Winning Britain’s first medal on the world stage in over four decades would be a lot for anyone to take in. For Lilah Fear and Lewis Gibson, the first to stand on a podium in any figure skating discipline since the legendary Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean won ice dance gold in 1984, the scale of their achievement still hasn’t hit home.
“Everytime I hear that sentence I’m like wait, that’s us?!” Fear tells The Independent, only a couple of days after the pair sealed ice dance bronze at the World Championships in Boston. “It doesn’t feel real yet. In the moment when we found out that we got a medal it was just the craziest feeling I’ve ever had in skating and the biggest feeling of celebration so far. [In the] aftermath, we haven’t really stopped, so we’re just riding the wave. I’ve been waiting for it to sink in – I'll let you know if it does!”
Gibson echoes the sentiment. “Surreal is the best way to describe it – it’s such a dream, and then you do it, and you’re like, is this real life?” he says.
Lying in third place after the first part of the competition, the rhythm dance, the pair had the narrowest of leads over some formidable opposition, three-time European champions Charlene Guignard and Marco Fabbri of Italy. In a sport defined by fine margins, where a fraction of a slip out of sync with your partner can spell the end of any hopes of a medal, they knew that it was always going to be tight.
The British pair produced a strong free dance – but not their best. A minor slip on an early lift put pressure on the rest of the routine, a fan favourite set to a mash-up of Beyonce hits. From their rueful looks at the end of the programme, it seemed like they knew it might not be enough. After two consecutive fourth-place finishes at the World Championships, it would have been too cruel to narrowly miss out again.
There followed a lengthy, nerve-wracking wait for the result.
“It was awful waiting. I've never felt that nervous in my entire life,” Fear confesses. “When you wait in skating it usually means they’re reviewing one of the elements, the technical panel, so it’s a bad thing when you have to wait that long. We were just thinking, how many points are we losing right now?”
“It created one of those X Factor moments where they do the edit, and it’s probably five seconds in person but it feels like a minute when you watch the show,” Gibson jokes. “And for that to be real life…” he trails off as they relive the moment.
But the wait was worth it: they beat the Italians by just 0.65 points for bronze, and Fear adds that the lengthy delay made for a better reaction as the pair whooped and cheered in disbelief. The timing couldn’t be better after the pair’s strongest season yet, with Britain’s first Grand Prix Final medal under their belts and an undefeated record in Grand Prix competitions.
They came to Boston off the back of a bronze medal at the European Championships in Tallinn, Estonia – their third straight finish on the European podium, but a disappointing result by their own standards.
“We wanted gold, so even silver, we probably wouldn't have been happy with!” Fear admits. “Bronze was like, ‘Okay, let’s just get to work now.’ We didn’t put out our best skates, and as a result, we got that result. And it gave us such clarity [on what to do to improve], and lit that fire which we always have.”
The pair train with many of their closest rivals at the Ice Academy of Montreal, which has produced the vast majority of ice dance medals in recent years, and share a coach and choreographer – Romain Haguenauer – with the likes of three-time world champions Madison Chock and Evan Bates. Fear describes a collaborative process: she and Gibson contribute ideas for choreography and work them through with Haguenauer, adding their own “flair” to routines, which are tweaked and perfected from competition to competition.
That flair is apparent in the routines they create and their distinctive style. While many couples opt for a lyrical feel to their routines, Fear and Gibson tend to go for high-octane, poppy numbers that get crowds on their feet. This year they opted for a slight change to that approach, incorporating a more flowing, emotional section to Beyonce’s ‘Halo’ into their free dance, before the energetic finish to ‘Crazy in Love’.
“We wanted to show a little bit of a different side to us out there, perhaps a more vulnerable side,” Gibson says. “And in turn, we also wanted to showcase the skating skills that we’ve improved on, because it’s something that would give us more space and more time to just really fill out the ice and fill out our movements.
“I think we have sort of crafted our own unique viewpoint in the sport,” the 30-year-old continues. “Really we just want to be as much ourselves out there as possible, and we always choose music that fires us up, something that we want to listen to every day, and also something that we know that the crowd is going to respect and get behind. For us when we are out there performing it’s because we truly love the material that we have, and we believe in it.”
“I think it allows people to connect to us more, because it's truly who we are out there,” Fear adds. “We can’t just morph ourselves to try to fit a certain box and have people like us, because that’s an endless pursuit, and it’s inauthentic.”
Looking ahead to the all-important Winter Olympics in Milan-Cortina, just ten months away, the team are in a strong position to end another British medal drought, this time stretching back 31 years to – again – Torvill and Dean’s bronze in Lillehammer in 1994.
The legendary duo were major influences on Fear and Gibson, supporting them and working with them earlier in their careers, and Gibson says, “We are just so honoured to be placed in the same sentences as them and be that kind of next role model, hopefully, for people who want to get involved in skating.”
British ice dance is enjoying something of a renaissance at the moment, with the young pair of Phebe Bekker and James Hernandez finishing 17th in Boston and qualifying for a second GB spot in Milan next year. (Fear and Gibson were the only pair to qualify for Beijing in 2022, when they finished 10th). Britain will host the next European Championships in Sheffield in January, one of the last major events before the athletes head to Milan, for the first time in over a decade.
“It’s really, really exciting to have that representation in Great Britain in the sport, and to just use this whole team GB to get as many people on the ice as possible, and have that dream for themselves,” Fear says.
British-Canadian Fear, who juggles studying psychology in Montreal alongside skating, stresses that despite the achievement of that long-awaited bronze medal there is “always” room for improvement. It’s clear that – like most other elite athletes – the pair are real perfectionists about their craft.
“You can never be certain [about medals],” she says. “This sport is so ever changing, which is what makes it so exciting. We would love an Olympic medal, and we believe that it’s possible for us, but between now and then, that involves a lot of work and dedication and clarity of vision. So I think we will use this bronze medal as a sense of such honour and confidence and pride, knowing that what we’ve been doing so far has been working, and just continuing in that vein.”
