American ice dancers Evan Bates and Madison Chock portray a bull and a matador in their Olympic program on Feb. 7 in Milan. (Getty Images)
(Getty Images)

MILAN – To make the Olympic team, American ice dancers Christina Carreira and Anthony Ponomarenko had to figure out the right way to die. They had spent the season trying to tell the story of Esmeralda and Quasimodo in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” which concluded with Carreira pretending to go limp over her concerned partner’s knee.

The program was not well-received, so they returned to an old piece skating to the movie “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer,” in which Carreira is pursued by a sinister genius with a heightened sense of smell. At the end, Carreira is dead again, going limp on her partner’s knee, as Ponomarenko gives a sinister sneer before looking to the heavens.

“Before that, we always had happy [programs],” said Carreira, who was thrilled the routine was good enough to qualify the duo for the Olympics. She and Ponomarenko currently sit in 11th place.

Over the course of the season preceding the Milan Cortina games, ice dancers across the world have been tangoing with the meaning of mortality. Some of the kindest athletes I’ve ever interviewed were pretending to slit throats or lance their partners with swords. Ice dancers are pantomiming suicides, double suicides, murder and maiming.

Of the 20 teams that qualified to compete in the ice dance final on Wednesday, at least six have an element of death in their programs.

It hasn’t always been this way. In the 2022 Olympics, none of the top six teams had an apparent death at the end of their programs. In 2018, the only routine revolving around mortality was the gold medal-winning performance from Canada’s Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir that re-created the doomed love story of “Moulin Rouge.”

I first noticed the change last November at a figure skating event in the idyllic, snowy mountain city of Lake Placid, New York. By my count, half of the teams competing in the ice dance competition involved some kind of loss of life. Americans Oona and Gage Brown skated to “The Godfather” to celebrate their Italian heritage. Given the piece is about the mafia, the Browns later told me they had to figure out the right way to present a death. They considered making handguns with their fingers, but that felt too unserious.

Then came the idea to behead Gage. Portraying a mafia boss, Oona slides her finger along his throat as his head goes limp. “It was a clean way to do it,” Oona said. (In the end, the pair didn’t qualify for the Olympics.)

“I have a question about death,” I said at the news conference for the top three finishers. “There seems to be a lot of ice dance programs this year in which someone dies at the end of the free skate. I’m wondering if you could all go through the process about whether or not you thought about dying and how you came to the conclusion of what to do at the end.”

“That’s a deep question,” said Madison Chock, who is in second place at the Olympics going into the free dance. The three teams laughed.

Chock, careful never to say a cross word in a news conference, suggested that I had got it wrong. Yes, her free skate with her partner, Evan Bates, is the story of a bull (her husband) who is being pursued by her, a fiery matador. The chase incorporates elements of flamenco and paso doble. In the end, Bates lays on the ice with his head down while she triumphantly towers over him, holding her cape with a menacing glare.

“I actually am not killing Evan,” she insisted. “It’s kind of mastering the beast.”

French ice dancer Evgeniia Lopareva – in eighth place going into the free skate – also said I didn’t exactly get what they were trying to do.

Her free skate, with partner Geoffrey Brissaud, did not include death at the end of her program. The death happened before they took to the ice. That explains why their first move is Brissaud lifting Lopareva from behind and spinning, while her chest is puffed out. Her sleeves are a translucent blue and the whole image evokes the ascent of an angel.

“I feel like our couple is known as the weird ones,” Lopareva said.

“I don’t think you’re weird,” Chock assured her.

Canada’s Zachary Lagha, who skates with Marjorie Lajoie and is in ninth place, looked at these interactions quizzically. Their free dance is an elegant, speedy abstract piece. Later in the news conference, while watching a screen showing the women’s competition happening at the same time, Lagha noticed that another skater on the ice was pretending to have expired.

“Look!” he said. “Death!”

– – –

There was once a time where the final phase of the ice dance at the Olympics were laced with imaginary tragedy. In 1992, the International Skating Union found the trend so concerning that it banned skaters from putting their full weight on the ice during the programs. This rule, it hoped, would restrict skaters from a cascade of corpses that were turning competitions into a fake morgue.

“It was becoming too much,” recalled Igor Shpilband, a former Soviet ice dancer and coach who helped establish the United States as a powerhouse in the discipline in the 2010s.

Shpilband attributed the start of the trend to the revolutionary, gold medal-winning performance in 1984 from Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean. The program ends with the British team twisting and turning each other before collapsing on the ice, face first, at the music’s dramatic end.

Teams from the Soviet Union perfected the practice. Canadian Tracy Wilson, the NBC commentator who won a bronze medal in 1988 with her partner, Rob McCall, recalled dramatic deaths – sometimes multiple in a program – from her rivals, Natalia Bestemianova and Andrei Bukin as well as Marina Klimova and Sergei Ponomarenko. (American Anthony Ponomarenko, the olfactory killer at this year’s games, is the latter team’s son.)

