Skating Fridays

Adult Nationals – Silver Pairs Recap

I’m back again and thrilled to share that my pairs partner and I earned the bronze medal in the Adult Silver Pairs event at Adult Nationals! We skated on a Friday and had an early morning practice a few hours before.

Even though there were only 5 total teams on the practice ice, we seemed to get in everyone’s way. First of all, we are “lefty” skaters, so our jump setups are on the opposite corners from normal teams. We tried our best to not run into anybody and not kill anyone else in the process and barely survived.

The program itself seemed to go pretty well. Our waltz lift did not rotate as much as we wanted to, but it still got great height. Our pivot spiral at the end of the program was a tad wobbly, but everything else seemed pretty solid. We were fourth in skate order, and we had already heard the score of the previous team.

Since this was our first time competing under the IJS system, we had no idea what to expect in terms of establishing a baseline score. We could get something like 13 points, or if we were lucky, we could break 20.

As they announced our score, this was our reaction:

Much to our astonishment and surprise, we earned 22.36 points, which was 2nd place with two teams to go. Team #5 skated extremely well and bumped us down to third. Team #6 also were fabulous but had a few mistakes and scored less than we did. That meant that we had secured the bronze medal. As it turns out, we were less than a point behind second place. Had we skated to our ability, we could have earned the silver!

Another fun and exciting surprise was that 3x National Champion and Olympic team bronze medalist Chris Knierim was in the stands to watch us. We got to meet him afterwards and get a photo. He said that we skated well, which meant a lot to us.

We plan on skating this program at least one more time at an upcoming fundraiser skating gala to raise money for our Ukrainian families. Now they can announce us as the national bronze medalists in silver pairs!!

 

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