After Olympic bronze, Gilles and Poirier treat world championships as a celebration

Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier of Team Canada celebrate their bronze medal in the Figure Skating Ice Dance competition during the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics in Milan, Italy on Wednesday, Feb. 11, 2026. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette

Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier won’t call it a last dance. But after 15 years and an Olympic medal, next week’s world figure skating championships look a lot like a victory lap.

The Canadian ice dancers will arrive in Prague after winning bronze with a euphoric free skate at last month’s Milan Cortina Games, the culmination of a career built slowly — and on their own terms.

“We really want to treat this event as a celebration of our skating,” Poirier said. “The Olympics was really the big goal for the season, and we’ve accomplished that.”

While some teams — including defending champions Madison Chock and Evan Bates of the U.S. — will skip the post-Milan worlds, Gilles and Poirier chose to give fans, old and new, one more chance to see this season’s programs.

Poirier said he’s excited to skate with “less pressure” in the Czech capital. Gilles, meanwhile, sees the event as an opportunity to take the ice with “more joy” after a stressful lead-up to the Games, including questionable judging that put their chances of a first Olympic podium in doubt.

An outpouring of emotion — tears, laughs and leaps of joy on the podium — followed their poignant “Starry, Starry Night” free dance in Italy, as Gilles and Poirier finally secured a medal in their third and final appearance together on the sport’s brightest stage.

“I don’t think we intended to be that content after a program,” Gilles said during a conference call Wednesday. “We’ve always been like, ‘OK, we won this event, or we’ve medalled at this event, now we have something else to look forward to.’ And I think, we just allowed ourselves to be so present in that moment.

“We weren’t ready to leave that moment ... even when we got to the podium, we were like, we could stay on this podium forever.”

Gilles and Poirier are already four-time world medallists, having won silver in each of the past two seasons.

Both 34, the longtime partners are expected to retire from competition following Prague, though Gilles wouldn’t completely shut the door.

“We always lead with our hearts and lead with what our bodies want to do,” she said. “We want to just really be present at the world championships and not really have an ending kind of lingering over (us) and, I don’t know, having this mindset of ‘this could be the end.’

“We’re just going to leave it open-ended.”

That didn’t, however, stop them from reflecting on the mark they’ve left on the sport, with Poirier highlighting their commitment to a creative, authentic and, at times, quirky style.

“The thing that I’m most proud of is our legacy of work, our body of work. All that we’ve produced and contributed to the sport and the way that we’ve always brought ourselves and our vision to what we do,” Poirier said. “That’s going to be our legacy more than anything.

“The Olympic medal speaks to the amount of work that we’ve put in and the skill that we have, but I think what makes us Piper and Paul is the creativity that we brought to the sport.”

Gilles said that despite their long grind to the Olympic podium, she wouldn’t change a thing, comparing their journey to an old fable.

“We’re like ‘The Tortoise and the Hare.’ We get there in the end, and we end up winning on our own time,” she explained. “I kind of like it the way that we’ve done it, because if you’re successful in the middle of your career and then you’re trying to chase that the rest of it, that’s really hard.”

Life since the Games has included time with loved ones — especially after “cocooning” to conserve energy ahead of the Olympics — and a quick return to training just two days after arriving back in Toronto.

They’ve also had their share of paperwork ahead of an eight-week road trip, including travel visas and taxes.

The rhythm dance is scheduled for March 27 in Prague, followed by the free dance on March 28. Then comes the show tours with “Stars On Ice” through the Victoria Day long weekend in May.

As for what’s after that, stay tuned.

“Paul and I will always be involved in skating,” Gilles said. “So whether this is our last (competition) or we’re just doing shows, we just kind of want to still be celebrating what we’ve accomplished over the last 15 years of our career.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 18, 2026.

Daniel Rainbird, The Canadian Press