Exquisite exit

Disappointments dissolved, Duhamel and Radford retire as bronze-medallists

GANGNEUNG —The bronze medal won by Eric Radford and Meaghan Duhamel early Thursday did more than just fill a void for the retiring Canadian pairs team.

It wiped away the pain of

Sochi in 2014, when they finished a distant seventh.

“I remember leaving Sochi so disappointed,” said Duhamel, from Lively, Ont. “I remember going outside and seeing my parents and my husband and crying out of disappointment.

“Today, I was like ‘I don’t care what I do, I refuse to cry because

I’m disappointed when I get off the ice.’ That was really the mission. For me, I feel this completes it because I got to have my Olympic moment. That was the only thing I felt was missing in my career.”

Their trophy case is stuffed: This bronze joining back-to-back world championship gold medals, Olympic team event gold, a Grand Prix final title, seven national championships. They will skate straight into retirement and pro tours, eschewing the world championship and all the practice that event would entail.

“We don’t ever have to do a quad throw again,” Duhamel said. “We landed the last quad we tried. That makes me happy.”

It makes the history books too as the first successful quad throw at an Olympics. It typifies the precision of their season, and stands, on one foot, and in stark contrast with all that went wrong in 2017.

“All of last season was disappointment after disappointment after disappointment,” said Duhamel. “It’s not fun to live your life feeling disappointed and loss. This year, I don’t think we ever felt disappointed or lost. I think we felt we were on a mission.”

And regardless of colour, an Olympic medal was going to be mission accomplished.

“I couldn’t have dreamed it that much better,” said Duhamel. “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.”

That mission, they now say, began in the wake of the crushing disappointment of a seventh-place finish at the 2017 worlds, after which former Olympic gold-medallist David Pelletier offered Radford some hope.

“He was like: ‘You know what? Coming seventh at worlds could be the best thing that happened to you guys because you’re going to go into the Olympics under the radar and that’s when you can hit it and then surprise everybody and that’s exactly what happened.”

But the line drawn from that event to this one is not straight. Last June, they jettisoned one of their coaches, Richard Gauthier, and brought

John Zimmerman on board to help 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.

After they made a mess of Muse, their long program, at the Autumn Classic, they totally retooled it during a show stop in Italy. And after a gold at Skate Canada was followed by a disappointing bronze at Skate America, they shook things up again. Over the Christmas break, while skating in China for Stars on Ice, they decided to scrap Muse and go back to Adele’s Hometown

Glory, which they had skated to gold at the 2016 worlds. They were in search of a comfort.

And it worked. They finished with 230.15 points, behind the Chinese at 235.47 and the Germans Aliona Savchenko and Bruno Massot at 235.90. They skated the day’s finest long program and stole that gold out from under the noses of the Chinese silver medallists Wenjing Sui and Cong Han, and the vanquished Olympic Athletes from Russia, Evgenia Tarasova and Vladimir Morozov, who fell to fourth.

The Chinese and OAR were first and second respectively after the short program, but the Germans were ready to write the comeback story of the pairs event, jumping — and throwing and twisting — from fourth place to first. Massot said it was a difficult mental hurdle for them.

“We have to attack this free program like tigers and I think we did it well today,” said Radford, who hails from Winnipeg.

They were the first of the big four to skate on Thursday, and they threw down the gauntlet. There wasn’t a bobble. He nearly tossed her to the roof of the arena on a quad twist, and almost over the boards on a throw triple Salchow.

Duhamel and Radford had to follow the Germans, and it took some will.

“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,” said Radford. “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.”

They were very good indeed, but the Germans combined power and finesse in a grand skate. When the official placements became final, Massot was a weepy mess.

“It’s just that I keep my tears for the right moments,” he said.

The Canadians were happy for them.

“Yesterday after the short program, the skating fan in me was like: ‘Oh my God, I hope Aliona and Bruno get it together for their long program,’” said Duhamel.

“We have so much respect for them. She’s my idol. They deserve it. They delivered a great program.”

The Canadian pair of Julianna Seguin and Charlie Bilodeau laid down a clean program for a season-best score of 136.50 and a ninth-place finish.

“For sure we had no expectation for this one,” said Seguin. “We’re here for learning. We’re not the stars of the show. It was just a great experience.”

The other Canadian pair,

Kirsten Moore-Towers and

Michael Marinaro was 11th.