Shae-Lynn Bourne and Victor Kraatz
One Last Time
Canada's Shae-Lynn Bourne and Victor Kraatz competed at the World level for over a decade. Though they rose quickly through the ranks, they rarely received their due reward.
Desperately close to victory on many occasions, the 2003 World Championships would mark their final amateur performance at an international competition.
Known for pushing technical boundaries replete with complex footwork they introduced hydro-blading to the sport. Bourne and Kraatz eventually defeated their closest rivals by hiring a pair of Russian coaches, Tatiana Tarasova and Nikolai Morosov who created a powerhouse free dance that almost blew the roof off Washington DC's MCI Center in 2003.
Their Adagio for the 21st Century was everything a contemporary free dance should be. Modern, edgy and dramatically explosive, it finally took them to the coveted World crown. Here is that winning free dance.
Isabelle and Paul Duchesnay - A French Revolution
The brother and sister combination of Isabelle and Paul Duchesnay, hailed from Canada but competed under the French flag.
At the 1988 Winter Games, the siblings made a global splash with two programs designed especially for them by Christopher Dean.
Their original set pattern, skated to an Argentine Tango, stood out from the competition for its wry tongue-in-cheek humor. Their free program, choreographed to "Savage Rites" helped raise the performance standard for dance leading into the next quadrennial.
Two years later, at the 1990 World Championships in Halifax, Canada, they were at the top of their game. "Missing," a dance protest about political imprisonment in South America was an iconic masterpiece that is still talked about today. On this night they had the capacity crowd with them all the way to a well-deserved silver medal.
Here is their free dance from 1990 Worlds.
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