MILAN — Madison Chock and Evan Bates stoically accepted their silver medals following their shocking upset in the ice dance final at the 2026 Winter Games on Thursday despite tying in a season-best free skate.
The moment sent chills through French figure skater Surya Bonaly, she told USA TODAY Sports. The three-time Olympian tuned in thousands of miles away in her Minnesota home, but she could clearly see past Chock and Bates’ stoic smiles and gracious waves. Bonaly resonated with the frustration and heartbreak simmering beneath.
“When I was watching the podium and I see everyone super excited except (Chock) and (Bates), I can see they are … forced to smile for the camera. And I’m like, ‘Oh, I feel I’ve been there,” Bonaly told USA TODAY Sports on Feb. 12.
Figure skating has long been a subjective sport, where judging is open to personal interpretation and sometimes implicit bias. It has greatly impacted Bonaly’s international career and the conversation was renewed following Chock and Bates’ stunning defeat by gold-medal winners Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron of France.
“I’m French, I do support my French team, but obviously the Americans…I feel so sad for them,” Bonaly added. “They lost it for so less than (two) points. And it’s sad, but I guess it’s figure skating, because some people like you, some don’t and they can just change the rest of your life just for one second in a competition just like that.’
Bonaly, a three-time World silver medalist, recalls her own podium moment. At the 1993 World Championship in Prague, Bonaly was awarded silver after landing seven triple jumps and a triple combination. Oksana Baiul had five triple jumps and no combinations in her program, but was awarded the gold over Bonaly.
The following year, Bonaly believed she did enough to claim an elusive World gold. But she narrowly missed the top of the podium again. During the medal ceremony, Bonaly removed the silver medal from around her neck as a symbol of protest.
‘It was difficult to fight all the time against all those barrier against me,” Bonaly added.
The crowd booed and the removal of her medal was viewed as poor sportsmanship, but Bonaly said she was tired of the unfair treatment and a system that undervalued her athleticism and skill.
“Our sport is so subjective. It’s not like with a swimming time, you just click your time … and can see exactly what the number was,” Bonaly said. “In skating, it all depends … look at (Thursday) at the competition with ice dance.”
In the free skate, Chock and Bates finished with a 76.75 technical elements score and a 57.92 program components score following a clean skate that many perceived as flawless. France’s Beaudry and Cizeron finished with a higher technical elements score of 77.06 and a program components score of 58.58 despite several missteps.
“Within competition … the top performance will win. We don’t care which one, but it has to be the top,” Bonaly said. “For me … we know it was American team. (Cizeron), even though I’m a big fan of him and he is a great dancer and he has a perfect technique, he did make some mistakes and somehow the judge didn’t acknowledge (the) mistakes … I saw two mistakes.”
Bonaly isn’t sure how judging can be improved to be more objective, but she declared that “something has to be changed,’ because the system that failed her decades ago is still flawed: “It has to be more fair and that’s it … I’m sick and tired of seeing some people who should have won miss it and just lose … It has to be more clear.”
Bonaly was featured on a 2019 episode of Netflix’s ‘Losers,’ where she shared some advice to a group of young Black skaters breaking into a sport that is both beautiful, but unforgiving. The episode is titled ‘Judgment,’ which Bonaly faced throughout her entire career. Yet, it gave her perspective she teaches to her skating students.
“Sometime it’s hard. Many days you feel like crying, but winning a competition, it’s not the important thing in life,” Bonaly said in the episode. “You don’t have to wait for a medal to make your life different … A medal is nice, but … it’s superficial. It’s not real. If you give 100% and you know there was no other way, you did the best, well, feel good about it.”
It’s a philosophy Chock and Bates have embraced. After the ice dance free skate result brought them to tears on Thursday, Chock and Bates said their perfromance, likely the last dance of their Olympic careers, was a “gold medal performance.”
“We did what we had to do,” Chock said. “Sometimes you do your very best and it’s not always what you hope in the result, but we feel confident in knowledge that we did our job and we wouldn’t change anything about what we’ve done or how we went about doing it.”
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