Journal Staff
Sarnia’s Michael Marinaro and pairs partner Kirsten Moore-Towers of St. Catharines pulled off a stunning sixth-place finish at the ISU World Figure Skating Championships in Milan, Italy.
The pair used a personal-best free skate of 204.33 on March 22 to surge from 10th to 6th place, despite their training being derailed by an ankle injury Moore-Towers suffered at the Olympics.
‘’We are extremely happy,’’ Moore-Towers told Skate Canada. ‘’We had a tough couple of weeks leading into this competition with not much training to rely on. We didn’t have that same confidence so this is a testament to how hard we worked all season.’’
Despite not doing any throws until a week before the Worlds began, Marinaro and Moore-Towers got better as the program progressed.
‘’We’d been putting in a full work load since July so I think that allowed us to put up personal bests under the circumstance,’’ Marinaro said.
The pair finished 11th at the PyeongChang Winter Olympics in February.
Olympic champions Aliona Savchenko and Bruno Massot of Germany took the gold with 245.84 points. Evgenia Tarasova and Vladimir Morozov of Russia were second.