Ashley Cain and Timothy LeDuc competing in the senior pairs free skate atthe 2019 U.S. Figure Skating Championships on Jan. 26, 2019 in Detroit.
Making their season debuts, figure skaters Ashley Cain-Gribble and Timothy LeDuc won gold and Vincent Zhou earned bronze at the U.S. International Figure Skating Classic in Salt Lake City.
Cain-Gribble and LeDuc, the reigning national pairs champions, entered Friday’s free skate sitting in first place after scoring 76.23 in the short program.
Their score of 129.35 in the free skate topped the field of nine teams and gave them a total of 205.58 for the overall win. Russia’s Evgenia Tarasova and Vladimir Morozov were second with a score of 194.69, while Cheng Peng and Yang Jin of China were third with 184.04.
It was just under a year ago that Cain-Gribble and LeDuc won the bronze medal at Skate America, the first Grand Prix medal for the duo. They dealt with a setback several weeks later when Cain-Gribble fell during a lift at a competition in Croatia and suffered a concussion, but at the end of January they won their first-ever national title. They followed that up with a ninth-place finish at the world championships.
Cain-Gribble and LeDuc will compete at Skate America again this year and then travel to France in November.
Zhou, a 2018 Olympian and the 2019 world bronze medalist, entered Friday’s free skate in the lead with a score of 89.03 in the short program. However, he slipped to fourth in the free skate, scoring 142.92. His overall total of 231.95 landed him in third place behind Japan’s Keiji Tanaka, who scored 249.96, and Sota Yamamoto, who scored 240.11.
U.S. men Alex Krasnozhon, Tomoki Hiwatashi and Jimmy Ma finished in fourth through sixth place.
Zhou told NBCSports.com over the summer that he’d attend Brown University beginning this fall, train in Boston and then take gap years or semesters until the Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022 are over. He will be competing in back-to-back Grand Prix events this fall in China and Moscow.
Karen Price is a reporter from Pittsburgh who has covered Olympic sports for various publications. She is a freelance contributor to TeamUSA.org on behalf of Red Line Editorial, Inc.