Wilson and her partner skated with joy and syncopation to ragtime music. Death beat them every time.

“Dance has improved in many ways, but no one could die like the Russians,” Wilson told me.

Despite the prohibition placed in 1992, skaters found other ways to pantomime death, such as in 1998 when Anjelika Krylova pulled a red scarf out of partner Oleg Ovsyannikov’s shirt, signifying the murder at the end of a program to “Carmen.” (No matter that it is Carmen, not her partner, who dies at the end of the opera.)

Such murderous innovation has become commonplace among this season’s skaters.

The dozen or so teams I interviewed over the past four months for this article found this line of inquiry entertaining. Ice dance is a complicated sport that requires focus and concentration to carve deep edges into the ice while trying to replicate a dance one would witness at a ballet, a ballroom or concert hall.

After all that work, it can be fun to pretend to die. But it also raises some existential questions about among skaters about how and why they are choosing to end programs this way. Of all life’s great moments, why death?

Canadians Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier wanted their program to question the ways we think about life’s meaning.

The duo, currently in third place, performs their piece to Don McLean singing the song “Vincent.” The team depicts Vincent van Gogh and the creation of his famous painting, “Starry Night,” which is physically embodied by Gilles. Toward the end of the piece, Poirier grabs his ear as the lyrics allude to the artist’s suicide. The piece ends with Poirer standing behind his partner, the art living on without him.

“We don’t want it to feel one-dimensional,” Poirier said. “It’s crazy to think about Van Gogh and the tragedy in his life, but we also wanted to depict his love of his own work of art and how that brought him joy and inspiration.”

In skating their free dance to “Romeo and Juliet,” another American duo, Emilea Zingas and Vadym Kolesnik, who are in sixth place going into Wednesday’s competition, found a vehicle to showcase their power and youth.

When the team was choosing potential programs, Zingas told me she was nervous that music would be old and overused. But their choreographer found a contemporary rendition of Sergei Prokofiev’s score that emphasized the darker themes of the love story.

The final element is a choreographic sequence – that’s the part of any ice dance program that essentially looks like the team grooving down a “Soul Train” line – that begins with a bit of B-boy popping and ends with the dancers looking at each other, clasping their hands and stabbing themselves.

“I think it became clear to us that we wanted to portray more of the tragic side of Romeo and Juliet,” Zingas said. “There’s a lot of couples who portray love and happiness and joy, which is part of the story,” but this rendition makes this young team different.

“It’s not excessive, because they are skating to a story that everyone knows,” Shpilband, their coach, said. He added that he felt his team’s approach was distinct from fellow Americans Chock and Bates, who graft the bull-matador storyline onto a flamenco-inspired version of the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black.”

“Madi has assured me she does not kill Evan,” I told him. Shpilband was skeptical about that interpretation. “Whatever,” he said.

When I landed in Milan last week, I happened upon a new theory for the homicidal leanings in the sport. Perhaps teams had become frustrated with the increased pressure to get permission to skate to modern music, a licensing issue that almost derailed a Spanish skater who wanted to skate to a chorus sung by the Minions of the “Despicable Me” movie franchise. (He eventually got clearance). Maybe it was easier to just skate to “Romeo and Juliet” and “Moulin Rouge” scores that are regularly used each season.

A British ice dancer, Phebe Bekker, had posted online about her difficulties getting permission for songs to perform in the first phase of competition, which mandated skaters use music from the 1990s. In the second phase of competition, she and her partner, James Hernandez, chose death: Romeo and Juliet.

Bekker told me licensing concerns were not a part of their calculus. She wanted to skate to a timeless story at the Olympics, while Hernandez suggested that over-the-top performances of life and death offer escapism in a time of chaos.

“We’re in a very, very privileged position in our sport,” Hernandez said. “Hopefully, you get enveloped and engulfed in what you’re watching. We have a chance to get people to believe that story and take them out of what can sometimes be a depressing world.”

Going into the final, Chock and Bates find themselves in second place, slightly behind French skaters Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron. Cizeron told me that he did not want to dictate whether mortality was a theme of their piece – he liked the idea of judges and audiences interpreting the program in whatever way they saw it.

The American couple would not entertain such ambiguity. After our initial conversation, I pushed them to explain why she chose to tame the bull, instead of maiming the bull.

“Animal rights are everything,” Chock said. She and Bates, her husband, have two toy poodles, Stella and Henry. The duo has a pet food sponsorship. And in Chock and Bates’ last Olympics together, death was not a fact of life that she wanted to face. Chock added: “I cannot murder my husband.”