FIGURE SKATING: Kailani Craine has continued her good Asian Winter Games form, producing a strong routine in the women’s free program at Sapporo’s Makomanai Indoor Skating Rink.
Encouraged by her personal best result in the short program, Craine gave another competitive performance to score 55.02 in the free program and finish the women’s short program in fifth position overall.
Korea's Dabin Choi won the event with a score of 61.30. Rika Hongo from Japan and China's Ziquan Zhao rounded out the podium with scores of 60.98 and 58.90 respectively.
“Still a lot of work to do, it wasn’t a personal best but definitely it was 20 points better than last week (at Four Continents),” Craine said.
“I was happy about being able to do a lot better than last week and stay physically and mentally strong.
“I don’t think I delivered a really good performance tonight but once again I was really focused on each element, I really do need to work on the performance factor,” she said.
The Asian Winter Games were an important preparation event for Craine who will aim to qualify Australia for the PyeongChang 2018 Olympic Winter Games at next month’s Figure Skating World Championships.
“Obviously still a lot of work to do before Worlds but I think now I’m on the right pathway,” she said.
“Top 17 is the ultimate goal but I really want to show everyone what my potential is and what I can do every single day in training because I think that’s the most frustrating part that sometimes it doesn’t always work out.
“It really does depend on what other people do so I don’t like to compare myself to other people I like to compare myself to myself so I want to go out and know and
complete everything I know I can do,” she said.
In the pair’s competition, Matthew Dodds and Paris Stephens had their final Asian Winter Games outing, taking to the ice for the free program.
Their score of 62.38 brought their final score to 91.90 and ranked them seventh in the overall standings.
The pair were disappointed with their short program and in Saturday’s free program they were out to prove they could deliver a polished performance.
“We wanted to get the twist done,” Stephens said. “Being able to show that I can do the twist was important because I missed that yesterday so that was good,” she said.
While they were happy with the performance Dodds admitted they had more to give.
“We would have hoped for a little bit higher, I think we were missing a couple of levels in some of our elements so even though everything happened it wasn’t top quality for us,” Dodds said.
“Overall not really disappointed as this is our last time running this routine so we’re just happy to get a good last one out,” Dodds said.
The Asian Winter Games Figure skating competition concludes Sunday with the men’s free program which will see Australia’s Brendan Kerry in action.
Michelle Cook
olympics.com.au
