Now this is quite a weekend for Canadian dance.
The pewter curse is definitively broken! Both because Nadiia & Peter won bronze and Irina & Grayson dropped an ordinal and didn't finish fourth (despite being fourth in both programs, heh).
A big win for Nadiia & Peter, obviously, though ironically they did it with lower scores than any of the fourth-place teams (though all in a fairly tight range, so with scoring variation, etc., it's not much of a gap). Much as at their domestic events, their PCS isn't presently being marked akin to the more well-known junior teams. Their stationary lift got called as a Level 3, which cost them about a point, so that's something to look at before Croatia.
Irina and Grayson, much better than last time, and definitely the most fluid this program has looked. I still don't think the middle section is as good as the opening or ending, though.
Piper & Paul's new programs were both skated well. The RD is more out-of-the-box successful than the FD, in my opinion. Several judges think the FD doesn't meet the tempo requirement, so that may need to be changed, but it's probably a fairly straightforward alteration to make the opening "happy" part faster.
Carolane & Shane had a strong RD and most of a strong FD, but then you had the fall. The FD is a lot of fun in my opinion. I hope this doesn't spiral like things did for them last year.
Over to Lombardia (still not over, of course), the RD scores there were a bit of an earthquake. Laurence & Nikolaj almost bearded the lion in its den here, and they did beat Guignard/Fabbri in TES. That's a straight-up declaration of war both domestically (vis a vis Gilles/Poirier) and internationally. Fantastic program (and amusingly, the Gadbois choreographers evidently had the same idea for twizzles as Carol Lane did).
I wouldn't have guessed West Side Story for Marjorie and Zach, but that went well as a debut. Zach seems to be performing a lot more than he did in juniors, especially in the opening parts.
: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6PDUbYIWhU
Does anyone know if he's recovering from an injury?
:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpvLgVsqAhA
, and he moved up from 10th to 6th place over-all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uynr0KK2OF4
It's a nice coincidence that Keegan is 1/16 Japanese through his mother's side (for those of you who don't already know this, he's the great-great-grandson of the first Japanese person to officially immigrate to Canada).
kicks in.
