All Photos Copyright Beth Hamill
Original Dance Practice and Competition 11/3/2000
It's now the evening of 11/3, and it's time for the Original Dance competition. Marina and Gwendal were the third team to skate (out of four) in the middle group. I only have four digital pictures of the competition. We moved down to lower seats for their group, so I took most of my photos with my standard camera. These are from the warm up.
His costume was the same as from the days practice. She made a change to her dress. It looked like the same dress on the bottom, but the top was now black with long sleeves, and illusion material.
Marina found something funny.
Maybe it was this: There was a bit of a traffic jam in the corner during the warm up. Each couple wanted to warm up their diagonal footwork sequence. Here you see the first couple start, the next couple is ready to go, and Marina and Gwendal wait patiently for their turn.
Now it's their turn. I must like this move, it's the second time I've caught them in mid air.
After the OD was finished, Dave Gannon pointed to someone on the steps, at the bottom of our section, and asked if we might know who it was. There was this person, sitting on the bottom step, with blond hair coming out from under his baseball cap, wearing warm-ups. It was Gwendal, checking out the French pairs team of Lefrancois/Blanchard. It didn't take long before he was being asked for his autograph, to which he was obliging. I took this opportunity to get his autograph on my photo (that Marina signed earlier in the day).
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Unfortunately, because I moved, and because I was very involved in taking pictures, I didn't write any scores down for most of the dancers. As I'm sure you are aware, Marina and Gwendal had a problem during their straightline footwork. I was looking through the lens, so I missed what happened, but they got out of sync during the pass (don't know if there was a stumble, or what happened). This resulted in technical marks around 5.6ish. Their artistic marks were in the 5.8 area. It was a bit tense, waiting for the team from Israel to skate. They were clean, but their footwork, lifts, and holds were simpler then M&G's. The judges could have gone either way, and some did. After the marks were tallied, M&G won 3 judges, C&S won 2 judges, and they tied for the other two. They had to go to the tiebreaker to get the results:
Leaders after the Original Dance:
1. Anissina/Peizerat
2. Chait/Sakhnovski
3. Dubreuil/Lauzon