U.S. dancers Chock and Bates, Canadian’s Gilles and Poirier building figure skating’s best rivalry

Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier, of Canada, perform during the ice dance rhythm dance program at the figure skating world championships, Friday, March 28, 2025, in Boston. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

BOSTON — The word “rivalry” tends to carry a combative connotation, so perhaps it’s best to describe the relationship between American ice dancers Madison Chock and Evan Bates and their Canadian counterparts, Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier, as healthy competition.

They are fond for each other. Yet they also push each other every time they step on the ice.

That was the case again after the rhythm dance at the world championships on Friday night, when Chock and Bates delivered a season-best performance to take the lead heading into the free dance. Their score of 90.18 points was nearly four ahead of Gilles and Poirier, their closest challengers, giving them quite a cushion heading into Saturday’s night conclusion.

“That’s a tough amount of points to catch up on,” Poirier admitted, “but we also know that sport is really unpredictable. It’s been an unpredictable season. And so our job is to come out tomorrow and skate to the best of our abilities, and share with the crowd and with the skating community our art and our craft, and what we enjoy doing.”

Chock and Bates are going for their third consecutive world title, something no team has accomplished in ice dance since Oksana Grishuk and Evgeni Platov for Russia in the 1990s. Gilles and Poirier finished second to the U.S. duo last year.

The Americans also hope to use it as a launching point for the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy.

Chock and Bates were part of the U.S. bunch that ultimately was awarded team gold after a protracted investigation into Russian doping at the 2022 Games in Beijing. But while they cherish those medals, Chock and Bates acknowledge that they are not the same as winning on your own, and that is something that continues to drive them.

They finished eighth in 2014 in Russia, ninth four years later in South Korea, and an agonizing fourth in Beijing.

“We’re putting all our chips on the table for next season,” Bates said. “We’ve been so focused on absolutely maximizing our potential for Boston, and then for the next 12 months. We’re going to treat it like it’s our last shot.”

They will probably have to contend with Gilles and Poirier along the way.

They always do.

On Friday night, the Canadians delivered a fun, upbeat rhythm dance set to the most American of music — The Beach Boys — and scored 86.44 points to temporarily take the lead. Then the American team followed them to the ice, and Chock and Bates had the home crowd in TD Garden on its feet for their “tour of the decades” through song and dance.

There was the theme from “Hawaii Five-O” and “Let’s Twist Again.” They were “Stayin’ Alive” and took a trip through the “Car Wash.” The couple even tried to “blame it on the boogie” before getting the crowd to do the “Y.M.C.A.” And they fittingly finished with “Last Dance” by Donna Summer, who was born in the Boston neighborhood of Mission Hill.

“It was probably the most fun I’ve had thus far on competitive ice in a performance, maybe ever,” Chock said afterward. “It was really a joy to perform in front of a home crowd and share that excitement with Evan. It was the best.”

Gilles and Poirier were unaware that Chock and Bates had beaten their score; they were busy doing TV interviews deep inside TD Garden when word filtered back that they would be in second place heading into Saturday night.

Not that it seemed to matter to them.

Gilles and Poirier prefer to “keep our heads in the sand,” as he put it, and focus only on what they can control. They don’t do any scoreboard watching, and unlike most teams, they rarely know what other competitors are doing on the ice.

“We pay as little attention to other people as possible,” Poirier said. “We find that’s when we skate our best, when we’re really focused on the job that we need to do, and we’re really focused on the emotion of the performance that we want to put on.”

They will need to skate their best to overcome the deficit that Chock and Bates built Friday night.

“The balance as an athlete is putting enough expectation on yourself that it forces you to improve and be better and want to be better all the time, but not put so much that you sabotaged yourself,” Poirier said. “This is the thing that we all have to balance, and we all have to learn how to balance. I think experience and time has really taught us where the middle is.”

___

Dave Skretta, The Associated Press