Riku Miura, Ryuichi Kihara win pairs' world title; U.S. gets chance at 3 Olympic spots
BOSTON — Japan's Riku Miura and Ryuichi Kihara barely reclaimed the pairs' title at the World Figure Skating Championships, while the U.S. will get a chance to have three teams at the Olympics for the first time in 32 years.
Miura and Kihara prevailed by 71 hundredths of a point over Germans Minerva Hase and Nikita Volodin combining results from Wednesday's short program and Thursday's free skate at TD Garden.
Italians Sara Conti and Niccolo Macii earned bronze.
Americans Alisa Efimova and Misha Mitrofanov and Ellie Kam and Danny O'Shea finished sixth and seventh. Their results needed to add up to no more than 13 to give the U.S. a chance at earning a third 2026 Olympic pairs' spot, and they hit 13 on the number.
FIGURE SKATING WORLDS: Results | Broadcast Schedule
The U.S. last qualified the maximum three pairs' teams at the Olympics for the 1994 Lillehammer Games. To get a third spot for Milan Cortina, a U.S. pair other than Efimova and Mitrofanov and Kam and O'Shea must compete at a qualifier in Beijing in September.
There, the last three Olympic pairs' spots are at stake. Competition is expected to be tough, given the likely presence of teams from traditional pairs' powers Russia and China, which could take two of the three available spots.
Efimova and Mitrofanov, the U.S. champions, were clutch Thursday. After placing ninth in the short program, they turned in the fourth-best free skate to move up three crucial places.
'That would mean a lot,' to get the third Olympic spot, Mitrofanov said. 'It's bigger than us. That's something, actually, we kind of set a little goal in our heads (before worlds).
'Whether or not we make it to the Olympics, we at least know that we did everything for Team USA.'
Efimova and Mitrofanov train at the Skating Club of Boston. In the kiss and cry the last two days, they held pictures of club members who died in the Jan. 29 mid-air collision between American Airlines Flight 5342 and an Army helicopter.
'We wanted to dedicate our performance to everybody, and not just us,' Mitrofanov said.
Miura, 23, and Kihara, 32, have trained in Ontario since teaming in 2019, just about the time that Kihara was ready to retire after two Olympics with other partners and a recent concussion. They ranked outside the top 20 pairs in the world that first season, but since set milestones for pairs in Japan, which has a rich figure skating history in singles events.
Miura and Kihara placed seventh in their first Olympics together in 2022. Japan's best previous Olympic pairs' finish was 14th.
Since, they've finished second, first, second and first at the World Championships. None of the other top 13 teams from the 2022 Olympics are still competing together internationally.
After winning their first world title in March 2023, Miura and Kihara were sidelined that fall by Kihara's lumbar spondylosis. They returned last February and then took silver at last March's worlds, winning the free skate.
This season, they regularly had errors in the free skate. At December's Grand Prix Final, they finished a distant 11.39 points behind Hase and Volodin.
Now back on top, Miura and Kihara can become the third and fourth Japanese skaters to win Olympic gold after Shizuka Arakawa (2006) and Yuzuru Hanyu (2014 and 2018).
Of Japan's 18 world titles in figure skating, 16 have come in singles, plus the two from Miura and Kihara.
Philip Hersh,
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