After winning Olympic gold in Beijing, French ice dancer Gabriella Papadakis accompanied her father to the Greek island of Tinos. He had promised to light a candle in Evangelistria Church—a major pilgrimage site—if his daughter won.
Now what? He’d asked her. What’s your next goal?
On top of her Olympic gold in 2022—and her silver in Pyeongchang in 2018—Papadakis was a seven-time French national champion, five-time European champion, and five-time world champion, all with skating partner Guillaume Cizeron.
“Now I want to be happy,” Papadakis told her father. The words tumbled out, half-serious, half-joking.
Four years later, on a Zoom call from her London flat, in her first English-language interview about her memoir Pour Ne Pas Disparaître (translation: So as Not to Disappear), Papadakis reflects on that conversation in Greece. “I knew it was going to be a whole process—like work,” she says. “I knew in my mind this was going to be harder than winning the Olympics.”
What Papadakis didn’t know was that the process would involve writing a book about systemic abuse in ice dance—a book that she now holds up as a symbol of her “autodetermination.” A book that cost her an NBC commentary position in Milano Cortina, where her now ex-partner, Cizeron, has just won gold with a new ice dancing partner.
A book she wrote because she believes that her beloved sport can change.
The highly anticipated memoir, which was released on January 15 in France, chronicles Papadakis’s rise to the top of competitive ice dance, a 20-year journey that she spent entwined with Cizeron. They started skating together as children, moving from their native Clermont-Ferrand, France, to train in Lyon, and then crossing the Atlantic to attend the Ice Academy of Montreal, the powerhouse school that coaches 13 of the 23 ice dancing teams competing in the 2026 Winter Games.
A few years ago, Papadakis thought that she, too, would be in Milan, defending her Olympic title. She and Cizeron had discussed a comeback. They explored choreography at the Paris Opera Ballet and worked on their communication as skating partners in couples therapy (though fairly common in ice dance, the pair were not romantically involved). Papadakis was eager to push herself and saw a return to the Games as a chance to innovate artistically.
But ultimately, the choice was not hers to make. “I was pushed out of my own career,” she says.
From the outside, Papadakis was thriving in her partnership. But to hear her tell it, their dynamic had become mentally and physically dangerous. In her memoir, Papadakis alleges that, in the months leading up to their 2022 Olympic victory, the control that Cizeron had exerted over her for years intensified. Some of it she was used to. Cizeron didn’t allow her to practice spins on her own. When she darkened her hair, he told their coaches he’d preferred her hair blond. Before Beijing, he called her boxing coach and insisted that he stop letting Papadakis box out of fear of injury. He rebuffed her desire to compete in pants at her second Olympics, instead designing a gold dress for her to wear. By then, Papadakis didn’t argue. She’d learned to hold in her anger, though the psychogenic non-epileptic seizures she suffered after Beijing were a tell. A doctor attributed them to stress.
She received a message from Cizeron saying that he wanted to go to Milan, but decided not to reply immediately. By that point, she felt panicked just seeing his name on her phone. But she also felt anxious when she contemplated a future without Cizeron. She couldn’t imagine finding a new partner. With no prize money and appearance fees, how would she pay the bills? What would her life be without skating?
A few days went by, and she told Cizeron that she was still thinking. When he responded, it was to inform her that he had no choice but to leave their partnership. The pair announced their retirement as a competitive team in December 2024.
Now, with Cizeron’s return to competition with a new partner, Laurence Fournier Beaudry, Papadakis keeps seeing articles saying she’d stepped away to focus on performing in skating shows. “When the choice is between your safety and even, like, life, the choice is not, ‘Oh, I chose to retire.’ No, I was pushed out,” Papadakis says.
Only after their Olympic victory—18 years into their partnership—did Papadakis consider that the word “abuse” might apply to her situation. In her memoir, she recalls her coach seeking advice about a younger skater who was mistreating his partner. What that skater was doing reminded the coach of Cizeron’s “abusive behavior,” as he put it to Papadakis—words Papadakis herself had never applied to her skating partner. Instead, she’d blamed herself for Cizeron’s outbursts.
Papadakis began writing her memoir exactly a year after the Beijing Olympics, filling 10 notebooks with her impressions and memories while on tour. Then, just after her partnership with Cizeron had officially ended, an editor approached her about telling her story.
“The book is about a system, and if people frame it as my suffering, it completely undermines the system of responsibility,” Papadakis says. “I wrote from my perspective, my experience, because that’s all I can do. I’m not a scholar trying to write a study of figure skating.”
