By Canadian Press

Ice dancers Weaver, Poje going back to old favourite in Olympic season

Oct 26, 2017 | 12:14 PM

REGINA — Canada’s Kaitlyn Weaver and Andrew Poje hope a page from their past will help them climb the Olympic podium.

The ice dancers have gone back to their popular free dance to “Je Suis Malade” that saw them finish fourth at the 2012 world championships in Nice, France, announcing the news on the eve of Skate Canada International.

“I keep thinking ‘Did we really go back to that program? Like, what? Were we crazy?’” Weaver said Thursday. “But then we get out on the ice and it all makes sense.”

Weaver, from Toronto, and Poje, from Waterloo, Ont., said they’d received lukewarm feedback from fans and judges, as well as their own coaches, on their free dance to Adagio from “Spartacus,” when they debuted it at the Autumn Classic earlier this month in Montreal.

“Just getting the general lay of the land with that program, and it wasn’t exactly what we wanted, and in an Olympic year, you can’t dilly-dally. . . we needed to make something happen,” Weaver said.

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They made the switch less than three weeks ago. Their coach Nikolai Morozov initially made the suggestion. Later,  while working with choreographer Lori Nichol in Toronto, they performed the two programs back to back, and Nichol agreed they needed to make the change.

Weaver and Poje were seventh at the 2014 Sochi Olympics. They won silver at the 2014 world championships and bronze at the 2015 worlds.

“Je Suis Malade” was a huge fan favourite, and the song was originally a suggestion from a fan from Latvia, who travelled to Nice to see the two compete at the world championships. The haunting French love song is about a woman who wakes up to find out her lover is leaving her, and then goes mad.

Weaver and Poje briefly considered using the same costumes they wore in 2012 — hers was an elegant neligee, a shoulderstrap purposefully fallen off one shoulder, his was a simple shirt and slacks.

“But we pulled them out of the closet and we were like ‘Ew,’” Weaver said. “They were old and the colours were drained, and they didn’t fit us as well. So we redeisgned them keeping the same vision, you may not even notice a difference.”

Lori Ewing, The Canadian Press

Note to readers: This is a corrected story. An earlier version reported that Weaver and Poje finished fourth in 2011.