On Wednesday night in Milan, Canadian ice dancer Piper Gilles finished a free dance to Govardo's cover of Don McLean's "Vincent" — also known as "Starry, Starry Night" — and her partner Paul Poirier immediately broke down sobbing. The crowd at the Milano Ice Skating Arena was already on its feet. Gilles jumped out of her seat in the kiss-and-cry when the score flashed: 131.56 in the free dance, 217.74 total. A season's best. An Olympic bronze medal. Their first Olympic medal ever, after 15 years skating together and three trips to the Games.

It was a beautiful moment. But the reason it hit so hard — the reason even the commentators were choking up — is what happened between the last Olympics and this one.

Three years ago, Piper Gilles was lying in bed alone when she found out she had cancer.

A Rink Rat From Rockford

Gilles was born on January 16, 1992, in Rockford, Illinois. Her older brother Todd was the first in the family to start figure skating, and it turned their house into what Gilles has described as a revolving door of billets — visiting skaters who came and went with the seasons. She and her twin sister Alexe grew up as "rink rats," and Piper was on the ice by the time she was two and a half.

She started competing at five. She tried dance and gymnastics, but nothing stuck like skating. When she was nine, the family moved to Colorado Springs — the figure skating capital of the U.S. — so the kids could train seriously. Her sister Alexe became the U.S. junior ladies' national champion in 2008. Her brother Todd competed internationally in ice dance. Skating wasn't just a hobby for the Gilles family. It was the family business.

Piper initially competed for the United States, skating with partners Zachary Donohue and Timothy McKernan on the junior circuit and winning four ISU Junior Grand Prix medals. But a new chapter opened in 2011 when Canadian ice dancer Paul Poirier reached out to arrange a tryout. They clicked immediately. Gilles — whose mother and grandmother are Canadian — moved to Toronto to train at the Scarboro Figure Skating Club. She became a Canadian citizen on December 17, 2013, and has represented Canada ever since.

Gilles and Poirier: Fifteen Years and Counting

The Gilles/Poirier partnership is one of the longest-running in international ice dance. They teamed up in 2011, and over the next decade-plus built one of the most decorated careers in Canadian skating: five-time Canadian national champions, four-time World Championship medalists, two-time Four Continents champions, Grand Prix Final champions, and competitors at three consecutive Olympics.

They also became known as innovators. Their partial step sequence from the 2015-16 short dance was literally adopted by the ISU as a new official pattern dance — the Maple Leaf March. Their programs drew from Van Gogh, James Bond, film noir, disco. Their free dance to "Vincent," first debuted in the 2018-19 season, became their signature piece — a program so emotionally resonant that they brought it back this season, seven years later, for the Olympics.

But the road wasn't straight. Poirier broke his ankle six months before the 2014 Sochi Olympics, and they didn't recover in time. They made it to PyeongChang in 2018 and placed eighth. They improved to seventh at Beijing in 2022. Every four years, the podium was just out of reach.

And then everything almost fell apart.

A Diagnosis on Her Birthday

In October 2022, heading into the first Grand Prix event of the season at Skate Canada International, Gilles started feeling wrong. Fatigue. Nausea. A throbbing pain on her left side. She initially dismissed it as competition nerves or period-related pain — she'd always had difficult periods. But when the symptoms persisted, her coach and her husband pressed her to see a doctor.

An ultrasound revealed an ovarian tumor. Doctors told her surgery was needed immediately, despite her hope to wait until after the skating season. Blood tests taken before she was scheduled to leave for the Grand Prix of Espoo in Finland indicated the tumor was possibly cancerous.

In December 2022, Gilles had surgery to remove an ovary and her appendix. The tumor was nine centimeters — roughly the size of a tennis ball.

Then, on January 16, 2023 — her 31st birthday — she got the pathology results. Stage 1 ovarian cancer.

The cancer diagnosis was terrifying on its own. But for Gilles, it carried an unbearable extra weight — because she had already watched cancer take someone she loved.

Her Mother's Fight

Gilles' mother, Bonnie, was diagnosed with glioblastoma — one of the most aggressive forms of brain cancer — while Piper was chasing her Olympic dream. In the late stages of the disease, Bonnie watched from home as Gilles and Poirier competed at the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics. She saw her daughter skate on the Olympic stage. It was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream for both of them.

