Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron on Olympic triumph: "It's more for our story than the actual medal"

Gabriella Papadakis was so nervous before taking to the ice at the Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022 that she could hear her heart thumping in her chest.

“I honestly thought I was going to have a heart attack,” the French ice dancer told Olympics.com in an exclusive interview following her golden triumph with partner Guillaume Cizeron.

“It was this, ‘Boom, boom, boom, boom.’ And I was trying to pretend that I was OK.”

But Papadakis found the right mentality even in the eye of the storm: “I was trying to tell myself when I was freaking out that I usually skate better when I'm stressed. And I had never been this stressed before. So [I decided] I'm going to skate my best ever.”

She and Cizeron would skate their best ever in the rhythm dance. In fact, they set a new world record of 90.83 to take a two-point lead into the free dance, and 36 hours later claimed the gold medal that had eluded them at PyeongChang 2018 when they took silver.

It capped an entire Olympic cycle of building anticipation, expectation and pressure, which was beset by one surprise issue after another, namely just two major international events in the 24 months leading up to Beijing.

Their wardrobe malfunction of 2018 behind them, and four world titles now not their main calling card – Papadakis/Cizeron’s golden moment was 20 years in the making, since they had begun skating together as children.

But the final few days of their skating for the gold could be classified as some of the most challenging.

“Honestly, it's such a mental game,” Cizeron, 27, confirmed. “They should be called the mental Olympic Games.”

While Papadakis would feel the pressure most before the duo took to the ice for the rhythm dance (12 February), Cizeron’s moment came the day