(c) AP

For those of you who could not watch the Canadian coverage of Skate Canada this is the transcript from the interview with Valérie and Craig that preceded their short program.

 Craig: I grew up in a single-family household. My mom re-mortgaged her house and the sacrifices that both my mom and my brother have made in order for Val and I to get where we are is unbelievable.

 Val: Well, when I was young both my parents worked, and my mom had to start –well she liked it –but she started making dresses for the others to get more money, like, to help for skating

 Craig: We skate, I guess, somewhere between 20-30 hours per week and we work somewhere upwards of 35 hours. My first impression of Val was just honestly disbelief. She spent close to 3-4 hours on the ice alone doing program after program after program to get her singles program perfect because she wanted a pairs partner and she was working so hard to get it

 Val: Off the ice he’s always there to have a good time and he takes life easy. But when he’s on the ice and he has a goal to achieve he’s really going for it and I really enjoy that. For the 2003 Canadian championships we went in thinking that we want to make the world team.

 Craig: Maybe we weren’t 100% prepared to be in that last flight, we had a pretty disasterous lift to open up the program.

 Val: It took me maybe 4 months to watch that tape without having emotions.

 Craig: We knew at that time, as soon as we finished Canadians that we had to make a change in our training.

 Val: I went through some hard times after changing coaches; it’s still emotional talking about it. I don’t know, I used to cry every day because I was uncomfortable, I wasn’t happy.

 Richard: She didn’t think she was pretty, she didn’t think she had much quality, she was excusing herself to Craig all the time, there was a few words I had to get rid of (from) her vocabulary.

 Craig: Looking back on it now we can understand exactly what Richard was doing. He basically each day just asked us how we were doing, and he was just so patient with us. At last years Canadian championships in Edmonton we knew that internationally we had skated two clean long programs the two competitions previous.

 Val: The crowd was on their feet, it was the best feeling ever.

 Craig: We both feel just very optimistic about where we are right now. We’re ready to take that step in the world to get to where we need to go.