SOCHI, Russia — When Meryl Davis and Charlie White began skating together in suburban Detroit, she was 9 and he was 8. It was an awkward age when a girl is not yet comfortable looking into a boy’s eyes, even for the theatricality of sport.
So their coach devised a clever training solution for Davis’s shyness, redirecting her gaze to a smiley-face sticker placed on White’s forehead.
White was a bit annoyed at having to break in a new dance partner. He had all of six months’ experience, while Davis was a beginner. Still, he said, “I remember being really impressed that she had never done it before, and we were sticking together like glue.”
More than 17 years later, their relaxed and reliable familiarity provided the first Olympic gold medal for the United States in ice dancing.
With a refined sense of performance and tempo to accompany their speed and power, Davis, 27, and White, 26, finished with great energy Monday and defeated their training partners and chief rivals, Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir of Canada, the 2010 Olympic champions.
While a number of favored American athletes have not fulfilled their hopes at the Sochi Games, Davis and White performed with unwavering consistency. They won the long program with a season best 116.63 points, for an overall score of 195.52.
As these Olympics opened, Davis and White boosted the United States to a bronze medal in the team skating competition. They prevailed in the separate dance event with bubbly fluidity in Sunday’s “My Fair Lady” short program and with the dramatic tension of love and escape in Monday’s free skate to “Scheherazade.”
In finishing second with 190.99 points, Virtue and Moir displayed ease and elegant unison, exploring the way a relationship changes over time while skating to music by the Russian composers Alexander Glasunov and Alexander Scriabin. Their only obvious flaw was a lack of harmony on a second twizzle, or traveling spin.
The bronze medal went to Elena Ilinykh and Nikita Katsalapov of Russia, who performed a dynamic version of “Swan Lake” and drew loud, flag-waving support from a home crowd. They finished with 183.48 points.
Even as American prominence in figure skating has ebbed, and popularity and power bases have shifted to Japan, South Korea and a rejuvenated Russia, ice dance has become a North American stronghold, albeit with Russian coaching.
Davis and White took silver at the 2010 Vancouver Games, while White’s companion, Tanith Belbin, and her dance partner Ben Agosto, finished second at the 2006 Turin Olympics. The Canadian stars Virtue, 24, and Moir, 26, now have a gold and silver medal in their Olympic collection.
And the Arctic Edge Ice Arena in Canton, Mich., outside Detroit, where Monday’s gold and silver medalists train with the coach Marina Zoueva, has become the epicenter of ice dancing. A number of other top skaters also train in the area. Whatever financial ills have stricken Detroit, and whatever prestige it has lost as an automotive center, it has emerged as a world figure skating capital.
The American and Canadian dance teams pushed each other daily in training, White said, and each realized that “if you’re not perfect, you can forget about your dreams.”
As performers, Davis and White and Moir and Virtue provided the judges with a compelling difference in style. Among skating’s four disciplines, none provokes such a conflict between art and sport as does ice dancing, a discord that makes it engaging for many but extremely difficult to judge objectively.
Dance also has been tainted by a perception of outcomes decided in advance. Even as the Sochi Games began, L’Equipe, a French sports newspaper, wrote of a supposed plan by Russia and the United States to fix the ice dance and other skating competitions here. The International Olympic Committee dismissed the contretemps as groundless gossip.
On some level, the outcome of any ice dancing event distills itself to preference as much as performance.
“We’re extremely pleased with our performances,” said Moir, who with Virtue was gracious in finishing second. “We left it out there on the ice. I have no regrets.”
Moir and Virtue are classic ballroom dancers with a lyrical, romantic connection. Davis and White are more gracefully athletic, evidenced by their first lift on Monday, when Davis swooped from her back, low and parallel to the ice, to White’s shoulder. Slightly more effort was needed than usual, but there was no real disruption of flow.
The concluding 40 seconds of the four-minute program were performed with enormous vitality, a strategy designed to impress the judges with resilience in the face of exhaustion.
Davis and White whirled across the arena, then she placed her left skate on White’s right thigh and wrapped her free leg around his neck before plunging toward the ice, head first, in a final kinetic maneuver as the program concluded musically and thematically.
“I think it’s a really great representation of how we’ve become a complete team,” White said. “It was a process of being able to embody those characters and be bigger than the music and not let it overcome us.”
At the Vancouver Games, athleticism was something that both lifted and restricted Davis and White. Now they are more believable as storytellers, having worked diligently to build emotion, charisma, mood, love and passion into their routines.
“Especially this year, they grow as actors,” Zoueva said recently. “They hear music very well. Now the body can explore what they hear.”
Davis possesses a striking look with wide-set eyes that draws the audience to her hypnotically. She has what White calls an ethnic ambiguity, allowing her to portray various exotic roles.
A mime has assisted Davis with her expressiveness. And she consulted a dancer and choreographer from “Dancing With the Stars” to polish the light foxtrot and quickstep routine in the short program.
A Persian dancer helped Davis prepare for the role of “Scheherazade,” the sultan’s wife whose enchanting stories distract her husband for 1,001 days from his aberrant habit of marrying a new wife daily and having the previous one put to death.
“She’s not only trying to save her life because she’s in this situation,” Davis said in an interview. “She’s not a victim. She inserts herself into it to prevent the sultan from continuing his ways.”
With mystery, intrigue and changing fortune facilitated by musical contrast, Davis and White won the gold medal. She had come far from being the shy girl partnered with a boy into whose eyes she could not look.
“We’ve grown up together in every sense of the word,” Davis said. “And I’m just so grateful that we’ve gone through it together
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