China’s Sui Wenjing and Han Kang won the pair gold medal

CNN
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China’s Sui Wenjing and Han Kang won gold in pair figure skating at the 2022 Beijing Games on Saturday.

The two finished with world record total scores of 239.88 – 84.41 for the short program and 155.47 for the free skating to capture their first Olympic gold.

The pair skated to the song “Bridge Over Troubled Water” written by US duo Simon & Garfunkel – seemingly a nod to their friendship, which Sue has suffered from an ankle injury.

Sui and Han, who are the first Chinese figure skaters to win gold in the doubles event since the 2010 Vancouver Games, won a silver medal in the event at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games.

“We have gone through a lot which was not expected in the beginning. People said we were a pair of underdogs, because our builds weren’t for figure skating,” Sui said after the win.

“Traditionally, men were expected to be tall and women to be short,” she explained.

“If there is no way before us, we will forge our own path, leaving it to others, and thus we create a legend,” she said.

They became the third pair skating team to win Olympic Games gold on home ice after Germany’s Maxi Herber and Ernst Beyer in Sochi 2014, along with Russia’s Tatiana Volosozer and Maxim Trankov in Garmisch-Partenkirchen in 1936.

Since the start of the 2015–16 season, Sui and Han have finished on the podium in every international competition in which they have competed.

It is China’s ninth gold medal and 15th overall at the Games, a significant improvement on a gold it achieved in Pyeongchang four years earlier.

China’s 15 medals surpass the country’s previous high of 11 in Vancouver 2010 and Torino 2006.

The silver medal went to Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) Evgenia Tarasova and Vladimir Morozov, who finished with an aggregate score of 239.25.

ROC’s Anastasia Mishina and Alexander Galliamov won the bronze medal with a total score of 237.71.

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