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Mike and Margret in Minsk, Belarus
at the Junior Worlds Championships

Thursday, March 1

Hi Again! We are finished competing our long program and we ended up 5th!! We skated well – a few small errors but we are happy! We skated a personal best for the long program on the junior circuit with 92.25 points and an overall personal best score for junior competitions of 141.76 points. A lot of people were here to watch the pair event on both nights; a couple of thousand I would guess. This was a very tough competition with several really strong teams. China took 1st and 2nd, Russia was 3rd and USA was 4th. Canada also placed 7th and 12th. The top 5 teams skate in the gala so we are not quite done skating at this event yet! Our coach has music on her iPod that we used for an exhibition at a local skating club in December so we will skate to that music. We will have to get ourselves ready for the gala skate - at least we have a practice for it on Sunday. We have a little bit of time to relax now and cheer on the rest of our Canadian team members. We will be flying back to Canada on Monday.

 


Wednesday, February 29
Hi Everyone! We are done our short program and we skated well! We got a slight deduction on one element but everything else scored well. We received our season’s best score on the junior circuit with this short program skate of 49.51 points. We are in 7th – only 0.26 points behind 6th (one of the other Canadian teams), 1 point from 4th, and 2 points from third! This is a really close competition!! We drew 2nd to skate in the second last group for the long program which is an awesome spot. The third Canadian pair team did well too – they are in 12th. All the Canadian teams have qualified to do the free skate! Yay! It’s anyone’s day tomorrow!
 
In case you were wondering: At the start, 24 pair teams were entered in the competition. Only 9 teams had a direct entry to the short program - we were 1 of those 9 – and didn’t have to skate in the preliminary round. 15 teams had to do the preliminary round and 11 of those qualified to skate in the short program (one of our Canadian teams had to skate this preliminary round and ended up 4th so they got to continue to the short program). Of the 20 teams that did the short program today, only 16 qualify to go on to the long program.
 
Margaret and Mike


 

Tuesday, February 28
Hi there. We did our draw today for the short program and we are the very last to skate! This is a good spot and we are happy since we usually draw 1st!! We have had our first of two practices already today and it went really well again. We are just going to get some food and then head back to the rink for our second practice tonight. We found a really good (and cheap) pizza place last night. The pizza was delicious with a really thin crust ... So good! Great news for our Canadian lady, Kaetlyn. She finished 1st in the qualifying round so now will continue with the competition. We will let you know how things go tomorrow.
Margaret and Mike

Monday, February 27

Hi Everyone! Just finished our first practice and it went really well!! We are heading back to the hotel to change and then going to go to watch some of the preliminary round for the pair event. After that, we are going to get some food at this restaurant the coaches found last night. We do the draw tomorrow for our starting order in the short program and have two practices. Our man Nam won the qualifying round for men! Go Canada!
Margaret and Mike
 
Sunday, February 26
Hi Everyone. It has been a long day. We have been to the rink and it is really nice and new! We did a workout there and then walked around for a while. It was good to have the opportunity to figure out where everything was! We are relaxing a bit right now with some of the other competitors and have a team meeting tonight. We finally get to skate tomorrow at 4pm for our first practice but that’s it for the day. We get 2 practices Tuesday though so that will be nice! Hope all is well in Canada. It has been snowing and raining here but not too cold.
Margaret and Mike
 
Saturday, February 25
We are in Minsk and got all our bags! Craziness but we got here!! Yay! The city is pretty industrial looking where we are and there is lots of construction. We don't get a practice until Monday which is too bad but we have the whole day tomorrow to get used to the time change – it is 8 hours ahead of home.
Margaret and Mike
 
Friday, February 24
Well, we got to the airport in lots of time only to find out that we were no longer on our originally scheduled flight! Not really sure why but they managed to get us on to an earlier flight to Frankfurt. That was a relief because we didn’t want to miss our connection to Minsk. It was a run to the plane and we are hoping that our bags will get there with us! We will let you know what happens.
Margaret and Mike