Figure Skating: Sentimental Savchenko/Massot glide to the second title

All that was missing in their masterly freestyle routine was the final pose, when Alyona Savchenko and Bruno Massot still had enough power to inspire the audience to applaud them even more.

“We enjoy this support of the fans,”said the five-time World Champion, her partner had unequivocally supported the applause of the visitors with unequivocal arm movements.

The second national title for the pair runners from Oberstdorf was self-evident, but it wasn’t necessarily a sovereign performance. The Grand Prix winners are still struggling with the jet lag brought back from Japan a week ago, and the training of the last few days suffered from permanent fatigue.

“Nevertheless, it was a good position finding for us,”said coach Alexander König. At 229.38 points, his charges naturally did not quite come close to Nagoya’s result. The throws were good, the pirouettes were solidly centered, in the parallel jumps one or the other wackler could not be overlooked.

As usual, however, the sophisticated choreography brought points to the music of the nature documentary “Die Welt von oben” (The World from Above) and “Eistanz mit Sprüngen” (“Ice Dance with Jumps”) – as choreographer and living ice dance legend Christopher Dean had classified his work with the two Allgäuers of choice.

Behind Savchenko/Massot, who won their second national title after 2016, Minerva-Fabienne Hase and Nolan Seegers won the Berlin duel for second place against Annika Hocke and Ruben Blommaert.

At noon, Paul Fentz from Berlin had already secured the victory in the men’s competition and thus also the Olympic ticket. With the best freestyle, the EC-tenth even extended his advantage from the short program and did not leave Peter Liebers (also Berlin) the breath of a chance in the direct duel to the Olympic eighth Peter Liebers (also Berlin).

Fentz could even afford two crashes with triple Axel and fourfold Toe-Loop without endangering his clear success. For Liebers was simply out of shape and thus far from successfully defending his title.

“I didn’t want to and wasn’t allowed to run tactically, I kept to that,”said the new German champion, who will experience his Olympic premiere in February in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Third place in the Frankfurt ice rink went to Catalin Dimitrescu from Oberstdorf.