French duo crowned, Chinese ice dancers make history
0 Comment(s)
Print
E-mail Xinhua, February 14, 2022
France's four-time world champions Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron danced to the gold on Monday, while Wang Shiyue and Liu Xinyu ranked 12th to set China's best result in the ice dance at a Winter Olympics.
Papadakis and Cizeron, the 2018 Olympic silver medalists, re-stated their dominance over this discipline with another new highest score, 136.15 points in the free dance, bringing their overall score to 226.98 for the championship.
The French duo, who did not compete at last month's European Championships as well as the 2021 World Championships because of COVID concerns, set a new personal best and world-record score of 90.83 points in Saturday's rhythm dance.
Russian Olympic Committee athletes Victoria Sinitsina and Nikita Katsalapov, the current world champions and the 2020 and 2022 European champions, settled for silver with a 131.66-point free dance and 220.51 points overall.
American 2021 world silver medalists Madison Hubbell and Zachary Donohue took the bronze with a season's-best free dance of 130.89 and 218.02 overall.
China's sole ice dance representatives in this Olympic Winter Games, Wang and Liu, scored 111.01 points in the free dance, which added to their rhythm dance score of 73.41 to rank the Chinese duo 12th on 184.42 overall.
Before Wang and Liu's performance on Monday, the country's best result in ice dancing was when Han Bing and Yang Hui finished 18th at Albertville 1992.
Wang and Liu, both 27 years old, were also the sole ice dancing couple from Asia to have advanced to the free dance, as 20 out of 23 couples rounded up the qualification and Japan's Misato Komatsubara and Tim Koleto finished 22nd in the rhythm dance.
