Paul Poirier, Piper Gilles get personal at Trophée Eric Bompard

Canadian ice dancers Paul Poirier and Piper Gilles are feeling the pressure from all sides. 

"There's less and less room to move up," Poirier said of the 2016 season. "It gets harder and harder, and people are pushing more and more."

The skaters are in Bordeaux, France this week to compete in the Trophée Eric Bompard, their second Grand Prix event this season. The competition has just opened up, as ice dance world champions Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron have suddenly withdrawn from this week's competition.  

A first-place finish would virtually guarantee Piper and Paul's spot in the Grand Prix Final.

A second- or third-place finish may not be enough.

"Hopefully this competition should be a little bit better than our last one," the 23-year old Gilles told CBC Sports, speaking of the duo's third-place finish in October's Skate America.

Change of approach

While Gilles maintains they are proud of their performance, the results weren't what they wanted.

"But at the end of the day we can't keep thinking about results," she said. "We have to be satisfied with what we did and keep moving forward."

That's the attitude the three-time Canadian medallists are taking into Bordeaux.

After a disappointing 2013-14 season where they missed qualifying for the Sochi Olympics, the pair headed into the 2014-2015 season looking to establish themselves, which didn't end up being the right approach. 

"I think the first few competitions [of that season] we tried a little bit too hard and that resulted in really stupid mistakes," said Poirier. "Since we knew that that wasn't the right attitude to go into a competition, we made sure this year not to go in feeling that way.

"The consistency so far this year in terms of just going out and doing our job has been really good."

Getting personal

Gilles also finds she and Poirier have matured this season. In the skating world, the two consider themselves middle-aged, but she says their programs are now reflecting the direction they've always wanted to go in.

"It's ice dance, there's usually a male and a female — it's usually lovey-dovey, that's what ice dance has kind of become," she said. "And I think for us, that's not who we are.

"The programs that we're doing [now] are more who we are and that's the direction we've always wanted to go to, but we needed to establish ourselves."

Skating programs that are more personal, however, comes with their own challenges. 

"We've described every competition we've done [like] we're jumping off a cliff because we don't know if people are going to like what we're doing," said Gilles.

"It's not your typical ice dance."

Plan for upcoming competition

The pair will go into this weekend's competition balancing these pressures with the goals of a podium finish. 

"I think we are putting a little bit more pressure on ourselves to be able to kind of exceed our goal that we've set for ourselves," said Gillies. "So I think we just need to stay in the moment.

"If we can go out there and at least skate as well as we skated at Skate America, we can keep proving to ourselves and people that we're here for good and aren't a fluke team that just had a great season last year."