Silver medals of the championship of Ukraine in figure skating for juniors were won by pupils of the Odessa sports school "Ldinka" Lika Bondar and Artem Koval.

This is the first award for athletes at national competitions of this level, the press service of the regional branch of the National Olympic Committee of Ukraine reported.

14-year-old Lika Bondar and 16-year-old Artem Koval (their coach - Elena Onishchenko) competed for the first time among juniors. After the rhythmic dance, they were in second place, behind the Kharkov duet of Maria Pinchuk and Nikita Pogorelov a little less than four points - 56.60 against 60.62.

In the free programme, the leaders were summed up with twizzles (rotation on one leg in one or more revolutions with a shift in the direction of travel), at the same time, the Odessa dancers performed their program to music from the rock opera "Mozart" rather cleanly, in particular, having received fourth levels on twizzles and support.

Lika Bondar and Artem Koval won the free skate with 87.44 points, but this was not enough to win. According to the results of the competition, Odessans scored 144.04 points, yielding 2.3 points to the champions.

The assessments received by the residents of Odessa are a record for them. They exceeded the previous total result by almost ten points.

Artyom was injured in training on January 4 and was in the bra for three weeks. We started training only on January 25th. I understood that it was simply unrealistic to recover in five days, and at the same time we had to compete in the junior championship. Lika and Artem are great, they got together and performed very well.

Elena Onishchenko, coach

In December, Lika and Artem won bronze medals at the Winter Star international junior tournament, which was held in Minsk. Then the inhabitants of Odessa scored a total of 134.88 points (55.44 + 79.44).

The closest start for the Odessa skaters will be the second international tournament in sports ice dancing LuMi Dance Trophy, which will be held on February 11-13 at the Odessa Sports Palace. The tournament is dedicated to the memory of the famous specialist Lyudmila Mikhailovskaya. 44 couples from ten countries of the world will take part in it.

Source and pictures: Dumskaya.net