Jamie Sale and David Pelletier

Sale was also making her name on the world stage. At age sixteen she and partner Jason Turner represented Canada at the Olympic Winter Games in Lillehammer, Norway, placing twelfth. That same year they placed sixteenth at the world championships in Chiba, Japan; after those two competitions Sale and Turner decided to go their separate ways. Sale embarked on a singles career, peaking at fifth in the 1995 Canadian Nationals.

Pelletier and Sale had met more than once in the past. In 1994, the two were Canadian national teammates, though she skated in the senior division and he in the juniors. Pelletier admitted to Chatelaine interviewer Beth Hitchcock that the thought of partnering with Olympian Sale was "intimidating." Though she was the younger of the two, "in skating you put people on a pedestal," Pelletier said. "She was the star out West; she was the future. She was a very confident, cocky little girl. Everybody in Quebec wanted to skate with Jamie Sale."

By 1996, however, Sale was on a downward track, splitting with Olympics partner Turner and struggling as a singles competitor. The first tryout of Sale and Pelletier was described as "awkward" in the Chatelaine piece. "To start, Sale wasn't entirely sure she wanted to leave Alberta," noted Hitchcock. Even Pelletier's coaches "were discouraged by what they saw; they advised him to look elsewhere." When Pelletier delivered an outright rejection, Sale was "devastated," as the skater told Hitchcock. "I thought he was my last hope," she remarked.

Depressed and unmotivated, Sale was delivered an ultimatum by her parents: no more funding unless her heart was truly in the sport. She "picked herself up," said Hitchcock, "hired a trainer and went to skating boot camp." Pelletier was likewise experiencing difficulty. After learning his first partner, Laporte, had been killed in an auto accident in 1998, "I decided to take two months off my skating," Pelletier told an interviewer for Canadian television. "I sat down and wrote some criteria I wanted for another partner. I decided that if I can't find anybody, I'll just quit."