MILAN — On Wednesday night, an epic battle will conclude in the Olympic ice dance competition. An American team that has been together for four Olympic Games and has won seven national titles and three consecutive world championships — Madison Chock and Evan Bates — will try to win its first individual Olympic medal, potentially gold.
The most significant hurdle in Chock and Bates’ path is a new French ice dance team, formed a year ago, that exists only because of the investigation and subsequent suspension of an alleged sexual abuser.
Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron, who defeated Chock and Bates by a very slim margin in the first stage of the competition Monday, are that new dance team on a meteoric rise to the top of the sport. Cizeron won the Olympic gold medal in 2022 in Beijing with longtime dance partner Gabriella Papadakis, but they announced their retirement as a competitive team in December 2024.
Fournier Beaudry, a Canadian who received French citizenship three months ago, needed a new partner after her previous partner, Nikolaj Sørensen, was banned from the sport for at least six years after a Canadian investigation into allegations he sexually assaulted an American figure skater in April 2012, according to documents and emails obtained by USA TODAY Sports in 2023.
The documents said the woman, then 22, alleged Sørensen, then 23, held her down against her will on a bed and raped her after a party at a condominium near Hartford, Connecticut. The woman is not being identified because USA TODAY Sports does not publish the names of victims of alleged sexual abuse.
In October 2024, Sørensen was suspended for a minimum of six years by Canada’s Office of the Sport Integrity Commissioner for “sexual maltreatment.” The suspension was overturned in June 2025 by the Sport Dispute Resolution Centre of Canada on jurisdictional grounds, but an arbitration board has since ruled that decision must be reviewed, meaning the ban could be put back into place.
Fournier Beaudry has said she’s been dating Sørensen the past 12 years, and both she and Cizeron continue to support him. Sørensen has appeared in the stands at competitions supporting the French team, according to various social media posts.
In the Netflix documentary ‘Glitter & Gold: Ice Dancing,’ Fournier Beaudry spoke about the impact of Sørensen’s ban, saying, ‘This was extremely difficult because it was not only about skating, it was about my integrity, it was about his integrity. I know my boyfriend 100%. I know him. And we (stood) strong together.’
On Feb. 6, the survivor of the alleged sexual assault texted this statement to USA TODAY Sports:
‘The comments by the French team in the press and on a Netflix documentary create a dangerous environment for skaters who need to report abuse. The comments of the reigning Olympic champion and a team in contention for the upcoming Olympic title carry weight, and using their voices to publicly undermine a survivor’s truth further enforces the culture of silence in figure skating.”
When asked that same day by USA TODAY Sports about the survivor’s comment, Fournier Beaudry said, ‘We have no thoughts.”
That’s one part of the story of the new French team. There is another.
A book reveal and the fallout that followed
In January, Papadakis, a skating commentator for NBC, published a memoir, “To Not Disappear.’ In the book, Papadakis wrote of a power imbalance in the sport and described Cizeron as ‘often controlling, demanding and critical,” and said she would not skate with him unless a coach was present at practices.
Cizeron called the book a ‘smear campaign’ and said his lawyers were demanding a halt to what he called defamatory claims against him. Within days, NBC removed Papadakis from her role as an ice dance analyst at the Olympics, saying the book created ‘a clear conflict of interest” and that the network’s ‘responsibility is to deliver coverage that our audience can trust to be free of bias — whether actual or perceived — and we regret that is no longer possible given the circumstances.”
When asked about NBC’s decision on a special edition of USA Today’s Milan Magic podcast, available Wednesday, Papadakis said, “I think it’s a bigger societal issue because we often wonder why survivors don’t speak out about abuse and why things don’t change, and this is because it has tremendous negative impact on the survivors’ lives, and as long as a society we don’t do anything to change that, things won’t change and ignoring the problems don’t make them go away.”
On the Netflix documentary, NBC Olympic commentator and 2018 U.S. Olympic team bronze medalist Adam Rippon said, ‘There is some sinister energy around the partnership.”
In her interview on Milan Magic, Papadakis said that her skating relationship with Cizeron “was a dynamic that was profoundly harmful and dangerous to me, that took me a very, very, very long time to understand.”
“I was trying to write about how these dynamics creep (into) a partnership and in a relationship,” Papadakis said, “how these dynamics can become incredibly dangerous.”
Milan Magic is USA TODAY Sports’ flagship Olympics podcast hosted by Christine Brennan and Brian Boitano. You can listen on Youtube, Spotify, Apple and Amazon.