Piper Gilles, a champion ice dancer with Colorado ties, is competing in the Winter Olympics in Italy, three years after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer – the fifth most common cause of cancer-related deaths among women in the United States.
“When I got the news, I was lying in bed alone, and I started bawling. I had no idea if I would have to do chemotherapy or how the diagnosis would impact my skating,” Gilles, 34, told Toronto Life magazine recently. She had lost her mother to stage 4 brain cancer in 2018.
Gilles was born in Illinois into a family of skaters and relocated to Colorado Springs as a youth for better training opportunities. Eventually she moved to Canada and became a citizen there in 2013, and now skates with ice dancing partner Paul Poirier on the Canadian team.
Gilles has won numerous ice dancing medals in U.S., Canadian, and international competitions and, with Poirier, competed in the 2018 and 2022 Winter Olympics.
In late 2022, Gilles felt fatigue, nausea, and “a throbbing pain in my left side.” She learned she had a possibly cancerous ovarian tumor. That December, she had surgery to remove the tumor. The next month, on her 31st birthday, she was diagnosed with stage 1 ovarian cancer.
“I was still healing from surgery, bandaged up and in pain, and now I had to deal with this life-altering news. It was terrifying,” she told Toronto Life.
Gilles learned she would not need chemo for her cancer, and a few weeks after her diagnosis, she returned to the ice. In late March 2023, she and Poirier resumed competition, and in 2025 they won gold at the 2025 Canadian Figure Skating Championships.They are scheduled to compete February 11 in the rhythm dance event at the Milan-Cortina Olympic Games.
“I’m doing well [and] I’m currently cancer-free,” Gilles, 34, says in Glitter & Gold: Ice Dancing, a new Netflix documentary series. “It took about 2⅟₂ years for me to feel like myself.”
The American Cancer Society projects that about 21,010 U.S. women will receive a new diagnosis of ovarian cancer in 2026, and about 12,450 women will die from the cancer.
To learn more about ovarian cancer, we turned to University of Colorado Anschutz Cancer Center member Marisa Moroney, MD, a gynecologic oncologist and assistant professor in the CU Anschutz Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. (Moroney is not privy to the details of Gilles’ case.)
Photo at top: Ice dancers Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier perform in the exhibition gala at the 2024 World Figure Skating Championships. Photo credit: FloweringDagwood via Wikimedia Commons.