ST. LOUIS — Amber Glenn won her third straight U.S. figure skating title Friday night with a brilliant free skate on the heels of an equally impressive performance from world champion Alysa Liu, who stayed on the ice to cheer on her future Team USA teammate heading to the Milan Cortina Olympics.
Glenn finished with 233.55 points in the packed Enterprise Center, while Liu was second with 228.91. Isabeau Levito won the bronze medal with 224.45 points and, more than likely, the final female spot on the team for the Winter Games.
The official team announcement will take place on Sunday.
“I’m so grateful. It was terrifying,” said Glenn, who has had a dominant tear for the past two years. “And I got to skate after two amazing women destroyed the house. I’m still blown away.”
Earlier in the evening, Alisha Efimova and Misha Mitrofanov defended their pairs title despite a few mistakes, including a scary moment where Mitrofanov was nearly hit by Efimova’s skate. They finished with 207.71 points to beat Ellie Kam and Danny O’Shea, second on 197.12, and the team of Katie McBeath and Daniil Parkman.
Now comes the nervous wait to see if Efimova and Mitrofanov will be able to compete in the Olympics.
Although she is an American citizen, born in Wisconsin and raised in Texas, Efimova, 26, was born in Finland and has competed for Germany and Russia alongside her native country. However, only citizens of the nation they represent are eligible for the Olympics, and while Mitrofanov and Efimova are married and she has a green card, she has not yet received a U.S. passport.
The Skating Club of Boston, where the couple trains, worked with U.S. senators and U.S. figure skating officials to speed up the three-year waiting period for citizenship. But time is running out before Sunday’s deadline to announce the team.
The Americans qualified the maximum three women’s spots on the Olympic team.
They only have two places in pairs.
Efimova and Mitrofanov would get one if her citizenship is approved at the last minute. Kam and O’Shea are about to make their first Olympic team, while McBeath and Parkman can’t go because he also doesn’t have American citizenship.
That could leave U.S. Figure Skating to pass judgment on the second pairs team it sends to the Milan Cortina Games.
Emily Chan and Spencer Howe came back from eighth place after a tough short program to finish fourth with 186.52 points Friday night, while the promising team of Audrey Shin and Balazs Nagy were less than two points behind in fifth place.
But ahead of them were Efimova and Mitrofanov, the best in American pair skating.
Their free skate, set to “Where should I start?” » from Arthur Hiller’s 1970 romantic drama “Love Story,” was intended as a tribute to two-time Olympic champions Katia Gordeeva and Sergey Grinkov, who was just 28 when he died of a heart attack in 1995.
Efimova and Mitrofanov opened with a beautiful triple twist, but then a sequence went wrong after their triple salchow when he fell during a double axel, and Efimova nearly wiped her forehead with the blade of her skate. She also struggled during their side-by-side triple toe loops later in the program, but a strong finishing sequence left no doubt they would repeat as champions.
Then it was the women’s turn to take center stage.
Levito placed first among America’s “big three,” performing with her classic dance style in a sparkling blue dress to music from the 1988 Italian coming-of-age film “Cinema Paradiso” — imagine him on the ice in Milan next month.
His score in the free skate was a season’s best and propelled Levito into first place.
Liu cheered when the score was read in the middle of her own warm-up, then began ripping the start of a new free skate to a medley of Lady Gaga songs. It was a performance every bit as good as Liu’s at the World Championships in Boston last year, when she became the first American woman to reach the podium in two decades.
The pressure was on Glenn to respond. And did she ever.
From her opening triple axel, the only 3½-turn jump attempted by all the medal contenders, to the final strains of music, the 26-year-old from Plano, Texas, brought the crowd to its feet. Glenn skated to a standing ovation, then broke down in tears with his coach, Damon Allen, when his huge score was played over the arena speakers.
She was soon joined in the kissing and crying zone by Liu and Levito, the likely triumvirate for the Milan Cortina Games.
“I hope,” Liu said, “we can keep this energy going next month for all of us.”
