#hubbell and donohue

[aflawedfashion]

[im-a-slut-for-skating]

2022 Olympic teams finally got their medals! Congrats Teams USA and Japan!

[edgecallskating]

Where were you when Hubbell and Donohue's stationary lift was called 1 BV during the 2019 Four Continents free dance?

Lest you think I exaggerate, I bear receipts!

I'd like to nominate this as a future Canadian Heritage Moment for putting Gilles & Poirier and Weaver & Poje on the podium.

[twistsandtwizzles]

Congrats to the 2022 Olympic Team Event Gold Medalists!!! (Finally)

[isabeaulevito]

team usa, let it happen 🥇🇺🇸

aaaand here’s my team usa edit! i made this one more somber but I have a more upbeat one coming soon as well! congrats on finally receiving your team gold medals, team usa!

flash warning!

song is let it happen (slowed) by tame impala

[a-birdhouse-in-your-soul]

don’t mind me i’m just watching hubbell/donohue’s hallelujah short dance from the 2015 grand prix final and mourning what could have been

[misslacklamb]

An Italian cheese company was a sponsor of a figure skating competition. The medalists all got cheese as gifts. The photos are delightful!

[beautifulstorms]

good rd event! since they're skating to the same music, it's really clear that g/f are the better skaters but have worse choreo than t/v (in the sense that their RD has way less jive / social dance character)

[figurelifeflirt]

2022 US Nationals Entry #7

Senior free dance

Hawayek/Baker

Thoughts: Jean, again I find myself drawn towards his energy. He is so fun to watch.

Pate/Bye

Thoughts: Johnny shut your damn mouth about these two looking tired. Go over and sit in the perfectionist corner right the fuck now. Ookay, that’s out of my system. Logan, the new haircut darling. It’s incredible.

Hubbell/Donohue

Thoughts: how much my opinion of these two has changed. I used to think they were just overscored and boring but now… I’m not in love yet, but I am seeing them differently now. The chemistry. And of course, Maddie’s superb hairdo.

Green/Parsons

Thoughts: normally I do like them, but here they just fell a little flat.

[jennibeultimate]

Apart from the technical side of ice dance where Shibutanis might excel (what we cannot say bc they did not show their skating yet) and being away from competitions for a long time the return is a challenge mentally and physically...

I feel like many ppl overestimate the Shibutanis bc of their former political power in USFS. But things have changed. Marina Zueva's team is also not the strong powerhouse it used to be bc that is IAM now. And being back from competition for 7 years is not easy. I don't think judges will forget the past 7 years and just make them top contenders. In ice dance you need to work for your reputation...I dunno how much of the reputation is left after a whole scoring change.

Imo it was partly politics that gave them the Bronze at the Olympics 2018 in a time where there was no clear No 1 US team skill wise. They were not a team constantly in the world medals throughout their career. They were not even US champs in 2018 (Hubbell/Donohue were!)...so even with their political power in USFS back when they were not the best of the best, not even in the US. They profited from the absence of teams and no clear political order after Olympics 2014 (besides P/C dominating since 2014-2015 season) and had to fight to become world medal contenders in 2015-2016. And they placed 2nd 2016, where Worlds was in the US, but still were immediately dropped further down with V/M return in 2016-2017.

So now 7 years later why are ppl acting like they would become Oly champs? They are not V/M who had a track record of being the BEST ice dance team for years.

I don't underestimate them, they will probably kick a current US team from an Olympic spot and place well in ice dance overall (and I am personally not a fan of returning just for the Olympic season), but to place on the Olympic podium after 7 years is not a given just bc they were on the podium in 2018.

Ice dance has become quite interesting with FB/C and Shibsibs in the mix for the Oly season, but atm there is nothing clear as to how this will turn out. If all this makes things more unclear instead of clear how the season will go....

[sunskate]

a Washington Post article from today about Madi and Gabi:

One night in late February, Madison Hubbell and Gabriella Papadakis, two Olympic gold medal ice dancers, glided into a skating exhibition in Zurich’s 85-year-old Hallenstadion to shatter one of figure skating’s great taboos by performing not with their longtime male partners but each other.

