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Ice dancers Routhier and Saucke-Lacelle win bronze at ISU Junior Grand Prix

(September 20, 2008 - OSTRAVA, Czech Republic) – Karen Routhier of Vanier, Que., and Eric Saucke-Lacelle of Sherbrooke, Que., won the bronze medal on Saturday in the ice dance event at the fourth stop on the ISU Junior Grand Prix figure skating circuit.

Piper Gilles and Zachary Donohue of the U.S., took the gold medal with 159.30 points, Marina Antipova and Artem Kudashev of Russia were second at 149.97 and Routhier and Saucke-Lacelle were third at 149.83 skating to music from Cinema Paradiso.

‘’It was a very good skate, I don’t think we could have done better at this point in the season,’’ said Saucke-Lacelle, 19.  ‘’Now we need to work on putting more polish on all the new elements in our long program.’’

Saucke-Lacelle said the couple took a giant step in its showing this week.

‘’The highlight for us was the original dance’’ he said.  ‘’The past couple of years that’s the one that has always brought us down, but this week, it’s the program that got us noticed.’’

National novice champions Olivia Martins and Alvin Chau, both of Toronto completed an impressive international debut finishing sixth out of 17 entries.

In pairs, Russian teams swept the podium with Lubov Iliuschechkina and Nodari Maisuradze earning the gold.

Amanda Velenosi of Laval, Que., and Mark Fernandez delivered the second best long program of the night to climb from seventh to fifth overall.  Zoey Brown of Cambridge, Ont., and Ian Beharry of Guelph, Ont., jumped from ninth to seventh while Christi Anne Steele and Adam Johnson, both of Chatham, Ont., were ninth out of 17 entries.

Velenosi and Fernandez admitted they were a little rusty as both missed valuable training time this summer due to back injuries.  They only started training again earlier this month.

‘’The result made us happy but the program didn’t go as well as we would have hoped,’’ said Fernandez.  ‘’We didn’t do our jumps properly but the rest was pretty solid especially our lifts after we struggled with them in the short program.  We started training late but we are only going to get better from here on in.’’

In men’s singles, Andrei Rogozine of Richmond Hill, Ont., climbed from 15th to ninth overall with the eighth best long program while Andrew Lum of Burnaby, B.C., finished 14th.

‘’I was pleased with how I overcame a very bad warm-up and had a pretty good performance,’’ said Rogozine.  ‘’I wasn’t feeling like myself today but I knew I had to put that behind me when it counted.’’

The next stop on the circuit is this Thursday to Saturday in Madrid.

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