Pang-Tong win pairs title at World Figure Skating Championships

Published 3:45 pm Wednesday, March 24, 2010

TURIN, Italy — Olympic silver medalists Pang Qing and Tong Jian won their second pairs title at the World Figure Skating Championships on Wednesday.

Pang and Tong’s strong routine to “Impossible Dream” easily secured the title, even with a small error in one of their side-by-side jumps. The Chinese pair finished with 211.39 points, more than six points ahead of two-time defending world champs Aliona Savchenko and Robin Szolkowy of Germany.

Pang and Tong won their first title in 2006, also a post-Olympic world championships.

Russia’s Yuko Kavaguti and Alexander Smirnov, second after the short program, settled for a second straight bronze after she fell on their throw quadruple salchow — the hardest element attempted by any of the pairs.

U.S. champions Caydee Denney and Jeremy Barrett were seventh while Amanda Evora and Mark Ladwig finished ninth.

Earlier Wednesday, Olympic bronze medalist Daisuke Takahashi took the lead in the men’s competition, dazzling the judges with huge jumps and speedy steps in his short program.

Canada’s Patrick Chan was second with a clean, well-polished tango, followed by France’s Brian Joubert, who rebounded from a disappointing Olympics with an impressive skate that started with a quad-triple combination.

U.S. champion Jeremy Abbott is sixth and two-time world junior champion Adam Rippon is seventh. The Americans need to finish with a combined placement of 13 or better — sixth and seventh, for example — to secure three spots at next year’s worlds. The free skate is Thursday.

Olympic champion Evan Lysacek isn’t competing at worlds and neither is silver medalist Evgeni Plushenko. That makes Takahashi the favorite, and he delivered in the short program.

His score of 89.30 puts him more than a point in front of Chan (87.80) and Joubert (87.70). The crowd cheered wildly with dozens of Japanese flags waving in the stands.

“I did a good performance, even if I did not skate as fast as I could,” Takahashi said. “I know that I can also do better.”

The results showed again that the quad is not king in men’s figure skating. Despite the point-boosting quad-triple, Joubert was not able to overcome Takahashi’s more intricate and energetic step sequences.

Joubert’s technical score was only half a point ahead of Takahashi’s and Chan’s — neither of whom attempted the jump.

Takahashi said he was still deciding whether to put a quad into his free program. He tried one in Vancouver and fell.

Joubert, the 2007 world champion, was expected to be a medal contender in Vancouver. Instead, he was so bad he didn’t even make the final warm-up, and he clearly wanted to erase those memories here.

His joy grew with each element that he completed cleanly: a quad toe loop-triple toe combination, followed by a fist punch; tight triple lutz, another fist; then a textbook triple lutz. Joubert seemed so sure of his victory that he punched the air toward his coach when preparing for a step sequence.

“A lot of people said bad things about me” after Vancouver, Joubert said. “I want to show people I am not finished.”

Chan, too, said he had something to prove at the worlds. The reigning world silver medalist was fifth in Vancouver, an experience he said gave him peace of mind at the worlds.

“If you can handle the Olympics, you can handle almost anything,” Chan said. “I think it really, really helped today in the short program.”