2022 ISU World Champion Shoma Uno jumped to gold, overtaking teammate Kao Miura for a Japanese 1-2 finish. Matteo Rizzo of Italy secured the bronze in what was an exciting Men’s final at Skate Canada International.
Uno opened his elegant program to “Air on a G-String” by Johann Sebastian Bach with a somewhat shaky quadruple loop. He landed a quad toe-triple toe and triple Axel-double Axel, however, he slightly under-rotated his quad flip and Salchow (q) and stumbled on an underrotated quadruple toe loop. The two-time Olympic medalist scored 183.17 points for his performance and racked up 273.15 points for this seventh ISU Grand Prix gold medal.
“Today’s performance same as in the short program, I was able to find the agenda the main agenda, which was the quad toe,” Uno said.
“I’m happy with the result. I performed like I do in practice, there were good parts and bad parts.”
Overnight leader Miura produced a quad toe-triple toe, triple Axel-Euler-triple Salchow and another solo triple Axel, but fell on his quadruple Salchow. The 2022 Skate America silver medalist earned 171.23 points and totaled 265.29 points to win his second Grand Prix medal in as many weeks.
“These results are totally unexpected. Before Skate America I thought maybe I can be on the podium when I skate well and coming here I thought again maybe I can do it.”
The 2022 ISU Four Continents bronze medalist had to deal with a broken lace that interrupted his warm-up.
“What happened before my performance was that my skate lace broke. I would give myself a 100 percent for the way I was able to perform my program considering this,” the 17-year-old noted.
Skating to “Talking to the Moon” and “That’s What I Like” by Bruno Mars, Rizzo landed a quad loop and six triple jumps. Only his quad toe was wobbly. The 2019 European bronze medalist netted 169.85 points and was ranked fourth in the Free Skating, but overall held on to the bronze at 251.03 points.
“That means a lot,” the Italian Skater said. “It was important for me to achieve a great result in this competition.
“Keegan [Messing, CAN] skated an amazing Free Skate before me, the crowd was crazy. I actually love this kind of situation, I can take the power from there and try to put it in my program.”
Keegan Messing (CAN) put out the third-best Free Skating of the night, but was edged out of the podium by less than half a point. He remained in fourth place at 250.72 points. Camden Pulkinen (USA) finished fifth on 219.06 points while Lukas Britschgi (SUI) moved up from eighth to sixth place (212.43 points).
Uno takes 15 points to his second event, the NHK Trophy in Sapporo (JPN). Miura has completed his two events and with two silver medals and 26 points is likely to qualify for the ISU Grand Prix of Figure Skating Final. Rizzo (11 points) will skate again in Japan.
