'I can't believe it happened' - Lilah Fear and Lewis Gibson miss out on Olympic figure skating medal

There were smiles on camera and tears off stage as Britain’s much-hyped chance of ending a 32-year wait for an Olympic figure skating medal fell well short, as Torvill and Dean watched helplessly on.

Starting the decisive free dance in fourth place, Robin Cousins, who won Olympic gold in 1980, said their only path to a medal was to be flawless and they weren't.

Instead their Highland Fling-inspired free dance didn't come close to seeing them take the high road to the podium, their worst score of the season plummeting them down the leaderboard to seventh.

It wasn't the miracle on ice they dreamed of, more a nightmare that will take some time to process.

At the recent European Championships in Sheffield, Gibson's mistake on a twizzle sequence saw the couple relegated from bronze to silver, this time it was Fear's error and so much more costly.

There were other issues too, Fear and Gibson's faces saying it all as they watched the scoreboard in stunned disbelief and the sea of British flags in the Assago Forum suddenly fell limp.

“I can't believe it happened, I am replaying it in my head and it's just such a shame,” said Fear. “I don't really have the words yet. it will take me some time to process.”

France’s Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron took gold while Americans Madison Chock and Evan Bates claimed silver.

Canada’s Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier produced a huge personal best to take bronze, so perhaps a podium was never in the stars for the Brits anyway.

In the cut-throat world of ice dancing, you are never far from an opinion, and Fear and Gibson’s approach to the sport has occasionally been divisive.

Their entertainment-forward ice dance style — which can feel like stage productions on ice — does not always win over the traditionalists and in this sport, the only metric that really matters is pleasing the judges, not the crowd.

Intrigue and controversy on the ice are stories as old as Olympic time in this sport. Fear and Gibson just seem very nice, which is quite unlike gold medallists Fournier Beaudry and Cizeron.

Fournier Beaudry competed for Canada and Denmark before being rushed into French citizenship last year in order to find Cizeron a new partner.

It came after he split from Gabriella Papadakis, with whom he won the Olympic title in Beijing and five world titles. Their split was acrimonious, with Papadakis describing him as controlling and demanding and labelling their relationship ‘unbalanced’ in a tell-all memoir.

Fournier Beaudry’s former partner, Nikolaj Sørensen — with whom she is still in a relationship — was last year suspended from the sport for six years for ‘sexual maltreatment’, an allegation he continues to deny.

Elsewhere, world champion Bruce Mouat rebounded from his defeat in the mixed curling bronze medal match to guide his men's rink to a confident 9-4 victory over China in their opening match. He and his team of Grant Hardie, Bobby Lammie and Hammy McMillan Jr are the favourites for gold and lived up to the billing on opening night.

“I had a really good talk with my sports psychologist and just refreshed, and I'm ready to go again," he said. “I am very proud of that performance. I think the boys and I haven't played a game since mid-January, probably.

“So it was nice to just feel like we were stepping back onto the ice as if we had played yesterday.”

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