Canada's Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier claim ice dance bronze for 1st Olympic medal

Canada's Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier completed an evocative skate to earn ice dance bronze at the Milano Cortina Games on Wednesday.

The achievement marks the long-awaited first Olympic medal for the three-time Olympians, who have been skating together since 2011.

Former Canadian skater Laurence Fournier Beaudry and partner Guillaume Cizeron won the gold medal for France while the United States's Madison Chock and Evan Bates took silver.

Gilles and Poirier set a season-best score of 131.56 in the free dance and an overall score of 217.74 – also a season’s best.

They are the first Canadians to make the individual ice dance podium since Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir’s gold-medal performance at Pyeongchang 2018.

Canadians Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier waltz to an Olympic bronze medal

“We’re so proud of ourselves,” Gilles told CBC Sports’ Devin Heroux.

“It was exactly what we had planned it to be, and I don't know I wish we could relive it, like three times so I could remember piece by piece, but what a moment we created.”

The pair have had to overcome hurdles along their 15-year journey to this Olympic medal, including Gilles losing her mother to cancer in 2018 and her own Stage 1 ovarian cancer diagnosis in 2022. Piper has since been cancer free.

“I think a lot of the feeling that's coming out now just comes from that accumulation of everything we had to just push through and push past and believe that we could overcome that,” Poirier said.

“I think it was just so special that we could have a skate like that on Olympic ice.”

Upon accepting their Olympic bronze medals, the two were jumping up and down on the podium, a celebration Gilles said was a trademark of their “goofy” personalities.

“All I wanted to do was get that