Yuzuru Hanyu skated the highest-scoring short program in history, breaking his own record at the Four Continents Championships in Seoul on Friday.
Hanyu, the two-time Olympic champion, tallied 111.82 points with a quadruple Salchow and a quad toe loop-triple toe loop combination. Hanyu reverted to his 2018 Olympic season short program for the first time. He held the previous short program record of 110.53 from November 2018.
“Today’s performance was the most perfect performance I’ve ever done,” Hanyu said, according to the International Skating Union. “I set as a goal a score higher than 110 for myself.”
Hanyu leads China’s Jin Boyang by 15.99 points going into the free skate. American Jason Brown is in third.
Four Continents features top skaters from North America, Asia (but not Russia, which is part of Europe in Olympic sport) and Australia. A TV and live stream schedule is here.
Hanyu and other skaters are preparing for March’s world championships in Montreal. That’s where Hanyu will next face Nathan Chen, who is skipping Four Continents to focus on sophomore studies at Yale. Chen beat Hanyu in their last five head-to-head programs starting with the 2018 Olympic free skate.
Earlier, U.S. champions Madison Chock and Evan Bates extended their resurgence, repeating as Four Continents ice dance gold medalists despite a free-dance fall. Chock and Bates, eighth and ninth at their two Olympics, totaled 213.18 to beat Canadians Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier by three points.
Madison Hubbell and Zachary Donohue, the top U.S. couple the previous two seasons, dropped from first after the rhythm dance to third. Donohue erred on a twizzle in the free dance.
Chock and Bates bettered Hubbell and Donohue in all three head-to-heads this season. Chock and Bates rank third in the world going into the world championships, trailing four-time world champions Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron of France and Victoria Sinitsina and Nikita Katsalapov of Russia.
At the European Championships last month, the Russians handed the French their first defeat since the PyeongChang Olympics.
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