Olympic gold medalist at the Beijing Games in 2022 and five-time world ice dance champion as part of a duo, Gabriella Papadakis reached the pinnacle of her sport at age 26. The French skater, who bid farewell to competition in 2024, looks back on her athletic career and her journey as a woman in a book, Pour ne pas disparaรฎtre (“So as Not to Disappear”). In it, she paints an unflattering portrait of her former partner, Guillaume Cizeron, who was crowned European champion on January 17 with his new partner, Laurence Fournier Beaudry. Before the book’s release, Cizeron condemned it, saying it “contains false information, attributing to me, among other things, statements I never made and that I consider serious.”
I wouldn’t be here ifโฆ
โฆ If my mother hadn’t been a figure skating coach in Clermont-Ferrand [a city in central France]. Her water broke on the ice and she put me on skates when I was four years old. I skated by imitation, even in the bathtub with soap boxes. At least, that’s what I was told. In my very earliest memories, I was already a skater. Then I spent time at ice rinks the way other kids go to school. It was a given, I never questioned it.
What exact role did your mother play?
She was my coach. All the time. She was the “drive,” as we say in Canada, pure motivation, pure willpower. She built her own life through skating, against her parents’ wishes, even though they were the ones who had taken her to the ice rink one fine day. But she started late and became a coach at a very young age, just 19 years old. We didn’t have much money and she wanted to give me every possible chance to succeed. She trained with other coaches, looked for new moves, studied choreography, sent me to attend the best training camps. At home, the pleasure of reading in the evening was often interrupted by a sentence from my coach: “You’re going to be tired at practice tomorrow.”
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