Boikova and Kozlovskii stay on top: gold in Boston with 198.66 points
Alexandra Boikova and Dmitrii Kozlovskii have opened the pairs season in style, taking gold at the John Nicks Pairs International in Boston with 198.66 points — 70.39 in the short program and 128.27 in the free skate. It is their second consecutive victory on this early-season Challenger tour.
The podium battle behind them was tight: American pair Audrey Shin and Spencer Akira Howe took silver with 183.81 points, and fellow Americans Katie McBeath and Balazs Nagy completed the podium on 180.95. Nearly fifteen points separated gold from silver — the exact distance between a rebuilding season and a pair competing for everything again.
The throws these pairs execute — triples, quads — forgive no soft or uneven ice. At Napapiri we have been building real-ice rinks since 1993, with more than 30 years of experience behind events, municipalities and clubs, and we know that the same engineering that carries a championship free skate — a uniform, cold, energy-efficient surface — is what a municipal rink needs on opening day.
Photo: Rama, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.