Winter Olympics 2026: Madison Chock, Evan Bates win silver in emotional, painful ice dance
MILAN — After every Olympic performance, from qualification to medal-winning, Olympic athletes must pass through what’s known as the “mixed zone” — a media labyrinth of cameras, recorders, lights and phones, all pointed directly at them.
In a moment of triumph, it must feel like a glorious parade. But when your dream has just shattered in front of you, reliving the loss over and over again seems like a special kind of hell.
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Madison Chock and Evan Bates won silver on Wednesday night in Olympic ice dance, but in the mixed zone, it felt like they lost gold. They proceeded through their media obligations, station to station, silver medals around their necks, eyes rimmed with tears, managing — just barely — to keep their grief in check.
“Definitely it’s a little bittersweet,” Chock said, and then her voice broke. “Sometimes that’s just how it shakes out.”
They’d worked so very hard for this moment. They’d worked for 15 years as partners, and now two years as husband and wife. They’d spent countless early mornings and late evenings at rinks all over the world, they’d competed in four Olympics together. They had very nearly reached the top of their mountain … only to watch someone else get there just as they were about to plant the flag.
Chock and Bates skated 19th of 20 teams on Wednesday night. Their toreador-inspired skate to Ramin Djawadi’s cover of “Paint It, Black” thrilled the substantial number of American fans in attendance at Assago Ice Skating Arena. Chock’s brilliant red matador’s cape/dress was one of the night’s highlights, and when the duo finished their routine, they embraced, bowed to the crowd in every direction, and waved again and again as they left the ice.
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When the scores flashed across the arena’s screens, Chock and Bates received a final combined score of 224.39. It was a magnificent performance — “our gold-medal performance,” Bates said afterward — but it reigned for only a few minutes before France’s Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron topped it with a score of 225.82. Canada’s Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier took bronze with a score of 217.74.
There’s often something bittersweet about a silver medal, coming so very close to gold and yet falling short. As they worked their way through the mixed zone, the pair seemed to be trying to reconcile the reality of what had just happened to them, how decades of training and years’ worth of titles ended up just short of the top of the podium.
“Sometimes you can feel like you do everything right and it doesn’t go your way,” Bates said. “And that’s life and that’s sport … We felt like we were very close.”
The contrasts with their fellow medalists were striking. Gilles and Poirier were ecstatic, reveling in the joy of an unexpectedly high finish. Fournier Beaudry and Cizeron, both the focus of separate significant off-ice controversies, remained impassive and cool, allowing themselves smiles but little exuberance.
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While Chock and Bates have been a known Olympic quantity for well over a decade, they’ve only ascended to the top of the ice dance mountain since Beijing. They’re the reigning and three-time World and Grand Prix Final champions, the reigning and seven-time U.S. champions. They’ve won gold medals twice as members of the U.S. team, most recently this past Sunday. Until Wednesday night, they’d never claimed their own individual medals.
“We did everything we set out to accomplish,” Chock said. “There’s nothing more we could have done, nothing we would change.”
A bit further down the standings, four Americans making their Olympic debuts notched respectable finishes.
Christina Carreira and Anthony Ponomarenko, skating to selections from “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer,” finished with a combined score of 197.62 to end the Olympics ranked 11th. Emilea Zingas and Vadym Kolesnik, skating to Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet Op. 64, had a combined score of 206.72 and finished a surprising fifth.
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“I mean, this is crazy. We’re top five at the Olympics. This is absolutely insane. If you told me one year ago today that I’d be top five at the Olympics, I would have said, ‘No, it’s a lie. It’s a straight-up lie.’ So I’m really happy to be here and to have the result that we did.”
