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After 11 years of getting to know one another, one of Canada's best-loved ice dancing teams, Marie-France Dubreuil and Patrice Lauzon, are getting married.
Dubreuil, now 33, and Lauzon, 32, are best remembered for their romantic routines that helped them win two silver medals at world figure skating championships.
And they've always had a flair for the dramatic, with lives and adventures and crazy incidents that read like soap operas (losing costumes and skates, falling ill at the wrong time, having to withdraw from the Turin Olympics after a spectacular accident in a final rotational lift, making a comeback at a world championship in their home country.)
They will marry on Aug. 23 in Montreal. They are hoping for more romance and less drama.
But they put the dramatic and romantic together late last fall when Lauzon proposed to Dubreuil on the 11th day of the 11th month of their 11th anniversary together during rehearsals for a worldwide Stars on Ice skating tour in Lake Placid, N.Y. And Dubreuil said yes.
Lauzon went to a lot of trouble for this special moment. He had it planned months before. Everybody at the rehearsal was in on it. Lauzon surveyed the married men in the cast, such as David Pelletier, quizzing them about how they had proposed.
“He was trying to be original, but in Lake Placid, it wasn't easy,'' Dubreuil said yesterday. Eleven had always been Dubreuil's special number, and Lauzon knew it.
On Nov. 10, Dubreuil came down with food poisoning. But she recovered by Nov. 11, and the rest of the cast went off to a party, leaving Dubreuil and Lauzon to have dinner together.
Lauzon got down on one knee, and presented her with a ring. “I had no idea that he was going to do that,'' Dubreuil said. “It was a complete surprise. It was pretty special.''
Dubreuil and Lauzon were not involved romantically when they started skating together years ago. But after about a year, Dubreuil's mother told her that she noticed Dubreuil's boyfriend got very jealous when Lauzon was around. “I can understand why,'' Dubreuil's mother said. “When you (Dubreuil and Lauzon) interact, and the way you look at each other, it's pretty special.''
Dubreuil really didn't want to hear that, because of the minefields that can erupt when dating your skating partner.
Eventually, after Dubreuil and Lauzon started dating, Dubreuil was firm about one thing: she never wanted to get married.
“It's not something that I wanted, especially since my parents went through a divorce and for me it was hard,'' Dubreuil said. “I didn't believe in marriage any more and I was a little bit heartbroken and hurt about the situation. When I started dating Pat, I told him straightforward that marriage wasn't something I wanted to do. And that if he asked me to marry him, I would have to say no.''
Eventually, she changed her mind about that, too.
Dubreuil and Lauzon have taken the past year off to get away from the competition scenario, and have worked with some skaters in Montreal. But they've been touring with Stars on Ice since Jan. 2, starting in Japan, where they did 12 shows.
“It's honestly been a lot of fun,'' Dubreuil said. “It was good to be not training so hard, but performing more in front of crowds. It was good to travel and actually have a chance to go sightseeing or visit new places. Usually, when we compete, we never do any sightseeing. It's either too stressful and you don't want to get tired.''
Dubreuil and Lauzon also did the entire U.S. tour and went to a lot of U.S. cities they'd never seen before. Strangely enough, throughout their long career, Dubreuil and Lauzon never competed at Skate America and did only a Grand Prix Final and Four Continents and a world championship in the United States.
At first, Dubreuil said she was nervous about the idea of touring. As competitors, they always had a purpose and a plan and training to occupy their hours, but touring is so different. “I was scared of being on the road that long, and I can't believe that it's almost all over,'' she said. “It went by really fast.''
As for the future, Dubreuil and Lauzon have made no decisions yet about whether to return to prepare for the Vancouver Olympics. After the Stars on Ice tour in Canada ends in another week, Dubreuil said they will call French coach Murielle Zazoui, have a meeting with her and make a decision.
“We've been thinking a lot about it, especially since we've been touring in Canada,'' Dubreuil said. “A lot of the fans are asking us if we are coming back for the Olympics. There's a lot of talk about the Olympics. Being on tour and not on competition sites, it was a little further back in our minds.''
But the Canadian tour has been filled with Canadian success stories at the recent world championships in Sweden, and Dubreuil and Lauzon have been reminded about Olympic-eligible competition while skating in the past week with world champion Jeff Buttle, and Canadian champion Joannie Rochette and world ice dancing silver medalists Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, who were guests at the Toronto stop.
Dubreuil and Lauzon missed half of their Olympic experience in Turin, after having to withdraw. If they were to compete at the Vancouver Olympics, they would be 35 and 34 years old. But they wouldn't be the first to compete at an Olympics at that age in ice dancing.