Bonnie passed away in May 2018, just months after the Games.

After her mother's death, skating took on a new dimension for Gilles. She stopped holding back emotionally. She channeled grief and love and the full range of human feeling into her performances, and it made her skating more powerful than it had ever been. Every routine, in the back of her mind, was performed in Bonnie's honor.

So when Gilles herself was diagnosed with cancer five years later, the fear wasn't abstract. She knew exactly what cancer could do. She'd watched it happen.

Coming Back to the Ice

There was one piece of good news in the diagnosis: the cancer was caught early. Stage 1. Gilles would not need chemotherapy. Surgery was enough.

But recovery from abdominal surgery as an elite athlete is not simple. It was painful to move for weeks. Gilles returned to the ice in February 2023 — about six weeks after her diagnosis — wearing a pregnancy compression belt to hold everything together while she skated.

She and Poirier missed the 2023 Canadian Championships and the 2023 Four Continents Championships while she recovered. But they came back for the 2023 World Championships in Saitama, Japan, and won the bronze medal. Just months after cancer surgery.

The following season, 2023-24, was arguably the best of their career. They won both their Grand Prix events, won the Four Continents title, and took the World Championship silver medal on home ice in Montreal — the highest Worlds result of their partnership. They won the 2024 Canadian national title. They were firmly established as one of the top three ice dance teams in the world.

But Gilles was honest that the old version of herself wasn't coming back.

She's currently cancer-free. She still gets tested every couple of months. And she's become an advocate for ovarian cancer awareness, speaking publicly about her symptoms — fatigue, nausea, left-side pain — and urging women not to dismiss vague discomfort as "just a bad period."

Wednesday Night in Milan

The 2026 Olympic ice dance competition was supposed to be a two-team race. Americans Madison Chock and Evan Bates — three-time reigning World Champions, undefeated for most of the quadrennial — were considered locks for gold. Then, 11 months before the Games, 2022 Olympic champion Guillaume Cizeron shocked the skating world by coming out of retirement to skate with former Canadian champion Laurence Fournier Beaudry, representing France. Suddenly, the gold medal race was a three-way showdown, and it became the subject of a Netflix documentary series, Glitter & Gold: Ice Dancing.

Gilles and Poirier came into the free dance sitting in third place after the rhythm dance, just 0.71 points ahead of Britain's Lilah Fear and Lewis Gibson. The margin was razor-thin. One mistake and the medal was gone.

Then Fear stumbled in her twizzles in the free dance, and the British team dropped to seventh. The door was open. All Gilles and Poirier had to do was skate clean.

They did more than skate clean. They skated the performance of their lives.

Wearing a light blue dress with golden circles inspired by Van Gogh's Starry Night, Gilles and Poirier performed their "Vincent" program to a near-capacity arena. The crowd was with them from the first note. When they finished, Poirier was sobbing. Gilles was beaming. The score — 131.56 in the free dance, a season's best — confirmed what everyone in the building already knew: they were Olympic medalists.

Fournier Beaudry and Cizeron won gold for France with 225.82. Chock and Bates took silver with 224.39. Gilles and Poirier's bronze was Canada's first figure skating Olympic medal since Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir won gold at PyeongChang in 2018.

Why They Brought Back "Vincent"

There's a detail about this medal that makes it even more meaningful. The "Vincent" program isn't new. Gilles and Poirier first performed it in the 2018-19 season — the year after Gilles' mother died. It was choreographed as a tribute to the artist Vincent van Gogh, set to Govardo's acoustic cover of the Don McLean classic. It became their most acclaimed program — the one audiences connected to most deeply, the one that made people cry.

This season, heading into their likely final Olympics, they made the decision to bring it back. Judges sometimes penalize recycled programs, and some in the skating world questioned the choice. But Poirier said it felt like they had unfinished business with the program. Given everything that had happened — Bonnie's death, the cancer, three Olympics without a medal — "Vincent" wasn't just a free dance. It was the whole story.

Gilles told Olympics.com after the performance: "It was such a wonderful skate. And we felt like we had the whole crowd there with us from the beginning until the end."

At 34, both Gilles and Poirier have indicated this is likely their final competitive season. Fifteen years on the ice together. Five Canadian titles. Four World Championship medals. Two Four Continents golds. A Grand Prix Final title. And now, finally, an Olympic medal.