Americans Davis and White dance to gold

Silence. Real, thunderous, unknowing silence. All 12,000 seats in the Iceberg Skating Palace were filled but for these 45 seconds there may as well have been mannequins taped to them. Nobody in the place knew what was coming next, no inkling in the room as to what the giant scoreboard was going to flash up to bring the silence to an end. Sit. Wait. Wonder. It’s the figure skating way.

The American pair of Meryl Davis and Charlie White had left the rink and were gone to take their seat in the kiss and cry. They needed a score of 112.11 or better to beat Canadians Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir to gold but when you looked around the stadium, it was clear there wasn’t a single person beyond the judges’ bench who had a rashers.

Maybe they’d done it, maybe they hadn’t.

This wasn’t like waiting for a decision at a boxing match. At least there, folk have some clue – bravado-informed or otherwise. Here, nobody knew.

Mostly, people looked at each other and shrugged. The scoring system is such a knotted ball of twine even the competitors themselves admit they're never able to fully untangle it until they go back over the tape afterwards. If they don't know, who can know?

The hugged, they wept
When the score came, it chimed in at 116.03 for the Davis and White. They hugged, they wept. Having been greeted on to the ice by decidedly watery applause from the home crowd, they were roared from all corners now. It was raucous. It was stirring. It was Rocky IV all over again.

Most of all, it was a reminder that even when the scoring system is a Rubik’s Cube of mystery it doesn’t much matter because people come for the story and stay for the ending.

Davis and White v Virtue and Moir is as charming a yarn as these games have to offer. Far from being mortal enemies from either side of the 49th parallel, the foursome are training partners. They share the same coach, Russian-born Marina Zoueva. They train at the same rink in Detroit.

They’ve competed against each other since they were in their early teens and have grown up into their mid-20s as the two best ice-dancing teams in the world. Virtue and Moir won gold in Vancouver with David and White taking silver. Sochi brings places reversed, leaves it honours even.

“We’re linked forever,” said White afterwards. “These moments, all of the moments we’ve had, have brought us together and will keep us together forever.”

“No athlete likes to sit here in this position,” said Moir. “We came here to win gold. But it is easier when you see what they do every day. We know how hard they work, we know how they’ve pushed it the past four years. So it makes it easier.”

In their own way, both pairs are ground-breakers. Virtue and Moir are the first Canadian figure skaters to win three Olympic medals. Davis and White are the first Americans ever to win gold outside a singles event. Complex or not, the scoring system had them an ocean clear of the Russian pair Elena Ilinykh and Nikita Katsalapov back in third.

For Davis and White, it’s the end of a road of barely imaginable length. Though only in their mid-20s, they’ve been skating together for 17 years. Davis explained last night they knew each other casually before a coach put them together.

“Well, as casually as eight-year-olds can know each other,” she corrected herself.

White wanted to be an ice hockey player but got landed in the ice dance programme to learn some basic skills on his feet. A few months in, he got landed with a partner, a shy little girl who didn’t speak an awful lot.

"I remember the first time we skated together I had been doing ice dance for six months probably and she hadn't done it at all. So I was a little annoyed that I had to go back a level and do dances again that I already had done. We were super shy with each other."

Firm friends
Over a decade and half later, they're Olympic champions. Just as their training partners and firm friends Virtue and Moir are. Whether either or both pairs will still be on the go in Pyeongchang is debatable. To look at all four of them last night was to see nothing but joy that it was all finally at an end.

“There’s a lot of sleepless nights that go into an Olympic games,” said Moir. “The older and wiser you get, the less sleep you get. It’s been a fierce rivalry between the four of us and the pressures of it are melting away now, at last.”

Listening, you realised they could have been any athletes in any sport at any Olympics. You don’t need to know how it’s scored to see how it counts.