If Gracie Gold is to have a shot at a medal at next month’s World Championships, she almost certainly has to beat every skater who is not Russian.
Even that may not be good enough if all three Russian women skate cleanly.
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But Gold cannot lose to a Japanese skater, as she did in Friday’s short program at the Four Continents Championship in Seoul, South Korea.
The good thing is the 2014 U.S. champion took second with 62.67 points to Japan’s 16-year-old Satoko Miyahara (64.84) only because Gold singled her double axel. She received a zero for that element, which otherwise has a base value of 3.63 with the bonus for doing it in the second half of her program.
The bad thing is a skater of Gold’s experience botched a jump she should be able to do in her sleep at this point of her career.
“I can do a lot better,” Gold said in the mixed zone, via U.S. Figure Skating. “The mistake on the axel was silly.”
Gold, fourth at the 2014 Olympics and runner-up at January’s U.S. Championships, also lost .7 for her execution of the triple lutz-triple toe jump combination. That deduction owed to her being too close to the rink boards for a clean landing on the second jump.
Reigning U.S. champion Ashley Wagner chose not to compete at Four Continents. She appeared on NBC’s Today show Friday morning.
The two other U.S. women at Four Continents, Polina Edmunds (61.03) and Samantha Cesario (54.95), finished fourth and ninth, respectively, in the relatively weak 19-skater short program field.
The free skate is Sunday.
In ice dance, Canadians Kaitlyn Weaver and Andrew Poje made up a small deficit – they were third in the short dance – to take the title over U.S. champions Madison Chock and Evan Bates, with Maia and Alex Shibutani of the U.S. third.