Alaska figure skater Keegan Messing in 5th place after short program at World Championships

Honed by workouts with chainsaws and car batteries at his Anchorage home, figure skater Keegan Messing is on track to register a career-best finish at the World Championships -- and perhaps pave his way to another Winter Olympics.

Messing, 29, landed a textbook quad toe-triple toe combination jump while skating to fifth place in Thursday’s short program at the World Figure Skating Championships in Stockholm.

If Messing can stay in the top 10 in Saturday’s long program, Canada will received a second berth in men’s singles at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. Right now, Canada has one berth, and Messing is among three skaters expected to vie for it.

Messing’s dual citizenship allows him to skate for Canada even though he has lived in Girdwood and Anchorage most of his life. He trains in Anchorage, and although he continued to skate at the O’Malley Ice Center during the pandemic, he opted to do off-ice training at home rather than venture into a gym.

“Instead of going into the gym I stayed home, so it was picking up the chainsaw and doing spots with it, or taking (out) car batteries to do different things to get some workouts done,” he told reporters after his short program.

Messing, who skated in the second-to-last group Thursday, scored 93.51 points and was .01 out of fourth place. Japan’s Yuzuru Hanyu leads the competition with a score of 106.98.

By finishing in the top six, Messing will skate in the final group Saturday, along with Hanyu, third-place Nathan Chen of the United States and other top contenders.

In his previous appearances at the World Championships, Messing finished eighth in 2018 and 15th in 2019. At the 2018 Winter Olympics, he placed 12th. Earlier this season, he captured a bronze medal at Skate America.

The 2019-20 season was a trying one for Messing, whose brother was killed in a motorcycle accident in September 2019. This season, he’s awaiting the birth of his first child with wife Lane Hodson, who is due this summer.