The week before Papadakis’s book came out, Cizeron issued a cease-and-desist, accusing her of leading a smear campaign. “I want to express my incomprehension and my disagreement with the labels being attributed to me,” Cizeron told the press in January. “These allegations arise at a particularly sensitive time… thereby raising questions about the underlying intentions behind this campaign. I also wish to denounce the content of this book, which contains false information, attributing to me, among other things, statements I have never made and which I consider serious.” (At the date of publication, Cizeron had not responded to a request for comment.)
“I wrote a book to reclaim my story, and it’s being hijacked by people who are trying to silence me,” Papadakis says. “At first, this made me laugh a little because this is literally what my book is about.”
Papadakis was raised by her mother, a French skating coach, but when she spent time with her father, he filled his daughter’s world with Greek mythology, trying to make up for the fact that she didn’t speak his native language. “I don’t remember the stories as they have been written, but I remember them like a landscape of a parallel world,” she says. The stories became a “present part of [her] subconscious landscape.” In dreams, her father became Zeus and she Athena, and in waking life, she carried the goddess with her. “Every time I was going through something that was difficult, I would imagine that it was a mission that Zeus had given me to accomplish,” Papadakis says. Today, she credits that framework with her resilience—and the stories with helping her to feel less alone. “I always say that if you think you’re having a unique experience, then you’re not reading enough,” she says.
Last year, Papadakis stepped into a new role at skating competitions: An official ice dancing commentator for NBC. She’s covered the past two US National Figure Skating Championships and covered events in China and Japan last fall. (These included the Grand Prix Final in Nagoya, where Fournier Beaudry and Cizeron competed together and placed second.) At the Milano Cortina Olympics, she was set to provide ice dance insight alongside Johnny Weir.
But after Cizeron’s cease-and-desist, NBC pulled Papadakis as a commentator. “They considered that the perception of my neutrality was compromised and that I could not commentate on the Olympic Games,” Papadakis said in an interview with the French newspaper L’Équipe.
Now, Papadakis is in London, contemplating a permanent move from Montreal. Many of her books have already made the move; during our calls, she points out texts that kept her company as she wrote her own: The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch, Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Annie Ernaux’s work, and Audre Lorde’s essay “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.” “That was like my Bible,” Papadakis says. “I read it, like, honestly, almost every day.”
She pulls a book from her shelf, Chanel Miller’s Know My Name, looking for an exact passage that stuck with her. Instead, she paraphrases Miller. “She was like, you know, I’ve always dreamt about writing, but I wish it was about something else. I wish it wasn’t such a dark and sad story, but you don’t really decide what you write about. It’s God that decides that for you or whatever.”