Coquitlam’s Larkyn Austman could yet skate for Canada at the International Skating Union world championships in Japan despite her fourth-place finish at last weekend’s national championships.
Canada is eligible to send three senior women to the world championships, that are being held March 18-24. But on Sunday, Skate Canada only named one skater to the team, Alaine Chartrand, of Prescott, ON, who won the Canadian championship on Saturday in Saint John, N.B.
The remaining two positions are being left open pending the results from the Four Continents championships in Anaheim, Feb. 4 to 10. Austman will be one of three Canadian women competing at that event, along with Chartrand and Véronik Mallet, who finished third in Saint John.
Austman was second at the Canadian Tire nationals after her short program last Friday, but she slipped to fourth overall after finishing fifth in Saturday’s free skate.
Skating to music from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera, Austman missed a critical combination Saturday, landing one of her jumps on both skates, and then stumbled on two subsequent triples. The errors cost her a full mark, and when her routine ended, she gave a visible sigh, resigned that the top of the podium would not be hers, and a place in the top three was in peril.
Austman went into the competition with new confidence and simpler routines to assure clean skates after she spent her off-season overcoming illness, injury and her disappointment in not qualifying for the finals in either last February’s Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, or the world championships in Milan, Italy.
Ironcially, it was Chartrand whom Austman edged out by 5.41 points at last January’s Canadian championship in Vancouver to earn a spot on the national team at those events.
