The Athletes

Senior Dance

Marie-France Dubreuil & Patrice Lauzon
2006 Canadian champions

With two gold medals from the two ISU Grand Prix events they competed in this season, Marie-France Dubreuil and Patrice Lauzon qualified for their seventh consecutive ISU Grand Prix Final held in St. Petersburg, Russia. This was another highlight for Dubreuil and Lauzon in 2006. Last March they stood on the second step of the podium at the 2006 world championships in Calgary. The four-time Canadian Ice Dance Champions captured the silver medal in Calgary after being forced to withdraw from the Olympic Games in Turin due to injury. In June of 2006, Dubreuil and Lauzon made the announcement that they would continue skating in the eligible ranks for the 2006-2007 season and revealed their intentions of creating a four-year plan leading up to the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver.

Tessa Virtue & Scott Moir
2006 Canadian bronze medallists

Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir had an impressive debut on the ISU Senior Grand Prix Series this season as they won silver at the HomeSense Skate Canada International. They went on to finish fourth at Trophée Éric Bompard. Virtue and Moir’s 2005-2006 season highlight came at the 2006 world junior championships, where they captured the gold medal to become the first Canadian gold medallists in ice dance at this event. Virtue and Moir, who started skating together in 1997, also captured a medal in their first senior international event, a bronze, at the 2006 ISU Four Continents Championships. Virtue started skating as a six-year-old spent one summer at the National Ballet School of Canada when she was nine. Moir started skating when he was three-years-old and comes from a skating family. His mother is a skating coach and his father played hockey, while his two brothers also skated.

Chantal Lefebvre & Arseniy Markov
4th at 2006 national championships

Chantal Lefebvre and Arseniy Markov achieved two top-ten finishes on this season’s ISU Grand Prix Series circuit. Lefebvre and Markov started skating together in the spring of 2003. Lefebvre began skating when she was nine. In addition to skating, she was involved in a number of sports when she was younger, including swimming, ballet and gymnastics. When Lefebvre was 10-years-old, she had to choose to either continue in skating or swimming, and skating won out in the end. Before teaming up with Markov, Lefebvre was a member of the National Team with both Michel Brunet and Justin Lanning. Markov began skating as a three-year-old after his grandmother took him to a rink. He was a singles skater until the age of 11, when he decided to take up ice dancing. Prior to teaming up with Lefebvre, Markov, who was born in Moscow, skated with Russian Svetlana Kulikova until the winter of 2002.

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