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.
