It’s a rainy fall morning outside the rink in Montreal, just a few weeks ahead of the first event in the ISU Grand Prix of Figure Skating competition series.
On one ice pad, world champions Madison Chock and Evan Bates of the United States are drilling sections of their flamenco free program.
Around the corner on the second rink, reigning Olympic champion Guillaume Cizeron and his new partner Laurence Fournier Beaudry – a former Canadian champion, who now represents France with Cizeron – are running their twizzles.
Usually, Britain’s Lilah Fear and Lewis Gibson would also be here, but they have the day off.
All three teams are archrivals and Olympic podium contenders. They’re also training partners.
In fact, 13 of the 23 teams competing at these Milan Cortina Winter Olympic Games are based out of the Ice Academy of Montreal (I.AM), the elite international ice dance school that has produced the last two Olympic champions – Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir in 2018 and Cizeron and his former partner Gabriella Papadakis in 2022 – as well as nine of the last 10 world champions.
The idea of being able to openly watch your fiercest competition train every day may seem peculiar to some – especially after the outrage over the spying scandal at the Paris Olympics, when an analyst working for Canada Soccer was caught flying a drone over a rival’s practice – but this is the ethos of I.AM.
And it’s producing results.
The school’s dominance is so deep in the sport that seven out of the 10 top-placing ice dance teams at the 2025 World Championships are I.AM skaters. Canadian national champions and world silver medalists Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier are among the few high-level competitors in the world who don’t train at I.AM. They are based out of Ice Dance Elite in Scarborough, Ont. However, the second and third ranked Canadian teams, who are also in Milan, are with I.AM.
Barring calamity, the next Olympic ice dance champion, an event that begins Monday in Milan with the rhythm dance, will train at the Montreal academy.
The academy is run by Patrice Lauzon, at top watching the Americans skate, and Marie-France Dubreuil, conferring with Guillaume Cizeron and his partner Laurence Fournier Beaudry.
Patrice Lauzon, who founded the school along with his wife, Marie-France Dubreuil, and French coach Romain Haguenauer, said that their philosophy is simple: When the elite train together, they push each other further.
“But the environment, it’s not made for everybody,” Lauzon said.
In addition to practising alongside the competition, I.AM skaters aren’t attached to individual coaches. Instead, there are a suite of coaches, choreographers and dance specialists, who rotate through the teams based on what the school’s leadership thinks the skaters need.
And skating with each other doesn’t mean copying each other, Dubreuil said. The school’s coaches guide each team to find their own identity, inventing new lifts, tricks and movement that have made the sport more exciting to watch.
“We’re in the YouTube generation. They all come to me with videos of people – can we do this?’ No. Let’s build your own thing. This is their style. It’s not yours,” she said. “I think everybody has a little gift inside of them, a diamond that needs to be dusted and carved.”
Lauzon is often asked in interviews whether it’s hard not to play favourites. To this question, he shook his head. “It’s very easy to not choose, because when you get with somebody on the ice and you’re working intimately with them it would feel so wrong to not give your best,” he said.
Fournier Beaudry is Canadian, but she and Cizeron will compete for France at Milan Cortina.
Even though they are rivals, I.AM skaters form strong friendships. This is what led to the controversial partnership between Cizeron and Fournier Beaudry.
A little more than a year ago, Olympic champions Papadakis and Cizeron announced their retirement, but Cizeron was not ready to stop. At the same time, Fournier Beaudry, who had also been a long-time I.AM skater, found herself alone. Her boyfriend and ice dance partner, Nikolaj Sørensen, had been suspended over an alleged sexual assault from 2012. (The suspension has since been overturned on jurisdictional grounds.)
Cizeron asked Fournier Beaudry if she wanted to team up.
Dubreuil said it was a very natural choice: “It was an easy match. ... They’ve been best friends for 10 years.”
International training hubs are not new in figure skating, but what I.AM has created is unusual and it’s something that Lauzon dreamed of creating while he was still a skater.
For years, Lauzon and Dubreuil were ranked among the top ice dance teams in the world, capturing two world silver medals and five national titles, before they retired in 2008.
Dubreuil and Lauzon at the Canadian championships in 2007. A year later, they would be married and retired from competition.Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press
But in the early days of their partnership, the pair – who quickly became a couple off the ice – almost quit. Throughout the late 1990s, Lauzon and Dubreuil struggled to crack the national podium. While competitively frustrating, the practical consequence was that they weren’t receiving any funding help from what is now called Skate Canada.
Lauzon thought about taking over the family’s garbage business. But at some point, Skate Canada’s then president, the late David Dore, got wind of their plan and phoned.
“He said, ‘I believe in you guys. I know you’re going to change skating,’” Dubreuil remembers. She thinks often of the fact that Dore never said they would change the sport as athletes. “He said, ‘You’re worth the investment. How much do you need to keep going?’”
Skate Canada sent them a cheque and they won their first national title. But in the early 2000s, they realized that to take the next step, they needed to move to train at a high-level centre in Lyon, France.
“I’m very patriotic and I could not understand that I was leaving a country where figure skating is one of our national sports – there’s more than 80 ice rinks on the island of Montreal alone – to a country where, at the time there was like four or five ice rinks,” Lauzon said. “Why can’t we have this in Canada?”
This was the genesis of I.AM.
Gage and Oona Brown, a brother and sister from the United States, were at I.AM last fall as they hoped to qualify for the Games. They made it on the list of alternates for Team USA.
After they retired from competition and touring, the pair began coaching around 2010, starting out small with five or six teams.
At the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, their Spanish team – Sara Hurtado and Adrian Diaz – performed a fan-favourite Picasso program, placing 13th at the Olympics, which put the school on the map.
But the turning point came the following year. Haguenauer, who was still in France, phoned Dubreuil for help with one of his teams: Papadakis and Cizeron, who were 13th at the 2014 World championships.
They were gifted skaters, Haguenauer said, but something wasn’t clicking. Dubreuil watched videos of their skating: “I find they’re very talented, but very cold.” She began dreaming about a free program that would marry their power with some lightness. Papadakis and Cizeron won the world championships the following year – an astonishing climb in the sport of ice dance.
After Papadakis and Cizeron, the school’s inbox was flooded with requests. Haguenauer moved to Montreal permanently. They’ve also since opened a campus near London, Ont., where Moir serves as head coach and managing director.
Through the years the school has gone by numerous names, but in 2019, it rebranded to the Ice Academy of Montreal or I.AM.
“What we try to do with our school is to make it about the athlete, about the personal growth of the athlete,” Lauzon said. “For me, it means: Who am I? Who am I in this sport? The name works perfectly with what we’re trying to do.”
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