Girdwood figure skater Keegan Messing climbed the podium for the second straight year at the Canadian National Skating Championships, although this time he collected bronze instead of silver.
Messing, 26, finished third in Saturday night’s freeskate and third overall in the senior men’s competition in Saint John, New Brunswick.
Ahead of him were gold medalist Nam Nguyen, Canada’s 2015 national champion, and silver medalist Stephen Gogolev, a 14-year-old who wowed the audience with his short program on Friday night.
Nguyen finished with 258.01 points, Gogolev with 253.56 and Messing with 247.44.
Messing was second after Friday’s short program. He suffered a fall each night.
Messing, who finished an impressive 12th in his Olympic debut last winter, was aiming for his first Canadian national championship. A year ago he finished second, an effort that landed him on Canada’s Olympic team.
Although Messing grew up and still lives in Alaska, he skates for Canada because his mother was born in Alberta, giving him dual citizenship.
Gogolev, who weighs in at 90 pounds, was trying to become the youngest skater to win Canada’s men’s championship. He is so young that he won’t meet the age qualification for the world championships until 2021.
In Friday’s short program, Gogolev stole the show with a quad-triple combination that put him in front of Messing, who fell on his opening quad toe jump. Nguyen was third in the short program.
At the U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Detroit, Hailey Sundstrom of Anchorage won the juvenile pairs competition with partner Andy Deng.
Sundstrom, 13, lives in Anchorage with her family but trains in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where she and Deng belong to the Fort Wayne Ice Skating Club.