Marley-Brubaker take second, earn berth at worlds
SAN JOSE, Calif. – Caydee Denney and John Coughlin kept their winning “streak” intact.
After winning the previous two years with other partners, Denney and Coughlin won their first pairs title together Sunday at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships. They finished with 189.70 points, beating short program winners Mary Beth Marley of Downers Grove and Algonquin native Rockne Brubaker by almost four points. The top three pairs qualified for the World Championships from March 26 to April 1 in Nice, France.
Amanda Evora and Mark Ladwig, runners-up the last two years, dropped to third with a flawed free skate.
Marley and Brubaker got off to a rough start. He is a four-time U.S. champ with other partners (two titles each in juniors and seniors) and has always been the better half. But he made uncharacteristic errors, falling on their side-by-side triple toes and turning out of their side-by-side double axels. And their pairs spin was simply awful, so out of unison they may as well have been skating in separate events.
But they pulled it together, and made up ground with their difficult lifts. He raised her with only one arm on one lift, a move that takes incredible strength and balance to pull off while moving across a sheet of unforgiving ice. On another, he carried her while gliding on one skate.
“All things considered, skating last with everything on the line, for us to come through and show up and pull out a silver medal was great,” Brubaker said of the pair, in their second season together. “Our goal was to make the world team this year and we achieved our goal.”
Later Sunday, Jeremy Abbott made the week worthwhile, winning his third men’s title with a performance that won’t soon be forgotten.
With a seven-point lead after the short program, Abbott only needed to stay on his feet to win the title. Instead, he mesmerized the audience with the kind of quietly elegant program skaters do when they’re in the rink by themselves. He landed the only clean quadruple jump of the day, and his artistry surpasses that of world champion Patrick Chan. He finished with a total score of 273.58, 32-plus points ahead of Adam Rippon.
Abbott is one of the most technically sound skaters in the world, with beautiful edges that carve the ice like a master craftsman and perfect body control. He’s also one of the few skaters who has managed to maintain the balance between the performance quality that makes figure skating so entertaining and the tough physical tricks the system now demands.
