PAIRS STARS WIN THE BRONZE
Duhamel & Radford’s farewell tour
Hometown Glory was the name and the aim of the program, and Canadian skaters Meagan Duhamel and Eric Radford delivered a superb rendition on the biggest, most glorious stage their sport offers.
Duhamel is from Lively, Ont., Radford from Winnipeg. Their hometowns were surely ablaze with pride late Wednesday night as the veteran skaters capped their season with an Olympic bronze medal.
The German pair of Aliona Savchenko and Bruno Massot claimed a surprising gold, while the reigning world champs from China, Wenjing Sui and Cong Han, were sent reeling to silver after a flawed long program.
“I think we’re both proud and a little surprised at how good we felt when the Germans were receiving
their marks, which was a world record,” Radford said. “It didn’t excite us or make us any more nervous. We were just, ‘OK, happy for them, they had a great skate, they got a great score and now we’re going to do the same thing.’ ”
The two Canadians were crisp, skating the same long program they mastered in the team event, in which they propelled Canada to gold.
“I couldn’t have dreamed it that much better,” Duhamel said. “I could have dreamed it without my hands down on the triple Lutz, but we came to the Olympics and just delivered four amazing performances, four out of four, and I can’t believe that we did that.”
“And we saved the best for last,” Radford added.
“People thought, I think, that we were crazy to do that entire team event,” Duhamel said. “Who’s crazy now?” Not a bad body of work. Gone is the disappointment of their seventh-place finish in Sochi in 2014. Gone, too, are any doubts they created by blowing up their support team mere months before the Grand Prix circuit kicked off an Olympic year.
Last June, they jettisoned one of their coaches, Richard Gauthier, and brought John Zimmerman on board to aid coach Bruno Marcotte, who is also Duhamel’s husband. John Kerr joined the team as a choreographer to assist Julie Marcotte, who is Bruno’s sister.
Even then, after a gold at Skate Canada was followed by a bronze at Skate America, they were not quite done. Over the Christmas break, while skating in China for Stars on Ice, they decided to scrap their long program set to music by the rock band Muse and go back to Adele’s Hometown Glory, which they skated to a gold at the 2016 worlds, earning their highest component scores in the process.
They were in search of a comfort zone and a numerical edge, given the likelihood that the Olympic medals would be decided by small margins. They were right.
They finished with 230.15 points, behind the Chinese at 235.47 and the Germans at 235.90.
Their trophy case is officially stuffed: back-to-back world championship gold medals, an Olympic team event gold, a Grand Prix final title, seven national championships and now this Olympic bronze.
The 32-year-old Duhamel and 33-year-old Radford can happily skate off into the sunset — they plan to retire after these Games.
Russian skaters Evgenia Tarasova and Vladimir Morozov were second after the short program, but fell to fourth place after the long program.
Duhamel and Radford were just good enough for third place in the short program the day before — good, but not great, as Radford put it so succinctly, after he and Duhamel lost synchronization on their side-by-side triple Lutzes. He was so anxious to land the bothersome jump cleanly that he took off early.
But they both landed on one foot, which was an improvement given his previous two-foot troubles.
“Content is a really good word,” Radford said when asked to sum up the short program performance. “It wasn’t like crazy perfect. But we’re definitely really satisfied, really happy … We did some good elements, not great … I think we can take those little things that were off and give ourselves a target.”
“I think especially in a field this deep, we could have taken ourselves completely out of contention with missing a major element, and we didn’t do that,” Duhamel added. “We kept ourselves in the mix, and that makes us feel good going forward.”
People thought, I think, that we were crazy to do that entire team event. Who’s crazy now?