Canada’s Messing leading the men
LAVAL, Que. — Newly engaged and with his first Grand Prix figure skating title within reach — Keegan Messing couldn’t find words to describe his elation Friday night. “Cloud 9” didn’t quite cut it. “I’m above the clouds,” Messing said through a wide grin.
The Canadian is the leader after the men’s short program at Skate Canada International, less than a week after he asked the woman he loves — Lane Hodson — to be his wife on an Alaskan mountain top.
Skating to “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” from the movie “Toy Story,” the 26-yearold showman scored 95.05 points, opening with a gorgeous quadruple toe loop-triple toe loop combination, then landing a triple Axel en route to a clean program. “I’m pretty dang excited,” Messing said. Olympic silver medallist Shoma Uno is second with 88.87 points after a disastrous program that saw him crash on his triple Axel and slide back-first into the boards at Place Bell.
South Korean teen Cha Jun-Hwan, who trains in Toronto with Canadian coach Brian Orser, finished just behind Uno with a score of 88.86.
Canada’s Kirsten Moore-Towers and Michael Marinaro were third in the pairs short program, scoring 71.26 points.
In ice dance, Americans Madison Hubbell and Zachary Donohue lead after the short program by almost six points.
Russia’s Elizaveta Tuktamysheva topped the women’s singles short program, with 74.22 points, while disaster struck for her teammate and two-time world champion Evgenia Medvedeva, who was seventh. Medvedeva almost fell on the first jump — a triple flip — of a combination, and lost major points for not completing the required element.
Messing was born in Girdwood, an Alaskan resort town just south of Anchorage, where he now lives. Messing has dual citizenship because his mom Sally was born in Edmonton and raised in Peterborough, Ont., before moving to Alaska.
Messing is an avid outdoorsman, and so a mountain-top engagement seemed perfect. He and his girlfriend of 2 1/2 years set out for McHugh Peak of the Chugach Mountains, which form the backdrop for Anchorage, last Saturday.
“We had to pitch a wind block because it was blowing about (50-65 kilometres) an hour up there. Everything went wrong. I made her favourite soup, but then forgot the matches for the stove. So no soup. No hot chocolate,” he said. “But if she says ‘yes’ when everything goes wrong . . . ”
Messing was 12th in his Olympic debut in Pyeongchang, just four spots behind Canada’s three-time world champion Patrick Chan.
With Chan’s retirement, Messing is a likely heir to the top spot in the country.
“It’s one step at a time right now,” Messing said. “Right now, just focus on skating and see where it takes me, and if it takes me to the top, then I’m going to grasp it with two hands and smile while doing it.”
Nam Nguyen of Toronto pumped two fists in the air after a solid short program that included a quadruple Salchow. But he lost precious marks on his triple toe loop in his quad combination, and wound up seventh with 82.22.
“(The judges) called it right, but in terms of the score, I thought it was a little lower,” Nguyen said.
“But it honestly doesn’t matter to me, I had a great time out there, and hopefully I can just continue that (in today’s long program).”
Moore-Towers and Marinaro find themselves in a similar situation to Messing, suddenly Canada’s top pairs team in the rebuilt post-Olympic landscape.
And moments after their program to a Leona Lewis version of Roberta Flack’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” they talked about their new role.
“It’s weird in that we see the opportunity, but we also feel a little bit of responsibility. A lot a bit of responsibility,” MooreTowers said. “It was a bit of a mindset issue in the summer. Now we skate for ourselves, we do our absolute best for Canada.”
“To do so we have to focus on ourselves, stay in our lane and do the best we can,” Marinaro said.
World bronze medallists Vanessa James and Morgan Cipres of France are the leaders with 74.51, while Peng Cheng and Jin Yang of China are second (72.00).
Duhamel and Radford retired after Pyeongchang, while two other teams — Julianne Seguin and Charlie Bilodeau, who were second at the Olympic trials, and Dylan Moscovitch and Lubov Ilyushechkina, fourth at trials — split up.
On the global stage, Germany’s Olympic champions Aliona Savchenko and Bruno Massot aren’t competing and are expected to retire, while several other top teams are taking the Grand Prix season off.
“At the top there’s not really a huge cluster of teams there anymore, so we’re looking to advantage of this opportunity,” Moore-Towers said. “Quite frankly, whether they were here or not, we still want to push ourselves to be up there, but we definitely see the opportunity right now.”
Moore-Towers, from St. Catharines, Ont., and Marino, from Sarnia, Ont., were 11th in Pyeongchang and then improved to sixth at the world championships in Milan a month later despite an ankle injury Moore-Towers suffered at the Olympics.
The ankle injury sidelined MooreTowers for much off the off-season.
In dance, Hubbell and Donohue take a score of 80.49 points into Saturday’s free dance. Russians Victoria Sinitsina and Nikita Katsalapov are second (74.66), while Spain’s Olivia Smart and Adrian Diaz are third (72.35).
Canada’s Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier are down in sixth with 66.95 points after an uncharacteristic stumble. They’re feet got entangled and Gilles ended up on one knee.
“We are used to training on an Olympic-sized rink, so when we compete in North America, we know we have to squish it into a narrower rink so we have been putting pylons down on the ice to adjust to that,” Poirier said. “Tonight, with the competition adrenalin we had more energy than usual, we were a little bit faster than usual, and so we didn’t have enough space against the boards and our feet got tangled.”
Skate Canada International is the second stop on the ISU Grand Prix circuit.