They held hands, locked eyes and twirled under a spotlight at the Swiss show Art on Ice. Their program, skated to Marius Bear’s “Not Loud Enough,” was short and simple, filled with parallel spins, gentle hugs and linked fingers. At one point, Papadakis leaped into Hubbell’s arms, flinging her hand dramatically behind her head for several moments before dropping back to the ice.

Online commenters used words such as “gorgeous,” “incredible,” and “fantastique” to describe the performance. Hubbell said someone told them they looked as graceful together as Papadakis and her male partner, Guillaume Cizeron, did in winning gold at the 2022 Beijing Olympics.

“We made people see other realities,” Papadakis says.

They did this because they want to change figure skating — ice dance, in particular. In doing so, they are going up against more than 100 years of tradition because ice dance is different from any Olympic sport. At heart, it’s a performance as theatrical as it is athletic, each routine a fairy tale heavy on romance and chivalry. A male skater almost always leads, and his female partner follows, all while gazing at each other with loving eyes.

Many women in skating, including Hubbell and Papadakis, find this dynamic uncomfortable and outdated.

“The new generation just doesn’t relate to it anymore,” Papadakis says.

She and Hubbell see one gender ice dance as a chance to create more opportunities for female skaters because the pool of males is small, leaving many women without partners. But skating is a judged sport, and judges tend to be old-fashioned. They like the love stories and can favor couples who seem more passionate than others.

Nearly three years ago, Skate Canada, the Canadian figure skating federation, revised its rules to change the definition of a team from “one man and one woman” to “two skaters.” But no other country’s federation has followed, and the International Skating Union, which oversees the sport globally and at the Olympics, does not allow single-gender teams. Even Hubbell and Papadakis, who became good friends while training at the same Montreal rink and used to skate together for fun, aren’t likely to perform as a team outside of occasional exhibitions.

“I think when [people] see two women skating together, they are like, ‘Oh God, this is gay,’” Papadakis said.

Or as Kaitlyn Weaver, an American-born ice dancer who went to two Olympics with Canadian skating partner Andrew Poje and led Skate Canada’s gender definition change, said, “The conservative people don’t want to see two men skating together … it’s their homophobia.”

For all the sport’s emphasis on love and courtship, few ice dance teams are real life couples. The American husband-and-wife team of Madison Chock and Evan Bates, winners of the past three world championships, is a rare exception. Most teams are put together for their ability to fit together on the ice. For instance, Hubbell, an American, is married to Spanish ice dancer Adrian Diaz, while Zachary Donohue, Hubbell’s longtime partner with whom she won team gold and ice dance bronze at the 2022 Beijing Olympics, is married to Australian skater Chantelle Kerry.

Sexuality is a complicated topic in figure skating. Over the years, several male stars have come out as gay, and top Americans such as Jason Brown, who is gay, and Amber Glenn, who identifies as pansexual, are immensely popular with fans. But many inside skating are wary that the sequined costumes and elegant routines can overshadow the fact that figure skaters are among the best-conditioned athletes in the world.

Last fall, Ryan Dunk, a skater from Baltimore and former U.S. junior national champion, came out as queer in an Instagram post that included a long list of what he called “micro aggressions” from others in the skating community. One coach, he wrote, suggested he “skate like a man.” Others told him they didn’t want to see his “sexuality on the ice.” A fellow skater said Dunk shouldn’t “be allowed in the same-sex locker room.”

Papadakis identifies as bisexual and queer, something she never hid during her career, and Cizeron announced years ago that he is gay. As they won Olympic gold and silver medals as well as five world championships together for France, Papadakis struggled to comprehend the charade. She knew of ice dance couples posing as real couples away from the sport, desperate to make people believe their bond was genuine.

“Although it is understood that skating is an artsy place, the idea of openness in your identity is not there at all,” said Weaver, who identifies as queer. “Everyone’s like. ‘It’s figure skating, everyone is gay right?’ But the queer men are scrutinized. They go through a ton of s--- because at the end of the day, we’re a judged sport. At the Olympics, those nine judges come from places in the world where it is illegal to be gay or even look gay.”

Like Papadakis, Weaver waited until after she retired in 2021 to publicly reveal her sexuality. She had too much to lose. The next year, she was named to a Skate Canada task force to study diversity in the country’s skating community.

“This is a white, cisgender, hetero sport,” she said.

