The golden touch: Montreal figure skating academy trains 11 Olympic ice dance teams

Developing Olympic-level talent appears to come second nature to a pair of former Canadian competitive figure skaters who now coach the sport’s top performers.

The wife-and-husband duo of Marie-France Dubreuil and Patrice Lauzon, former on-ice partners as well, train skaters from around the world.

Eleven of the 23 ice dance teams at the Beijing Olympics train at the Ice Academy of Montreal (I.AM), which Dubreuil and Lauzon co-founded alongside former French skater Romain Haguenauer.

That includes this year’s ice dance gold medallists Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron of France.

“It felt pretty successful. I was a proud coach, and I think our 11 teams skated at the best of their capacity,” said Dubreuil. “They looked fit, trained, happy. For me, that’s really important.”

The gold won by Papadakis and Cizeron was the fifth Olympic medal won by figures skaters from I.AM.

“There’s five rings on the Olympic logo, and I wanted to come back with a set of five medals. And we did,” said Dubreuil.

Husband-and-wife duo of Patrice Lauzon and Marie-France Dubreuil at the Beijing Olympics. (Credit: Instagram/Ice Academy of Montreal)

Dubreuil, 47, and Lauzon, 46, co-founded I.AM in 2014. They had one couple go to the Sochi Olympics that year. They had four teams four years later in Pyeongchang, including Canada’s Olympic champs Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir.

Those numbers just kept growing.

Among the other Montreal-based teams at this year’s Games were Olympic bronze medallists Madison Hubbell and Zachary Donohue, their American teammates Madison Chock and Evan Bates and Canadians Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Nikolaj Sorensen.

“Our goal was to have a school where people are training almost like teammates,” said Dubreuil. “So when you’re a teammate, you elevate your teammates and then everybody gets better. And then when it’s time to compete, they compete.”

Figure skaters training at Arena Sylvio Mantha, part of the Complexe récréatif Gadbois. (Credit: CityNews/Pamela Pagano)

Dubreuil and Lauzon competed in two Winter Games: Salt Lake City in 2002 and Turin in 2006.

They captured back-to-back world silver medals and five national titles before retiring in 2007.

Their passion for figure skating hardly extinguished after ending their on-ice career.

“It takes a whole community and a village to train Olympians,” said Dubreuil. “I think this is exactly what we created.”

Training at the Ice Academy of Montreal

Marie-Jade Lauriault and Romain Le Gac, an ice dance duo from France that competed in Pyeongchang, currently train at I.AM.

“Everybody who comes, I think can feel like a home feeling,” said Lauriault.

“That’s really part of, I think, the success here,” added Le Gac. “It’s really to enjoy every moment at the training and to cheer for other and to support each other.”

One of the academy’s goals was to create an overall positive journey for the athletes. Competition is hard enough as it is, says Dubreuil

“Sport, even at the elite level, should be done with the best intention: to grow the athlete and the person first,” she said. “It should feel good and it should make you feel empowered. If it’s any different, then you’re not at the right place.”

The Ice Academy of Montreal is training athletes for the next Winter Games: Milano-Cortina 2026.

—With files from The Canadian Press.