North America wins first Team Challenge Cup
SPOKANE, WASH .• Gracie Gold bounced back from a bitter disappointment at the World Championships last month to help Team North America win the inaugural Team Challenge Cup on Saturday.
After dropping from first to fourth following her free skate in Boston last month, Gold scored 142 points, five points superior to her last skate, as North America held off Asia and Europe in the three continent competition.
“It felt great because it just felt more free,” Gold said. “I just thought, ‘ OK, that’s like points for the team. let’s just have fun.’
“I love team competition. I don’t always see myself as a team player, especially when I was younger. But especially after yesterday when I really kind of dropped the ball ... because I was hurting my team. It’s kind of a redemption.”
Team North American finished with 892.42 points. Europe had 848.51 and Asia 820.18.
Grace’s performance j umpstarted an outstanding night for American skaters with Adam Rippon and Jason Brown producing strong results before Ashley Wagner capped the night with a performance even better than she had in the World Championships when her free skated vaulted her from fourth to a silver medal.
Wagner scored 143.20, just shy of a full point better than Boston.
“Tonight, I really had to fight because I’m absolutely exhausted,” Wagner said. “Coming off such a great worlds I knew that I had set the bar really high for myself and I wanted to end this program off on a very strong note. The triple-triple in the second half for me was amazing. I pulled that out of somewhere very deep inside of me, so I was happy that I was able to pull that off when I needed to.
“The jumps were not perfect, but I got the job done.”
North America entered the sin- gles free skate with a sizable lead because of Canadians dominating pairs and ice dance earlier in the day. Meagan Dunhamel and Eric Radford topped the pairs with a score of 147.48 and Kaitlyn Weaver and Andrew Poje won the dance with 111.56.
That gave North America a lead of almost 20 points entering the free skate when each team used the top two scores among the three skaters for both the women and men.