The task force didn’t take long to identify the gender complexities in ice dance as a place to start. To Weaver, getting Skate Canada to remove the gender requirements for an ice dance team was a huge first step, but overhauling ideas more than a century old has been harder.

“With women, we are so scrutinized in sports,” she said. “You are one of two things: the ingenue or the sex symbol. Those are our only two identities. You can’t go outside of those identities.”

She believes these ideas are holding back skating, leading to a decline in television ratings and fan interest.

“Part of my mission is to keep this sport from going down to grandma and grandpa’s VCR in the basement,” she said.

Another by-product of such stereotypes discourages many boys from becoming ice dancers, Weaver adds, because they want to avoid being labeled or teased. The shallow pool gives incredible power to the males who stay with the sport. They can be picky about who they select as a partner, often auditioning several at a time, a process that can leave unchosen female skaters discouraged. The one who is selected must adjust to her partner’s style of skating. Almost always, she has to move to the city where he trains, even if it’s in another country.

“Boys most often hold all the cards,” Weaver said.

She remembers mass auditions in the U.S. where a handful of boys needing partners would be able to choose from more than 100 girls lined up on the ice with numbers pinned to their backs.

“Like ‘The Bachelor,’” Papadakis said with a laugh when she heard the story.

“If you are a good-looking dude in figure skating it absolutely is like ‘The Bachelor,’” Weaver said.

Weaver’s 13-year pairing with Poje is rare. Few women in ice dance have partners for that long. Papadakis, too, is unusual in that she skated with Cizeron since she was around 10. Hubbell was with Donohue for 11 years. Most female skaters are doing what Hubbell calls “musical chairs,” frantically searching for a partner with whom she can stick.

“It creates a pervasive power imbalance,” Papadakis says. “Even [inside] the couple, the woman knows that if she breaks up, she might not find a partner. He won’t have a problem finding another partner; she might not have that opportunity. And so you can imagine, for example, an occasion where the man is abusive and the woman might not be able to leave the relationship or the partnership.”

Hubbell, who now coaches in Ontario, Canada, has seen three of the 10 female ice dancers at her rink give up the sport for at least a year because they can’t find male partners. She begs them to try pairing with each other, to see if two of them might make a team, which would allow them to compete at least at Skate Canada events. They skate together at practice the way she once did with Papadakis, why not in competitions? Still, they refuse.

Part of the reason, Hubbell said, is they know they can’t take part in international events, but she also suspects the girls are apprehensive about breaking away from what she calls the “romantic endeavor” and the “Les Miz” aspect of ice dance.

She understands their fear, but she can’t get past the fact they are missing a year of skating because they don’t want to be stigmatized. She wonders why they won’t at least try. “Keep looking for your Prince Charming,” she wants to tell them, yet at the same time, she has wondered if she too is complicit.

She asked, “If I’m asking them to give it a shot, why not try myself?”

Not long after the Beijing Olympics, Papadakis spent a week in Ontario skating with Hubbell. They didn’t have a formal plan; instead it was a chance to try something they had talked about doing. A video of them dancing spread through the skating community. Then last year, Art on Ice asked Papadakis if she would skate with another woman on the production’s eight-show tour through Switzerland this winter. She said yes but only if she could do it with Hubbell.

She again went to Ontario. By this time, Hubbell had a 1-year-old daughter and a full coaching schedule. Still the two skaters were able to design and practice a routine in three weeks. As they worked, Hubbell was amazed by how quickly she adapted to Papadakis’s style.

She had loved skating with Donohue during her career, but he was so much bigger and stronger that at times he had to slow down so she could catch up. At particularly tense moments in events when one of them felt tired or stressed, Donohue — as the man — instinctively pulled them through. Papadakis “softened” those instances, she realized. Each woman was taking care of the other; no one seized control.

It reminded her of when she was little and partnered with her brother Keiffer back when there was no pressure to feign romance. She used to lift Keiffer off his skates. Now, two decades later, she was doing the same to Papadakis. She felt an amazing peace as they practiced.

Papadakis, though, was not relaxed. After years of rebelling against the male-led culture of ice dancing, she finally was skating with another woman, one of her closest friends, someone with whom she could share the power. Yet the first time she grabbed Hubbell’s hand, she froze.

“Oooh, I’m touching a woman,” she thought.

As they skated, she began questioning some of the moves she made on the ice. Were they too strong? Was she leading too much? Did she look too masculine?

