Canada's Keegan Messing, Madeline Schizas claim 1st national figure skating titles

It took 19 tries for Keegan Messing to finally claim a national title.

In a cruel twist due to COVID-19, it's the first national championship his mom Sally — who was born in Edmonton, thus is the reason Messing skates for Canada — had ever missed.

"A little bittersweet there," Messing said.

Skating in a virtually empty TD Place Arena due to the pandemic, the 29-year-old from Girdwood, Ak., won the men's title at the Canadian figure skating championships on Saturday, all but clinching his berth on the Olympic team for Beijing.

"It's an Olympic year, I think I might have got more points if you counted the butterflies in my stomach," Messing said with a laugh. "I forgot what it's like to go out on Olympic qualifying ice, and whoa, man, it's another ballgame out there."

Eighteen-year-old Madeline Schizas won the women's title, while world bronze medallists Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier captured the ice dance title and Kirsten Moore-Towers and Michael Marinaro claimed pairs gold.

Dressed in a plaid flannel shirt and jeans, Messing took the ice after an excellent performance by Roman Sadovsky. Skating to "Home" by Phillip Phillips, a tribute to his infant son Wyatt, Messing landed a pair of quads en route to scoring 258.03.

Sadovsky, a 22-year-old from Toronto, moved up from fourth after the short program to take silver — and likely Canada's other men's berth on the Beijing team — with 247.60.

"I kind of carried a little bit of that disappointment from last night and used that as energy going into today," Sadovsky said. "Basically from the end of last night I was on a mission to a much better skate and to prove that I'm a better skater than what I performed yesterday... I'm proud of myself."

Messing's victory capped a roller-coaster week that included 33 hours of travel and the temporary loss of his skates. But his week was as rough as his good friend Nam Nguyen's. The 2019 national champion struggled to sixth, revealing after that he'd had COVID-19 last week, and was still feeling the effects.

"Flu-like symptoms, times 10," Nguyen said.

COVID-19 has cast a pall over sports, with the surge of the new Omicron variant. Stephen Gogolev, who won silver at the 2019 nationals, withdrew on Friday after he tested positive in a PCR test upon landing in Ottawa.

Moments after clinching her first Canadian title, Schizas was asked about her goals for Beijing.

"My biggest goal is to avoid catching COVID," Schizas said. "That's my biggest goal, for the next three weeks I'm going to do everything in my power to stay healthy."