Record points night for Virtue and Moir
Amonth before the curtain closes on their outstanding career, Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir might be closer to perfection than ever before. But the three-time world champions still see room for improvement.
Skating to an upbeat medley of “Sympathy For The Devil,” “Hotel California,” and Santana’s “Oye Como Va,” Virtue and Moir scored a whopping 85.12 points in the short dance Friday at the Canadian figure skating championships. A perfect score for their program, Moir said, is about 86 points.
“It’s a great boost and we’ll have to maintain that momentum, but we’ll watch the video, and we know we’ll still have a lot of things we want to improve,” Virtue said.
“We still have five points (in us),” Moir added, laughing.
The score tops their world short dance record of 82.68, set at Skate Canada International in October, but national championship marks don’t qualify for records. Still, they’ll take it. A day after she was diagnosed with pneumonia, Gabrielle Daleman won the women’s short program. Skating to a French rendition of “Carmen,” the world bronze medallist scored 77.88 points to take a six-point lead over Kaetlyn Osmond into today’s free program.
“I am just most proud of how I’ve handled everything, I didn’t find out how sick I was (until Thursday), I just knew I couldn’t breathe properly,” said Daleman, who saw the Canadian team doctor after practice Thursday.
In pairs, two-time world champions Meagan Duhamel and Eric Radford have a huge 13-point lead after the short program.
In ice dance, Toronto’s Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier are second with 78.37, Carolane Soucissse of Chateauguay, Que., and Shane Firus of North Vancouver, B.C., are third, while perennial runners-up Kaitlyn Weaver and Andrew Poje of Waterloo, Ont., are fourth after Poje fell during the make-or-break twizzles — side-by-side travelling spins that are worth major marks in ice dance.
Virtue, from London, Ont., and Moir, from Ilderton, Ont., won gold in the same West Coast city at the 2010 Olympics, but had to settle for silver in 2014 in Sochi. They took a two-year hiatus then returned with a vengeance, winning every event but the Grand Prix Final in December, where they finished behind France’s Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron.
Friday’s program was the perfect Olympic tuneup, Virtue and Moir said, because it didn’t come easy.
Daleman, meanwhile, opened with a triple-triple combination on her way to a clean program, throwing two celebratory hands in the air when she finished.
“(Pneumonia) sounds bad, and it kinda is, because you can’t breathe. But I look at it as extra cardio training,” Daleman said, laughing. “My friends were saying ‘How are you going to deal with this?’ and I was sending them laughing emojis, like ‘Pssh. Extra cardio training.’ If I can do this now not breathing, having half oxygen, imagine what I can do at full strength. This was just a great confidence booster.”
The Canadian championships determine the Olympic team for Pyeongchang. Canada has three berths in women’s singles at next month’s Olympics.