“I had all these thoughts stuck in my brain, and it was quite a vulnerable moment,” she said. “I [had] to go like, ‘What do I believe in?’ I just was not conditioned to do it. I’m conditioned to think with any masculine movement I’m weirdly afraid of hurting her, which is stupid because it’s not the case.”

The memory still troubles her.

“I still have a hard time if I really think about it,” she continued. “When I’m in the performance I go back, I retreat into the default mode. And default mode is me being led and me following somebody else rather than taking initiatives.”

Eventually, she got past the shock. When she did, she realized that she and Hubbell fit well together on the ice. They had barely practiced, yet it looked as if they had been a team for years. She thought that if they really wanted to form a team and fight hard to rewrite the rules that maybe they could become Olympic medalists together.

That would mean changing more than a century of tradition, though, in a sport where change doesn’t happen fast.

[virtchandmoir]

September 6, 2023

Going into the 2021-22 season, both Hubbell and Donohue announced it would be the last of their competitive careers. While they had plenty they were still looking to achieve, winning two medals at the Olympic Games and silver at the World Championships, behind the scenes, what came next for Hubbell was beginning to take shape.

"I guess Scott [Moir] kind of voiced on multiple occasions to the coaching team in Montreal that, upon my retirement, he would be interested in having me join his team [in London, Ontario] – that he needed help with the teams that he currently had and to continue growing the school," said Hubbell, who had worked with Moir on choreography as an athlete. "And I had kind of heard from him in that last season things to that effect, but when you're hanging out with Scott Moir, who is an idol and then he mentions that he would like to coach with you, it's kind of like, 'Yeah, yeah. Maybe you're being really nice. I trust you, but are you just complimenting me?'"

But Moir was serious. So, during the final months of her career in March and April of 2022, logistics for moving began to take place. After finishing Stars on Ice, Hubbell began full time as a coach at I.AM with Moir and Díaz in July 2022.

Moir immediately trusted Hubbell to coach Carreira and Ponomarenko as one of her teams, taking charge of their season plan and return to play after Ponomarenko's ankle injury at the end of the previous season.

—Fanzone

[macaroni-rascal]

what do you think was tessa relationship with the other skaters during the comeback? she often said that in canton she felt isolated and the atmosphere was tense between girls especially. from what i know she never said anything about other skaters in montreal, maybe Marie and patch did a better job on separating different teams than marina, but i know madi h and gabi are good friends so I wonder if tessa felt maybe excluded also being a "newcomer" at the rink. I know her and scott had a big team supporting them so she surely wasn't alone and of course scott was there for her more than in canton but ive always wondered what the relationship between her and the other skaters was

I honestly don't know or care about her relationship with other skaters, and I don't think Tessa did either. I don't mean that in a disrespectful way, I mean Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir did that comeback with a very specific goal in mind, and worked relentlessly to make it happen. Going for group dinners with her competitors wasn't going to help her get deep edgers, better levels, and have more seamless lift transitions.

I don't think she was thinking about being included or excluded, she was there to be an athlete and win the Olympics, and that's what she did.

Gabrielle Papadakis, I believe, has talked about how the V/M comeback ruined the family dynamic at Gadbois, which, to me, is utter bullshit. That was just her complaining she actually needed to compete for medals instead of being gifted them, and her being uncomfortable her and Guillaume weren't the top team in the rink anymore.

It's all well and good to have a healthy and happy training situation, but you do not need to be friends with your competitors.

Also, do you think Gabi would be such good friends with Madi if Hubbell and Donohue were in any danger of ever beating P/C?

[edgecallskating]

A little Throwback Thursday™ to the 2019 Four Continents ice dance podium. Everyone was surprised and delighted to be there and looks like they're accidentally celebrating Hubbell & Donohue's invalidated lift score. This is among my favourites from all the gifs I've ever made! It's also the first one that went really wide on T*itter and made me the fs gif-maker I am today. Thanks accidental podium cinema!

[twistsandtwizzles]

Finally!

[raininyourblackeyes]

My commentator: Madison and Evan have recently changed coaches.

Me: WHAT??

Commentator: since the retirement of Papadakis/Cizeron and Hubbell/Donohue inspired by their success, they have decided to relocate to Canada to train with their coaches

Me: ?????????????