No Doubt for French

Another figure skating gold medal was decided by a 5-4 margin Monday. But unlike the controversial pairs final, the ice dance final stirred no complaints about judging conspiracies at the Salt Lake Ice Center.

Marina Anissina and Gwendal Peizerat of France, whose “Liberta” free dance program contained excerpts from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, edged Irina Lobacheva and Ilia Averbukh of Russia to win the first Olympic ice dance gold medal awarded to French athletes.

It was France’s third figure skating gold and its first since 1932, when Andree and Pierre Brunet won the second of two successive Olympic pairs titles.

It also marked the first time since the memorable “Bolero” performance by Great Britain’s Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean in 1984 that a non-Russian couple prevailed in Olympic ice dancing competition.

“I feel like it’s [a] historic day,” Peizerat said, “and I feel very proud of having been able to come up here and do this.”

Defending world champions Barbara Fusar Poli and Maurizio Margaglio of Italy won the bronze medal despite a hard fall by Margaglio on a diagonal step sequence about 90 seconds into the program.

“At that moment, you have all your life crossing in front of your eyes,” Margaglio said after he and his partner became the first Italian skaters to win an Olympic figure skating medal. “You don’t know whether to be proud that you continued the program, or sad.”

Fusar Poli chose the second option, sobbing as the couple finished and again in the kiss-and-cry area while awaiting the couple’s marks.

Anissina and Peizerat were ranked first by judges from Lithuania, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Ukraine and Poland, winning three tiebreakers because of their superior technical scores. Lobacheva and Averbukh won the judges from Russia, Switzerland, Germany and Italy.

Nonetheless, the Russian couple was happy. Averbukh even exchanged greetings with the Russia-born Anissina, his partner until he fell in love with and married Lobacheva.

“The silver medal is a dream,” Averbukh said. “Just one month ago before, we were third place in the European championships [behind Anissina and Peizerat, and Fusar Poli and Margaglio]. Four judges gave us first. It was wonderful.”

Shae-Lynn Bourne and Victor Kraatz of Canada, who tumbled out of their final lift, finished fourth. It was strangely similar to the fall taken by Canadian pair skaters Jamie Sale and David Pelletier at the end of their short program, and like Pelletier, Bourne kissed the ice. “I thought it was the best skate we’d ever done,” she said. “At the last second, we let it go. It’s too bad, because we might have had a bronze. You always have to believe the chance is there.”

Believing in the Easter bunny would have taken them just as far: The order of the top eight couples never changed from the first compulsory dance through the free dance, which was worth 50% of the final score.

U.S. champions Naomi Lang and Peter Tchernyshev were 11th, two places lower than they finished at last year’s world championships. However, they were not discouraged. “This was my first time in the Olympics, and everything seemed to come together,” Tchernyshev said.

Lang acknowledged being disappointed with their scores--which ranged from 5.1 to 5.4 for technical merit and 5.3 to 5.5 for presentation--but she reveled in the crowd’s affection.

“We’re always winners with the crowd,” she said. “We did the best performances we could.”