Figure skater Meryl Davis is one of the most titled athletes in ice dancing. Together with Charlie White, she won all the prestigious world competitions, including the 2014 Sochi Olympics, and won the hearts of millions of fans.
Carier start
Meryl Davis was born on January 1, 1987 in Michigan. She skated at the age of five on a frozen lake. In the same year, she began to train as a lone skater, but by the age of eight she had tried herself in ice dancing and made a choice in favor of this sport.
Since 1997, Meryl, at the suggestion of the coaches, has been paired with Charlie White. From the first season, the duo showed high results in almost all competitions in which he took part.
The junior career of Meryl Davis and Charlie White began less successfully: at the first Junior World Championships in 2004, athletes took only 13th place, and the next season did not even take part in the main start of the year due to a partner injury.
In the last season, before moving to the seniors, Meryl and Charlie selected the Grand Prix finals, where they took second place, won the national championship and got on the podium of the World Championship, having won bronze.
Olympic cycle 2006 - 2010
The first adult year, the skaters began with two consecutive fourth places at the stages of the Grand Prix. At the Championship of Four Continents, they also turned out to be fourth, and at the World Championships they became seventh. Experts noted a very high technical component of the pair's riding. At the tournament in Nagano, the judges rated all the elements of the program to the highest, fourth, level. Before this achievement, not a single couple in the world had.
In the next season, the skaters gradually increased the result: they took the first medal of the stage of the Grand Prix series in Paris in their careers, and at the World Championships they became sixth in the sum of two programs.
In 2008, athletes first reached the Grand Prix finals, despite an unsuccessful performance at one of the stages. Having won the bronze in the final and then won the national Championship, Davis / White nonetheless remained nominally the second pair of the country, as experienced Tanit Belbin and Benjamin Agosto retained the status of leaders.
At the World Championships, Meryl Davis and Charlie White did not have a few hundredths of a point before the first podium.
The Olympic season 2009 - 2010 became a turning point in the career of skaters. The pair confidently beat Belbin / Agosto for the first time at the US Championship and subsequently never lost to the former first number of the national team. The main rivals of the dancers in the struggle for world leadership were the Canadian athletes Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir. It was to them that the pair lost the gold of the Vancouver Olympics. The remaining competitors Virtue / Moir and Davis / White were left far behind.
Specialists called the performance of both couples a revolution in ice dancing, because athletes showed not only the highest quality of technical elements, but also an innovative approach to setting programs.
Olympic cycle 2010 - 2014
The entire Olympic cycle preceding the Olympics in Sochi was held in competition between the Canadian and American couples. In any competition, where both duets participated, the remaining athletes fought among themselves only for bronze.
It is worth noting that over many years of rivalry, couples trained in the same group and spoke about each other with great respect.
In the very first season after the Olympics, Meryl Davis and Charlie White won the missing world title for the first time in US history.
In 2012, after the collapse of the coaching duo Marina Zueva and Igor Shpilband, Davis and White decided to continue working under the leadership of Zueva.
In the pre-Olympic season, the couple once again beat their main rivals at the World Championships, breaking their world record for the sum of short and free dances.
The culmination in the career of the skaters was a confident victory at the Olympics in Sochi with another update to world records. At the same Olympics, a couple in the US team won bronze. A huge success with the audience was the free dance "Scheherazade" to the music of Rimsky-Korsakov.
After the triumphant season, the couple did not appear at official starts. Athletes officially announced their retirement in February 2017.
Personal life
The skater said in interviews many times that they are only on ice with Charlie White.
Since 2017, a touching photo of Meryl Davis and her young man has appeared on the web. Then Meryl admitted to reporters that she was engaged to the former skater, the son of Marina Zueva - Fedor Andreev, with whom she had been in a relationship for about six years.
