France’s extremely talented and extremely controversial ice dancers, explained

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Editor’s note: This story includes descriptions of sexual assault.

When Olympic ice dance pair Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron take to the ice on Wednesday, they’ll do so as the favorites for gold.

The French duo currently leads the pack with a score of 90.18, a slim margin over the Americans Madison Chock and Evan Bates, and roughly 4 points ahead of Canadians Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier. And Fournier Beaudry and Cizeron’s free dance, the concluding, longer skate of the multi-day competition, is considered one of the sport’s best this season.

A victory would be a triumph for the relatively new pair, as ice dancing is often characterized as a sport where years-long partnerships tend to rule the podium. But all of Fournier Beaudry and Cizeron’s success also comes with a disclaimer, one that involves allegations of rape and accusations of emotional abuse and the silencing of a victim — a dark reflection of some of the worst things about this gorgeous sport.

It’s hard to talk about Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron’s accomplishments on the ice without addressing the serious allegations — rape and emotional abuse — they’re currently embroiled in.

Prior to skating with Cizeron, Fournier Beaudry skated under the Canadian flag with a man named Nikolaj Sørensen. Fournier Beaudry and Sørensen also happen to be dating. The pair competed at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing and placed ninth.

In July 2023, a former American figure skater filed a report with Canada’s now-defunct Office of the Sport Integrity Commissioner, alleging that, after a party in April 2012, Sørensen held her down against her will and raped her.

“I pushed my arms against his hips to try to get his penis out of me and I was struggling to breathe. At this point, I feared for my life and let my body go limp as I lay there and he raped me,” the alleged victim said in the report she filed, which was obtained by USA Today. The outlet also wrote that “the woman said she remained silent for years and never reached out to the police or sports officials because she feared that she would be blamed and that no one would believe her.”

After an investigation, OSIC banned Sørensen in October 2024 for six years. The ban was later overturned on jurisdictional grounds and is currently under appeal; Sørensen has maintained his innocence the whole time. Fournier Beaudry has defended her boyfriend, most recently in the new Netflix ice dance docuseries Glitter and Gold, where she’s featured.

”I know my boyfriend 100 percent. I know him and we stand strong together,” Fournier Beaudry said in the doc. She also said, “when they decided to suspend him it meant his career was over. Which also meant that my career was over.”

Fournier Beaudry’s career wasn’t over. On March 2, 2025, she and Guillaume Cizeron announced in a joint Instagram post that they were teaming up and would represent France. The two said they were familiar with each other because they both train at the Ice Academy of Montreal, an ice dance coaching institution.

Cizeron was available because his previous partner Gabriella Papadakis, who he’d won two Olympic medals and broken world records with, had recently retired.

Earlier this year, on January 15, 2026, Papadakis published Pour ne pas disparaître (So as Not to Disappear), a memoir in which she discusses the pressure and mistreatment she experienced as a top female ice dancer. There is no English translation of the book yet, but according to French outlets like the AFP and Le Monde, Papadakis writes that Cizeron was a demanding, exhausting partner. She told the AFP: “I may have been under a kind of control and experiencing things that were not acceptable, but in fact, that relationship reflects the system [of ice dance]. … Little by little, I realized I was in a dangerous situation for my physical and mental health.”

Cizeron has denied Papadakis’s account of their time together, described her account as “a smear campaign,” and threatened his ex-partner with legal action. Papadakis was supposed to serve as a commentator for NBC at the Olympics this year, but was let go. In a statement, NBC said, “We respect Gabriella’s right to tell the story of her life and career. At the same time, her new book creates a clear conflict of interest.”

In response, Papadakis has posted on her personal social media account: “It is however incredibly difficult to make sport safer when survivors’ voices are still being silenced. I had to end my competitive career because I could no longer tolerate abuse. And now, as a result of speaking up about it I’ve lost my job.I don’t single myself out as a victim.”

Cizeron, Sørensen, and Fournier Beaudry by extension are not the first skaters tethered to allegations of abuse and misconduct. They probably won’t be the last. As beautiful as this sport can be, it’s also capable of true ugliness behind the scenes.

There are several recent accounts from former athletes alleging that the sport is a catalyst for toxic behavior and has taken a toll on their mental health.

Yulia Lipnitskaya, a Russian Olympic champion in 2014, has spoken about how anorexia forced her to retire from skating. Gracie Gold, an American Olympic medalist also in 2014, wrote a memoir, Outofshapeworthlessloser, that detailed the sport’s debilitating effect on her mental health and her own eating disorders. In that book, Gold also writes about the trauma of being sexually assaulted by a fellow skater.

There are also multiple stories and accompanying lawsuits in which skaters allege that federations and coaches did not protect them from their abusers.

It’s as if winning is more important than the human toll this sport takes.

The intense focus on success may explain how Fournier Beaudry’s French citizenship was granted just in time for the Olympics, and why the French and skating media has, according to critics, avoided asking the pair hard questions about the very bleak circumstances that set their partnership into motion. Fournier Beaudry and Sørensen would ostensibly still be skating for Canada if there were no rape accusations against him and if the OSIC investigation cleared him. And if Papadakis didn’t believe she was in an unhealthy partnership with Cizeron, they might still be skating together too.

On Friday, Christine Brennan, a USA Today reporter who broke the story about the rape accusation against Sørensen, asked Fournier Beaudry and Cizeron about Fournier Beaudry’s comments in the Netflix series (i.e., that she believes Sørensen “100 percent”) and if the duo has considered the chilling effect this could have on other victims and the overall safety of figure skating.

“What is the message you’re sending to sexual assault survivors and abuse survivors in your sport when you defend Nikolaj Sørensen?” Brennan asked.

“We said everything we needed to say about that subject, and we are focused on the Olympics,” Fournier Beaudry said in response. Brennan pressed her again, saying, “What about the fact that the survivor has said that today?”

“We have no thoughts,” the skater said.

The skating world should have many.

Fournier Beaudry and Cizeron will skate for the Olympic gold medal on Wednesday, February 10.