Who Are Beaudry and Cizeron? Olympics Controversy, Explained

What are the Winter Olympics without superhuman feats, beautiful costumes, and a polarizing French skating duo clouded by scandal?

On Wednesday, Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron took home gold in the Olympic free-dance event, beating out American figure skaters and three-time world champions Madison Chock and Evan Bates by a narrow 1.43-point margin. Many fans considered the win a stunning upset by what they saw as blatant favoritism from a French judge ignoring Beaudry and Cizeron’s controversies. The skating duo formed their partnership a year ago, after Beaudry’s boyfriend and erstwhile skating partner was suspended over allegations of sexual assault and Cizeron’s ex-partner retired and accused him of controlling and abusive behavior.

Together, they’re problematic enough that, in Netflix’s recent docuseries about the competitive skating world, former Olympian Adam Rippon said there was “sinister energy” around Beaudry and Cizeron. Let’s glide in, shall we?

In case you didn’t watch Glitter and Gold, 31-year-old Cizeron is a champion French ice dancer who recently came out of retirement to compete alongside Beaudry. Before that, he’d been skating with fellow French ice dancer Gabriella Papadakis. The two started skating together when they were both 9, broke multiple world records, and won gold at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics before retiring together in 2024. “We could not have dreamed of a more beautiful career,” the pair said in a joint statement at the time.

Behind closed doors, Papadakis and Cizeron’s partnership was fraught: In her memoir, So As Not to Disappear, which was released earlier this year, Papadakis accused Cizeron of “blood-chilling coldness” and said she refused to skate with him without a coach present during their storied career, “terrified by the idea of finding myself alone with him.” Cizeron denies her claims, which he’s characterized as a “smear campaign,” and reportedly sent her a cease-and-desist letter to stop what he described as “the dissemination of defamatory statements” about him.

Beaudry, meanwhile, has been trying to bounce back from her own controversy. The 33-year-old Montreal-born athlete used to skate for Canada with her boyfriend, the Danish Canadian ice dancer Nikolaj Sørensen. They stopped competing together two years ago, after Canada’s Office of the Sport integrity commissioner gave Sørensen a six-year suspension for allegedly sexually assaulting an American skater in 2012.

During that time, Beaudry has stuck by Sørensen’s side and defended him in the press. “It was not only about skating, it was about my integrity, it was about his integrity. I know my boyfriend 100 percent,” she said in an episode of Glitter and Gold. An arbitrator overturned Sørensen’s suspension last year on a technicality, though his ban is still under review. Earlier this month, the skater who accused Sørensen said in a statement to the Canadian press that Beaudry’s continued defense of him fosters “the culture of silence in figure skating.”

Last spring, Cizeron came out of retirement, shocking fans with the announcement that he was reentering the competition with Beaudry at his side. The embattled duo are longtime friends — they trained together at the Ice Academy of Montreal for over ten years — and Cizeron told CBC Sports he had proposed the partnership to Beaudry. “We were both at a crossroads. We were getting close to the end but had the feeling of maybe some unfinished business,” he said at the time. Beaudry, who promptly obtained French citizenship to compete with Cizeron, added, “We have nothing to lose. We have everything to gain.”

On Wednesday, Sørensen was in the audience, whistling to the French team as they waved at him from the podium.

In Milan, the new partners have stuck to tepid statements about wanting to focus on skating and “gratefulness” instead of their respective scandals. They finished first in Monday’s short program, but viewers raised their eyebrows on Wednesday, when the duo made clear errors in their free dance and French judge Jézabel Dabois scored them favorably by nearly eight points. Dabois also happened to be the only judge on a panel of nine to score Madison Chock and Evan Bates — who many viewers feel delivered a flawless skate — less than 130 points, cementing the Beaudry and Cizeron’s gold-medal finish.

Fans of Chock and Bates have called on the International Skating Union to review the scoring. But the ISU has doubled down on the outcome, saying in a statement that it’s “normal for there to be a range of scores given by different judges in any panel” and maintaining that it has “full confidence in the scores given.”

Meanwhile, a lot of ice-skating fans don’t feel great about this problematic duo winning big on the Olympics stage. Papadakis appeared to respond to news of her ex-partner’s gold medal with a cryptic Instagram post featuring a giant pour of red wine and a pack of Marlboro Golds. “Logging off xxx,” she captioned the post. Fans flooded her with support in the comments. “Can’t imagine what you’re feeling!” one wrote. “Je te crois!”