Burnaby skaters drew top assignments for three upcoming International Skating Union championships.
Former Burnaby whiz kid Nam Nguyen, just 16, who wowed the crowd at the Canadian national figure skating championships in Kingston, Ont., will compete along with Burnaby Centre of Excellence skater Jeremy Ten at the Four Continents championships in Seoul, Korea next month and at the ISU world championships in Shanghai, China in March.
At the nationals, Nguyen sent shockwaves around the world following a massive 256.88 winning score in the men’s singles competition on Saturday.
The former national pre-novice, novice, junior and world junior champion added another national title to his growing career mantel of hardware following a whopping 175.10 free skate score to win his first senior Canadian title handily over Ten.
Nguyen, now training in Ontario under former Canadian champion Brian Orser, sported a first-place short-program score of 81.78 heading into the long program.
His energetic program, included a quadruple jump and flawless triple Salchow and was a huge 24-point improvement on his previous best result of 232.24, achieved at last year’s Skate America competition.
Nguyen’s 256-plus score moved him up to 10th-best all-time, surpassing both Olympic silver medalist Kevin Reynold’s best and Jeffrey Buttle’s 2008 world championship scores.
Nguyen’s total points were also just a fraction shy of the great Russian skater Evgeni Plushenko’s best-ever score.
Currently six-time Canadian men’s champion Patrick Chan, who did not compete at the nationals due to injury, holds the best men’s score in the world with a 295.27 total, set at a Grand Prix event in 2013.
Also earning an assignment at the world junior championships in Estonia are local ice dancers Madeline Edwards and Burnaby’s ZhaoKai Pang, who finished in seventh place in the senior event at the nationals.
Nicole Orford of Burnaby and partner Thomas Williams placed fourth in the senior ice dance at the nationals with a third-best long program to finish with a 157.89 total just three points behind that of bronze medalists Alexandra Paul and Mitchell Islam of Ontario.
The national junior ice dance champions Brianna Delmaestro and Timothy Lum of Burnaby are alternates for the junior worlds after winning their first Canadian title with a top total score of 148.62.
In the junior women’s singles, Burnaby’s Sarah Tamura finished in sixth place after a fifth-best free skate at the nationals.
Kelsey Wong, who placed second at the recent Skate Canada Challenge, had an uneventful long program, finishing 11th overall.
