Supplemental Post - Erin Cooney

The Olympic ice dance event finished on Monday night. I have a LOT of emotions about figure skating in general and ice dance in particular and yesterday's free dance was really, really great. The Canadians, Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, won gold, with the French team, Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron, getting silver and the Americans, Maia and Alex Shibutani, winning bronze. There is a ton to be said about the way gender operates within ice dance, in the cisnormativity and heteronormativity of the man and woman couples, in the relative dynamics of femininity and masculinity, in the storytelling, and so on. What really stood out to me about the event last night, however, was the reaction to the Canadian couple, Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir.

I'm not Canadian, but to my understanding, they are huge celebrities in Canada. At this point, they've been skating together for twenty years and have won three Olympic gold medals and two silver medals, as well as a bunch of World titles and a ton of Canadian National titles. And based off of the reaction to their skate last night, everyone is obsessed with the idea that they might be a couple. I saw so, so many people talking about it on Twitter in the lead-up to their skate, which is a really fun program to music from the movie Moulin Rouge. And after they won, I saw an interview where the interviewers asked them if they were dating and after they kind of brushed off the question, the hosts insisted among themselves that Tessa and Scott just had to be a couple to be able to skate like that together. I haven't been following ice skating for that long (and Tessa and Scott hadn't competed for a couple of years since I have been following it), but from what I've heard, this kind of obsessive interest in their relationship has been following them for most of their career.

I find this kind of fixation on celebrities' relationships to be pretty disconcerting. Sure, it would be adorable if one of the top ice dance teams in the world were a couple and I've loved reading interviews or watching videos with the handful of skaters who are in love, like the married American pairs skaters Alexa Scimeca-Knierim and Chris Knierim. But I don't know what people are hoping to get out of obsessively fixating on celebrities like this, especially when it's clear that this interest doesn't exist in a separate realm to the couple themselves, when we see interviewers asking them directly about it and their obvious reluctance to talk about it. It's kind of creepy, it clearly isn't well-received by the celebrities themselves, and it's certainly forcing heteronormativity and really boring ideas about men and women being unable to have non-romantic close relationships. And in the case of ice dance, it also isn't amazing to see programs that center heterosexual romance and sexuality received with much more attention and excitement than the wider variety of programs that do and could exist, but that's another, longer conversation. The way we treat celebrities and their relationships is boring and frustrating and pretty clear not appreciated by the celebrities themselves.