new program).

On May 13, Olivia Smart announced the new team's music for the SD.  The difficulty, athleticism and energy of VanZant & Ballas' jive was still fresh in my mind, and knowing the skating capabilities S/D had had with previous partners and what interpretation was likely to come out of Gadbois, I weighed in on their chances of living up to the recent number.

S/D are doing Proud Mary? LOL, good luck with that. Even performance-wise, NOPE. But maybe MFD can one-up G/P when it comes to boat miming.

— Canada Blue (@canadablues) 14 May 2016

I did not necessarily believe at the time they were basing their SD on Ballas' idea- eleven days is a rather short time for the logistics to work, after all - but it did cross my mind.  My suspicions increased, however, when Smart explained in an interview how they switched to Proud Mary after having already chosen other music.

"We actually chose different swing and blues music in the beginning, and Marie then played Proud Mary in one of our lessons, and we both looked at each other and said how much we loved that music. ... So the next day we came into the rink and right away we requested to Marie if we could skate to that music instead!"

(Please note - I am assuming that Dubreuil choreographed the SD based on this interview, but it is not without precedent for one Gadbois coach to assist the team in deciding on music and for another to choreograph a piece. I will update this post if information surfaces that this was the case instead.)

Of course, choreography can to a certain extent serve the purpose of homage.  Bent/Razgulajevs's White Christmas-themed SD (likely choreographed by Carol Lane^D, and unveiled in the same Lake Placid Senior International competition as S/D's) is one example of this; another would be Paul/Islam's recent exhibition choreographed by Kelly Johnson to Ed Sheeran's Thinking Out Loud. In both cases, the programs include a small handful of upper body gestures copied from a single, well-known source, with the main substance of the choreography being a work onto its own and movements being either new or part of the team's catalogue of prior material.

It should therefore be noted that both the V&B and S/D pieces include classic movements done by Tina Turner and the Ikettes around the time of the song's release in 1970.  As can be seen in this 1971 performance, examples include the 360 degree turns at the tempo change in S/D's program, the revolving fists in V&B's, and the bending forward in both:

Three sections, however, stood out to me as owing more to the DWTS version than Turner's - the partnered section preceding the Twizzles, a jump by both partners during the Not Touching Step Sequence and the triple cartwheel ending.

Apologies

Well, two things have become painfully obvious. 

My last entry, at least with regards to Paul/Islam's political future, has turned out to be spectacularly wrong. 

And my follow through on promises of new material has been terribly pathetic.  My deepest apologies. I fully intend to publish more posts and videos (many of which already exist in draft stage!), and, if you're still willing to bear with me, a change in offline circumstances this spring should make doing so more realistic. I just wanted to make clear that my unintentional hiatus has not been due to lost interest or having given up the fight. In the meantime, for my most pressing thoughts, you can follow me on Twitter.

A Tale of Two Mistreated Teams

Shortly after the 2014-15 season concluded, Hubbell/Donohue and Paul/Islam moved from the Detroit Skating Club to CPA Gadbois in Montreal.  Why would two of the four strongest teams of the past season (according to what was executed on the ice rather than the scores given) move to a training centre that did not have a proven track record of accommodating the type of talent these two teams possess?  The obvious answer is, of course, politics.  What is interesting, however, is the divergent way in which the pressure to gain a political advantage likely took shape.


Hb/Dn had been left off the Olympic, World and 4 Continents teams for the 2012-13 and 2013-14 seasons in order for Davis/White and Chock/Bates to rack up undeserved accolades of all kinds.  In 2014-15, Hb/Dn once again proved themselves to be deserving of much more than they received.  After the earlier indignity of placing behind Gilles/Poirier, Papadakis/Cizeron and Monko/Khaliavin on the Grand Prix circuit, they had to make do with Golden Spin of Zagreb instead of the hoped-for Grand Prix Final in early December.  They nearly lost this Senior B competition to Guignard/Fabbri, a truly terrible team that had, until then, been mostly relegated to the scoring basement where they belonged.

Once Nationals arrived, it was clear that Ch/Ba had succeeded D/W as the automatic victors.  But instead of fighting for second place against the Shibutanis as might be expected, Hb/Dn were cast in the role of battling for third place against the very deserving but ultimately less refined Hawayek/Baker.

