Good things come in pairs for the Russians

Breaking news from the Olympic figure skating venue: these Russians are pretty good at this pairs thing.

Tatiana Volosozhar and Maxim Trankov followed up last year’s world title with a dramatic skate to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar to win gold — the first pairs team to win on home ice since 1936 — their countrymen Ksenia Stolbova and Fedor Klimov camped it up to music from the Addams Family to claim silver, and the dominating run of Russia’s rebuilt figure skating team continued Wednesday night at the Iceberg Skating Palace.

The Russians, or Soviet Union, or Unified Team, have now won or shared (with Canada’s Jamie Sale and David Pelletier in 2002) the pairs gold in 13 of the 14 Winter Olympics held in the past 50 years.

Eight times they’ve also won silver. The only team to break their gold-medal run was China’s Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo in Vancouver four years ago, and that must have been the loudest wake-up call ever, because the kings and queens of pairs skating have come back with a vengeance.

The Canadians performed respectably — Kirsten Moore-Towers and Dylan Moscovitch a little better than expected, national champions Mea- gan Duhamel and Eric Radford a little worse than they’d hoped — but really, at fifth place and seventh, they were bit players in the main drama.

There was too much firepower, namely seven world titles, arrayed ahead of them after the short program to expect a medal from either, and though the silver medallists, Stolbova and Klimov, didn’t have any of that hardware coming in, they had the goods this week, and anything close to a tie would have gone to the home country, anyway.

The judges might not have got out alive, otherwise, so raucous was the crowd’s reaction to the skates by the Russian pairs which were, in any case, unbeatable.

The host nation’s third pair, Ve- ra Bazarova and Yuri Larionov, were sandwiched between the Canadians in sixth, so on that score, Moore-Towers and Moscovitch can be proud: they beat a Russian team, in Russia.

“It’s great for pairs in Canada,” Moscovitch said. This time, they came out on top of the friendly rivalry with Duhamel and Radford, who made three fairly major mistakes in their program. The fact that the judges awarded them a season’s best score was small consolation.

“It happens to everybody, we see it with athletes in all sports here at the Olympics, great, great athletes not qualifying for finals,” Duhamel said. “It’s the story of the Games: there’s triumph and there’s heartbreak.”