Piper Gilles skates with different perspective since cancer diagnosis
CBC
Canadian ice dancer Piper Gilles is skating with a greater sense of peace since her cancer diagnosis last season and whenever she is struggling to walk out of her front door to attend practice, she thinks back to the many days she physically could not.
The 32-year-old Gilles and partner Paul Poirier have set their sights on gold at this week's world figure skating championships in Montreal, hoping for a glittering finish to what has been perhaps the best season of their 12-year partnership.
The two-time world bronze medallists were sidelined for much of last season after Gilles had an ovary and her appendix removed in December of 2022. Subsequent tests showed it was ovarian cancer.
"Anybody that goes through that [cancer], it changes your perspective on life a little bit," Illinois-born Gilles told Reuters in an interview.
"Anytime I get up in the morning and I don't want to skate or I'm thinking of hurting, I look back and I think this is a perspective thing. I want to skate, I want to do this, my body is OK to do this.
"It's definitely a shift. It's [also] a little bit of a mental roller-coaster constantly, I think of 'Am I OK? Am I not OK?' Anytime you don't feel good, you're like, 'Oh my God,'" she added.
Gilles' mother Bonnie died of glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer, in 2018 and the skater is active in spreading awareness around both brain and ovarian cancer.
She still gets tested every couple of months and she said her most recent clean bill of health gave her peace of mind.
Watch live coverage this week from Montreal on CBCSports.ca, the CBC Sports app and CBC Gem. Coverage begins Wednesday at 12 p.m. ET with pairs short program, followed by women's short program at 5 p.m.
Gilles and Poirier were on the Canadian team that finished fourth at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.
However, after it emerged during that Olympics that Kamila Valieva had failed a drug test, for which she received a four-year doping ban two months ago, many had assumed that gold-medal winners Russia would be disqualified and that Canada would be promoted to third.
Controversially, the International Skating Union (ISU) decided to only discard the points awarded to Valieva and when they recalculated the teams scores, Russia were awarded the bronze behind the United States and Japan because their new combined total was still more than Canada's.
Skate Canada has lodged an appeal with the Court of Arbitration for Sport against the decision to deny them the bronze.
"Everybody has their own approach to how they feel about it," Gilles said.
