Marina Anissina and Gwendal Peizerat, after winning the Gold Medal in ice dancing at the Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, Utah this year, have decided to retire from amateur skating.

Marina and Gwendal are known for their charisma.

Anissina and Peizerat made their mark as one of the world's top ice dancing teams when they earned the Bronze Medal at the 1998 Winter Games at Nagano, Japan. Four years later the two-time World Champions added the Olympic Gold Medal to their medals vault.

Last year their free dance of the last night of German composer Ludwig van Beethoven before his death, was a crowd pleaser with their passionate and dramatic style of skating.

It is thanks to a letter that Marina Anissina sent to Gwendal Peizerat are the successful dance team that they are.

Their story begins with two junior dance teams, one in Russia and one in France. Marina danced with Ilia Averbukh in Moscow and Gwendal trained with Marina Morel.

But Ilia fell in love with another ice dancer in his club and he couldn't stand for her to dance with anyone else. So they decided to join forces. That left Anissina without a partner.

She didn't want to stop skating. And from competitions, she remembered two skaters, one from Canada and one from France. She wrote letters to both of them. The one sent to Canada went to Victor Kraatz, but it never arrived. The other one went to Gwendal.

Gwendal didn't answer at first. He put the letter aside and continued to skate with Marina Morel. When things fell apart with Morel, he decided to answer the letter from Moscow.

Marina arrived in Lyon in 1993 and went to the rink with Gwendal to see how they skated together. They decided it might work, but it would not be easy.

Marina had to learn a new language and had to adapt to a different life. But they worked hard and Marina adapted to French life. And now they're Olympic and World Champions.

Marina and Gwendal won France's first Gold Medal in nine years at the World Championships last year in Nice, France, and became the first couple to win on home ice since Czechoslovakia's Eva Romanova and Pavel Roman in 1962.

"I understand now why it was so difficult," Peizerat said after he and Anissina had heard "La Marseilles" at a rink for the first time since Quebec-born Isabelle and Paul Duchesnay won in 1991.

The French pair had to overtake Italy's Barbara Fusar-Poli and Maurizio Margaglio, who led going into the free dance. They did it with a dramatic and elegant program skated to "Carmina Burana", which earned them four perfect 6.0 artistic marks, the most at a world event since Russian pairs skaters Natalya Mishkutenok and Arthur Dmitriev did the same in 1992.

Marina 's mother, Irina Chernieva, was a pairs skater and competed at the 1972 Olympics in Sapporo, Japan. Her father, Viatcheslav Anissina was a hockey player who won Worlds with the Soviet team. Both work as coaches in their sports today.

Gwendal's father, Eugene Peizerat is an official in the French Figure Skating Federation and chairman of the National Ice Dance Commission.

Marina and Gwendal toured last summer with Champions on Ice where they received tremendous ovations.

 

Personal

Name	Marina Anissina
Born	August 30, 1975 in Moscow, Russia
Hometown	Lyon, France
Training town	Lyon, France
Home club	CSG Lyon
Coach	Muriel Boucher-Zazoul
Choreographers	Bruno Vandelli, Antonio Najarro, Pascal Gaona

Personal

Name	Gwendal Peizerat
Born	April 21, 1972 in Bron, France
Hometown	Lyon, France
Training town	Lyon, France
Home club	CSG Lyon
Coach	Muriel Boucher-Zazoul
Choreographers	Bruno Vandelli, Antonio Najarro, Pascal Gaona