 |
| Korea's You Young performs her short program during the women's singles figure skating competition at the Beijing Winter Olympic Games at Capital Indoor Stadium in Beijing, Tuesday. Newsis |
South Korea's You Young ranked sixth after the short program of women's singles figure skating at Beijing 2022 on Tuesday, nearly matching her best score of the season with a strong performance.
You scored 70.34 points in the first phase of the competition at Capital Indoor Stadium, sitting 11.82 points back of the leader, Kamila Valieva of the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) with 82.16 points. You fell 0.39 point short of her season best set in October last year.
Anna Shcherbakova of the ROC is in second place with 80.20 points, followed by Kaori Sakamoto of Japan at 79.84 points.
The free skate is Thursday.
Performing to "Whirling Winds" from the soundtrack to "The Leftovers," You opened with a clean triple axel. She followed it with a flawless triple lutz-triple toe loop combination.
She nearly two-footed her landing of a triple flip, her final jump of the program, but mixed it with well-executed spins and step sequence.
You skated right after Valieva, as the 27th out of 30 performers. Valieva put 82.16 points on the board to take the lead in one of the most anticipated women's figure skating performances in recent memory, and You, not looking fazed one bit, put on a fine show of her own.
Valieva was cleared to skate here despite testing positive for a banned medication in December. She had been suspended by the Russian anti-doping authorities earlier but had it lifted on appeal. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) challenged that decision, but the Court of Arbitration for Sport sided with Valieva on Monday.
 |
| Kim Ye-rim performs her short program during the women's singles figure skating competition at the Beijing Winter Olympic Games at Capital Indoor Stadium in Beijing, Tuesday. Newsis |
You's medal chances will depend largely on her ability to land a triple axel, the most challenging element of both her short program and free skate, and also the triple jump with the highest base value with 8.00 points. You hadn't been able to execute that jump consistently heading into Beijing, but her execution Tuesday was promising.
Kim Ye-lim, the one other South Korean skater in the field, earned 67.78 points to rank ninth. The 19-year-old skated a mostly clean program to "Liebestraum" by Franz Liszt but still fell short of her season-best 70.56 points or personal-best 73.63 points. Kim lost points for under-rotating her triple flip near the end of the program.
The top 24 out of 30 after the short program will get to perform in Thursday's free skate. (Yonhap)
