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 Olympic Games in Sochi in 2014, and won the hearts of millions of fans.
Career start
Meryl Davis was born on January 1, 1987 in Michigan. She started skating at the age of five on a frozen lake. In the same year, she began training as a single 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, at the suggestion of the coaches, Meryl paired up with Charlie White. From the very first season, the duo showed good results in almost all competitions they took part in.
The junior career of Meryl Davis and Charlie White began less successfully: at the first Junior World Championships in 2004, the athletes took only 13th place, and the next season did not take part in the main start of the year at all due to a partner injury.
In the last season before moving to seniors, Meryl and Charlie qualified for the Grand Prix Final, where they took second place, won the national championship and got on the podium of the worldChampionships, winning bronze.
Olympic cycle 2006 - 2010
The skaters started their first adult year with two consecutive fourth places at the Grand Prix stages. At the Four Continents Championships they were also fourth, and at the World Championships they were seventh. Experts noted a very high technical component of the pair's skating. At the tournament in Nagano, the judges rated all elements of the program at the highest, fourth, level. Prior to this, no couple in the world had such an achievement.
The following season, the skaters gradually increased their results: they took the first medal in their career at the Grand Prix series in Paris, and at the World Championships they became sixth in the sum of two programs.
In 2008, the athletes reached the Grand Prix final for the first time, despite an unsuccessful performance at one of the stages. Having won bronze in the final, and then won the national Championship, Davis / White nevertheless remained nominally the second pair of the country, since the experienced Tanit Belbin and Benjamin Agosto retained the status of leaders.
At the World Championship Meryl Davis and Charlie White missed the first podium by a few hundredths.
The 2009 - 2010 Olympic season became a turning point in the figure skaters' career. The pair confidently outperformed Belbin/Agosto for the first time at the US Championships 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 Canadian athletes Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir. It was to them that the couple lost the gold of the Vancouver Olympics. Other competitorsVirtue/Moir and Davis/White left far behind.
The performance of both pairs was called by experts a revolution in ice dancing, as the athletes showed not only the highest quality of technical elements, but also an innovative approach to program setting.
Olympic cycle 2010 - 2014
The entire Olympic cycle leading up to the Sochi Olympics was held in competition between a Canadian and an American pair. At any competition where both duets participated, the rest of the athletes fought among themselves only for bronze.
It is worth noting that over the years of rivalry, the couples trained in the same group and spoke of each other with great respect.
In their 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 of 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 the world record set by them for the sum of the short and free dances.
The culmination of the figure skaters' career was a confident victory at the Sochi Olympics with another update of world records. At the same Olympics, a couple as part of the US team won bronze. The free dance "Scheherazade" to the music of Rimsky-Korsakov had a huge success with the audience.
After the triumphant season, the couple did not appear at official competitions. Officially athletesannounced their retirement in February 2017.
Private life
The figure skater said many times in an interview that they are a couple with Charlie White only on ice.
Since 2017, a touching photo of Meryl Davis and her boyfriend has appeared on the Web. Then Meryl admitted to reporters that she was engaged to a former figure skater, the son of Marina Zueva, Fedor Andreev, with whom she had been in a relationship for about six years.
After retirement
In 2014, Meryl Davis and partner Maxim Chmerkovskiy won the TV project "Dancing with the Stars".
In 2016, the champion became the representative of UNICEF Kid Power, which develops useful applications for children and sends part of the proceeds to charity.
Viewers still get to see the beloved Davis/White couple in ice shows like Stars on Ice and Art on Ice.
