Pairs, Mixed

With Olympic champions Sawtchenko and Massot moving into coaching, the Chinese pair of Sui Wenjing and Han Cong reclaimed the world title in 2019 and would have been favoured to repeat in 2020 had not the COVID-19 pandemic forced the cancellation of the event. In 2021, however, they lost their title to the Russian pairing of Anastasiya Mishina and Aleksandr Gallyamov, who were making their World Championships début, with two other Russian pairs, skating under the banner of the Russian Skating Federation, also closing the gap on them compared to previous years. At the European Championships in January, Russian pairs swept the podium and both the pairings of Mishina and Gallyamov and Yevgeniya Tarasova and Vladimir Morozov broke the existing world’s best total score.

The scene was set for a showdown between the Chinese pair and the Russian Olympic Committee pairs. The first part of the competition saw Han and Sui go into the lead after breaking the world best score for the short program, but the margin over Tarazova and Morozov was only 0.16 points and the other two Russian pairs were still in strong contention. The free skating phase turned out to be one of the most exciting sessions of the entire Beijing programme. Mishina and Galliamov, who were third after the short program, made the podium with a high-class performance but Tarasova and Morozov performed nearly flawlessly to lead with only the Chinese pair to perform. Four years earlier, Sui and Han led at the half-way stage only to make a couple of minor mistakes, which cost them the gold medal by less than a point. In front of a home audience and skating to Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” they opened with a perfectly executed quadruple twist, which set the tone for the rest of their routine. Their triple salchow, however, was downgraded for its execution and it remained uncertain if they had done enough for win. When the scores were tabulated, they had done just enough and held off the ROC pair by .63. This after losing gold in PyeongChang by just .53 of a point Unsurprisingly, this proved one of the most popular victories of the entire Games as far as the home nation was concerned.

Away from the medals there were some hard luck stories. The Hungarian pair withdrew when one of them was forced out after contracting COVID-19, while Nolan Seegert of Germany also fell victim to the virus and, although he recovered, he was so weakened by the illness that he was unable to lift his partner and they dropped to last place.

As the Games ended the American husband and wife pair of Brandon Frazier and Alexa Scimeca Knierim were informed of a lawsuit by the band “The Heavy Young Heathens”, which also encompassed US Figure Skating and the NBC television network, over use of their version of the song without the artists’ permission. A few days later Laura Barquero of the 11th placed Spanish pair was announced as having failed a doping test for Clostebol. After investigation she and her partner, Marco Zandrón were disqualified in October 2022.