Despite placing ahead of H/B, they were only given the Worlds assignment and not 4CC.  The message seemed clear: they could easily be replaced next season by the young and fresh World Junior champions, who also happened to represent the DSC.

In the meantime, CPA Gadbois was having an extremely good year.  Skate Canada mouthpiece Bev Smith's coverage of 2015 4CC, a competition which the European P/C naturally did not attend, provides a good example of the hype surrounding the camp's top team.

"A young team, Papadakis and Cizeron have made amazing strides throughout the past season. They improved their skating skills. They endured draining work over the summer to improve their interpretative skills, too. Strategies were put in place.  Their coaches threw them an uncommon challenge, asking them to skate to Mozart, which is not easy for ice dancer to interpret, especially skaters so young. Obviously, all obstacles can be overcome. The French certainly have done that – and quickly. And what’s most pleasant about the whole thing: the judges of the world have rewarded what they’ve seen on the ice. That makes a competition so much more fun. And sporty."
 
If a team whose quality was markedly below that of Hb/Dn's could ascend more suddenly than Virtue/Moir and score nearly as outrageously as Davis/White, then it would seem that anything is possible.  What Hb/Dn need is for strong international scores to force the USFSA's hand in keeping them in the game at the national level.  And while the cause/effect relationship of P/C's rise and Gadbois's popularity is still unclear, there is no question that teams aside from P/C have already benefited politically from training in Montreal, and that nabbing a top American team can only increase the prestige of the camp.


Paul/Islam's case, on the other hand, would appear to be more complex.  The benefit of moving to Montreal is less obvious and even somewhat counter-intuitive.  To be sure, their situation appeared to be desperately stagnant by the season's end (going by results, of course, as they continued to improve despite the absurd placements they were continually handed).  After a humiliating fall season where they unfairly placed behind or were outscored by more than a dozen weaker teams, they scrapped their first Free Dance and managed to hang on to the third spot at Nationals.  At this competition, where they should have been vying for the national crown against Weaver/Poje, the margin between them and silver medalists G/P was approximately five times more than the margin between them and the 4th- and 5th-place finishers (Orford/Williams and Paradis/Ouellette, respectively).  Finishing the season off with a nonsensical 13th-place at Worlds, three spaces lower than the year before, and having obviously ceded back all the ground they had gained over Gilles/Poirier during the Sochi season, a fresh start somewhere else would seem to be of both political and psychological benefit. 

But why Montreal?  The scrapped FD was, in fact, choreographed by Gadbois coaches Dubreuil/Lauzon and had been nearly universally, if somewhat unfairly, panned.  P/O, the team that many had viewed as their biggest competition going forward, were already training at the camp.  But what if the reason why P/O, and G/P once again, were more favoured by Skate Canada was as simple as location?  There is evidence to suggest that Skate Canada is currently obsessed with having their teams train within Canada's borders.

The first obvious sign of this new mindset came during 2014 Skate Canada International, when a fluff piece for the DSC was dismissively followed by an interview with High Performance Director Mike Slipchuk in which he discussed "a mission to keep our top skaters here [at home]".  A few months later at 2015 Canadian Nationals, on the heels of a Paul/Islam fluff piece, Tracy Wilson insisted on-air that training outside the country was no longer necessary.

And then there was the emphasis placed on P/O, which was suspect because it was far above what their skating should have merited.  It seems apparent from their trajectory last season that a Gadbois contender was very much what Skate Canada wanted. 

The buzz started when they were assigned Skate Canada's Grand Prix host pick outright at the end of June.  Having been assigned to a senior B the season before and finishing fifth in the FD at the previous Nationals did provide a basis of sorts for the decision, despite a previously non-existent international career.  Results at the 2014 Lake Placid Ice Dance Championships a month later, however, seemed to suggest that waiting to see how others teams fared during summer competition might have been a wise decision.  P/O scored lower than five other Canadian teams in the Short Dance segment, the highest-scoring of which were the 2012 Canadian Junior champions Poulin/Servant.  And while they were not present at this competition, the 2011 Canadian Junior champions and seasoned international competitors Orford/Williams would have also been a fitting choice for the host pick.  They had a strong showing at BC Summer Skate in early August, and had also publicly noted a wish to be assigned to the event because of its proximity to home.

