japan takes the gold! georgia takes the silver!

The hour's worth of Free Skate aired this afternoon revealed a big upset in the Pairs Figure Skating and was a very truncated show.

The first teams that were on at 4 PM were China (Sui Wenjing/Han Cong) and one of the USA teams (Ellie Kam/Danny O'Shea), but it was just a couple of highlights of their turns on the ice.

China scored 135.98 on the Free Skate and that USA team had 122.71.

Basically, both were in line with their standings from the Shorts program.

However, everything got taken up a notch when Japan came up.

Riku Miura and Ryuichi Kihana took their mistake yesterday to heart and were absolutely, positively, perfect for this free skate!!!

The music, from "Gladiator", crafted specifically for this place and this program, was obviously one they felt strongly about and they were completely rapt...

as was I, watching them...

that had to be a Gold Medal performance, right?

The judges certainly agreed that it was.
The couple came off the ice with the highest score yet: 158.13 - wow!

The closest competitor - the team from China, whose skate wasn't shown this afternoon - was still 23 points lower than them for the free skate.

They were 23 points lower for the Figure Skating total, too.

That's a lot of points for some team to try to best at this juncture. 

Totally incredible!

Four more teams to skate; could Japan hold that spot? 

For the first time ever, it was possible that Japan could get a medal if the next two teams scored lower.

Hungary's pair, Maria Pavlova and Alexei Sviatchenko, were next.

They had ended yesterday in 4th place... would this Free Skate advance them?

Their score was 141.39!

That wasn't enough to knock Japan off the pedestal yet.

What about the team from Canada?

Oh, my... Lia Pereira and Trennt Michaud were skating to "Gladiator", the exact same music that the Japanese team had used.

Nice costumes, that's for sure... but then they had a fall, and one of their required jumps was under-rotated... and they knew when they came off the ice that their position was in peril.

Yesterday, they had been in third place. 

Now they had a 125.06 for their Free Skate, giving them 199.66 overall.

They were totally out of the top five.

But that was good news for Japan - they were definitely getting a medal!

Now to determine if it would be Gold, Silver, or Bronze.

Georgia's team was hungry for a medal, too, as the country had never won.

Would "Keeping Me Alive" be enough for Anastasiia Metelkina and Luka Berulava to pull into a space closer to, or above, Japan?

Oh, it was good, and they skated their hearts out, too!

And they succeeded in scoring 146.29 for their Free Skate!!!

That gave them a total of 221.75, ensuring they were going home with an Olympic medal, just as Japan would be.

One team left: Germany's Minerva Hase and Nikita Volodin.

Would their "Memoryhouse" program grant them an Olympic podium position, or just a memory of what might have been?

Would it be them or Hungary's team up there for a medal???

They met the challenge, scoring two points below Hungary for the Free Skate, but that was offset by the 7 points higher yesterday.

That gave them the Bronze medal!!!

That meant Japan took the Gold and Georgia won the Silver!!!

I do love fairy tale endings!!!

I also love that I get to watch this again for Prime time!

(smile!)