Antiquated gender norms shape every aspect of that system. The International Skating Union (ISU) specifies that ice dancing teams must be composed of “one woman and one man.” Additionally, the amount of female ice dancers seeking partners greatly outnumbers the male ice dancers available, meaning women in the sport live in fear of being replaced.
And then there’s what happens on the ice: When learning even the most basic pattern dances, women traditionally assume the “follower” position to the men’s “leader” role. Holds and turns are led by the man. “For literally four hours a day, at least on the ice, my body did not belong to me,” Papadakis says. “As much as people think about it like, Oh, it’s just a code, it doesn’t have any impact, it does. It does impact how you construct yourself when you evolve in a certain dynamic where you perceive your own body as an extension of someone else’s.”
Notably, before teaming up with Cizeron, Fournier Beaudry placed ninth in Beijing with Nikolaj Sørensen—a skater who, in 2024, was banned from competition for at least six years for “sexual maltreatment.” (The ban has since been overturned on jurisdictional grounds.) Her high-profile pairing with Cizeron is one of three featured in the new Netflix docuseries Glitter Gold: Ice Dancing, which addresses the abrupt end of Fournier Beaudry’s former partnership. The show does not, however, detail the end of Cizeron’s partnership with Papadakis.
The week before Papadakis’s book came out, Cizeron issued a cease-and-desist, accusing her of leading a smear campaign. “I want to express my incomprehension and my disagreement with the labels being attributed to me,” Cizeron told the press in January. “These allegations arise at a particularly sensitive time… thereby raising questions about the underlying intentions behind this campaign. I also wish to denounce the content of this book, which contains false information, attributing to me, among other things, statements I have never made and which I consider serious.” (At the date of publication, Cizeron had not responded to a request for comment.)
“I wrote a book to reclaim my story, and it’s being hijacked by people who are trying to silence me,” Papadakis says. “At first, this made me laugh a little because this is literally what my book is about.”
Papadakis was raised by her mother, a French skating coach, but when she spent time with her father, he filled his daughter’s world with Greek mythology, trying to make up for the fact that she didn’t speak his native language. “I don’t remember the stories as they have been written, but I remember them like a landscape of a parallel world,” she says. The stories became a “present part of [her] subconscious landscape.” In dreams, her father became Zeus and she Athena, and in waking life, she carried the goddess with her. “Every time I was going through something that was difficult, I would imagine that it was a mission that Zeus had given me to accomplish,” Papadakis says. Today, she credits that framework with her resilience—and the stories with helping her to feel less alone. “I always say that if you think you’re having a unique experience, then you’re not reading enough,” she says.
Last year, Papadakis stepped into a new role at skating competitions, as an official ice dancing commentator for NBC. She’s covered the past two US National Figure Skating Championships and attended events in China and Japan last fall. (These included the Grand Prix Final in Nagoya, where Fournier Beaudry and Cizeron competed together and placed second.) At the Milano Cortina Olympics, she was set to provide ice dancing insight alongside Johnny Weir.
But after Cizeron’s cease-and-desist, NBC pulled Papadakis as a commentator. “They considered that the perception of my neutrality was compromised and that I could not commentate on the Olympic Games,” Papadakis told the French newspaper L’Équipe.
Now, Papadakis is in London, contemplating a permanent move from Montreal. Many of her books have already made the move; during our calls, she points out texts that kept her company as she wrote her own: The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch, Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Annie Ernaux’s work, and Audre Lorde’s essay “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.” “That was like my Bible,” Papadakis says. “I read it, like, honestly, almost every day.”
She pulls a book from her shelf, Chanel Miller’s Know My Name, looking for an exact passage that stuck with her. Instead, she paraphrases Miller. “She was like, you know, I’ve always dreamt about writing, but I wish it was about something else. I wish it wasn’t such a dark and sad story, but you don’t really decide what you write about. It’s God that decides that for you or whatever."
It’s an idea that resonates with her. Papadakis doesn’t think she would have written her book if she believed that finding happiness in her sport was a lost cause. Conventions are already changing: Since 2022, Canada, Finland, and the United Kingdom have removed gender-specific language from ice dancing partnership requirements, making way for open gender partnerships. Every time the change is covered, Papadakis sees a picture of herself skating with American Olympian Madison Hubbell in the Art on Ice show in Zurich.
“Happiness was impossible for me, but it is possible [for others],” Papadakis says. “I just want to shed light on the things that made it impossible so that people can have a better map to make that possible for them.”