The decision had already been made, however, and Bev gave P/O a starring role in her article covering the High Performance Camp in September.

"Dubreuil brought with her some new faces, Elisabeth Paradis and Francois-Xavier Ouellette, who aren’t exactly members of the national team, and never even saw a Junior Grand Prix, but at age 22, have finally impressed.

Their scores at Cup of Nice last season placed them in the top 75 of Grand Prix selection criteria. So Skate Canada has given them a starting berth at the Skate Canada International in Kelowna, B.C. in October. “We put them on a top level really quick,” Slipchuk said. “We like to see that….Junior is not the end of the line. It’s just a stop along the way.” Judging from the past quadrennial, young skaters can push themselves up quickly in the next four, Slipchuk said. Skate Canada will have a better idea of who will make up the 2018 Olympic team two years out, but for now, it’s time to spread wings and look at all possibilities."

[The first paragraph quoted could leave the impression that it is an unheard-of honour for a team who are not members of the National Team to receive an invitation to HPC.  It is, in fact, standard procedure to invite teams who have been given Grand Prix assignments.  Such was the case in 2010 for P/I and in 2012 for O/W.  (Thank you to blue eyed birds of Goldenskate for that insight.)]

Next, P/O received a somewhat baffling second Grand Prix assignment as substitutes (Skate America).  As they were handed scores in the same range as P/I's during the fall season, the narrative shifted to one in which P/I were no longer in a race with G/P, but in danger of losing their spot on the World team.  On the eve of the Nationals-qualifying Skate Canada Challenge competition in early December, Bev released another glowing recommendation of P/O, a profile that featured a rather suspicious similarity to P/I's 2013-14 "No matter what" motto, quoted here in Bev's Olympic profile of them.  P/O finished 15 points ahead of other competitors, against a field which included all five of the teams who outscored them earlier in the summer (albeit with P/S dealing with injury).  P/O appeared to have reason to believe a bronze medal at Nats was possible.  But P/I were, barely, allowed to remain ahead, and a surprise victory over P/O by O/W took a possible 4CC assignment effectively off the table.

In the days before Nationals, two things seemed to have possibly strengthened P/I's position.  P/O had failed to make the tech minimums for Worlds, despite padded GOE, and as noted above, P/I had scrapped their FD for one more suited to demonstrating what they were capable of.  But despite this, they hung on to third place via their SD, and finished fifth in the FD segment, a very close call that cannot have put them at ease going forward for the rest of the season.  For whatever reason, P/I were clearly not being given consideration in accordance with their skill level.  Instead, they were being put through the ringer (some technical examples to follow shortly in a separate post.)

Without the international resume of H/D, P/I almost certainly need the national backing of Skate Canada to see improved standings at high-level competitions.  And taken in context, it seems reasonable that this move was strongly encouraged by their federation.  Where that will take them this season remains to be seen, but the off-season has shown some signs of the tide turning back in their favour.

Bev busted out some Gadbois exclamation points in honour of their move.

Skate Canada has twice acknowledged the existence of P/I on Twitter, once in May and again at the  end of July (shown below).

And most notably, P/I have been been assigned to Skate Canada International alongside W/P instead of G/P.   P/O have not yet been given the nod for the host pick, with a TBD marking the third Canadian slot.  (P/O are unlikely to pick up a Grand Prix assignment without the host pick because their truncated 2014-15 season lost them opportunities to finish in the top 10 at Worlds or have high- enough standing on the World Standings or Season's Best lists, which are the usual ways senior teams receive assignments.)

Both Hb/Dn and P/I compete this weekend at the Quebec Summer Championships.  If their fortunes have improved, I'm sure much will be said about the magical change Gadbois has wrought with them, despite years of technical progress at the DSC being ignored.  As with the fate of all the Gadbois teams, it will be mostly political.

TPTB on Twitter: 2015 Worlds (Papadakis/Cizeron Edition)

Many ice dance fans, myself included, could have done without ever having to see Davis/White (or this pose) again. [Their full performance from the Opening Ceremony can be found here.  As for the quality of skating, I can only assume that they were instructed not to show up the flower retrievers.]  But let's be real.  They had to be in attendance at this competition in order to pass the torch to these guys.

[No, this lack of unison is not the reason they shouldn't have won finished on the podium.  This is just the most visible of a myriad of issues I hope to explore in future posts, and something the reigning Olympic champions had a tendency of doing.]

Now, Bev Smith noticed the glorious technique coming out of Montreal back in the fall.

You might even say she's a fan.

The skepticism expressed below was in response to a discussion about Chock/Bates' placement in the Short Dance. She didn't appear to be concerned about the final result.  (Nor about the nine times Virtue/Moir were wrongly defeated by Davis/White prior to Sochi.)

 

No, Papadakis/Cizeron's victory came as an agreeable surprise. 

One might even wonder if her expressions of shock were genuine.   But if they were... well, some of us could have predicted this back in November after Cup of China.

The pot insinuating that the kettle might possibly be black:

Tessa bringing credibility to the sport like a boss:

And a celebratory graphic from Ice-Dance.com that helpfully illustrates Papadakis/Cizeron's unjustifiable rise through the ranks, one that Davis/White themselves surely must envy:

Next up, a return to technical analysis.

TPTB on Twitter: 2015 Worlds (Gilles/Poirier edition)

Not sure if it was the presence of Paul/Islam or the absence of Gilles/Poirier that made editing the tweet necessary.

It is an insult to Virtue/Moir's memory to tell falsehoods about Twizzles.  So what exactly does Bev find nice about these?

The Dance Jump-two Twizzles combination of Davis/White fame?  Piper's glitchy rotation and minimal ice coverage?  The ugly positions that lack paso character?


On the day after the Short Dance, CBC Sports tweeted updates about Gilles/Poirier's placement and included a link to their performance twice.  No updates were tweeted for Paul/Islam, who sat only one place and 1.52 points behind them, nor for the pair counterparts of Séguin/Bilodeau and Ilyushechkina/Moscovitch.  No video link was tweeted for the performances of Weaver/Poje and Duhamel/Radford .  The only other team to have a link of their performance and an update of their placement tweeted was Cappellini/Lanotte.

Then, the Free Dance...

That's not how it works.  If someone is going to criticize Davis/White, they can't then turn around and claim Gilles/Poirier have speed.  Is the difference between actual power derived from edges and quickness kept up through workarounds something that needs to be explained to her?

Piper's edges were frequently nonexistent in this program, but I'm even more interested to know how PJ saw lyrical movement in a jazzy program executed with zero grace.

 

And after the competition...

 

What is good about a team moving up based on nothing at all to do with their ability or execution?  It is becoming increasingly clear how likely it is that Bev's belated Sochi campaign was done under the direction of Skate Canada.

 

Man, it must be really difficult to keep track of where your terrible third team ends up.  Or maybe Skate Canada was just disappointed they finished that high. 

As 2015 Worlds Approaches...

My rather unexpected hiatus will be coming to an end before long.  Truth be told, this season was far more problematic than I had anticipated.  The sheer amount of corruption meant that I became overwhelmed with the possibilities.  My plan is to cope with the off season by catching up and dissecting some of what has occurred.  No doubt this week will bring its fair share of inspiration. 

As an update to the last post, an article summarizing the 2015 Canadian Nationals results included an interesting error regarding Gilles/Poirier.  Strangely, it has not been corrected in the last two months.  The comments were closed after someone pointed out the mistake.

http://www.thewhig.com/2015/01/24/weaver-and-poje-win-dance-duhamel-and-radford-claims-fourth-pairs-title

It certainly seems that G/P's Sochi story is evolving.  By 2018, G/P will be heading into Pyeongchang as reigning Olympic champions.

Skate Canada Censors Criticism of Gilles/Poirier

Yesterday, the Skate Canada website published a piece by Beverley Smith which featured the particularly obnoxious misrepresentation that Gilles/Poirier missed the 2014 Olympics only due to injury.

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.