Kim Chae-yeon captures gold in women's figure skating at Winter Asiad
Kim Chae-yeon performs her free skate program during the women's singles figure skating competition at the Asian Winter Games at Heilongjiang Ice Events Training Center Multifunctional Hall in Harbin, China, Thursday. Yonhap
South Korean figure skater Kim Chae-yeon captured a stunning gold medal in her Asian Winter Games debut in China on Thursday, beating three-time world champion Kaori Sakamoto with a clean free skate.
Kim scored 147.56 points in the free skate to finish with 219.44 points overall for the gold medal at Heilongjiang Ice Events Training Center Multifunctional Hall in Harbin. Sakamoto, the 2022 Olympic bronze medalist who has won the past three world titles, fell on a triple flip en route to earning 136.87 points in the free skate and 211.90 points overall.
Both the free skate score and the total points were new personal highs for Kim, who gave South Korea its 14th gold medal of this Asiad.
Hana Yoshida of Japan got the bronze with 205.20 points.
Sakamoto led after Wednesday's short program with 75.03 points, and Kim was in second place with her personal best score of 71.88 points.
Kim, 18, was the second-to-last skater to take the ice. She opened her program, set to "Whisperers from the Heart" and "Love Dance," with a clean double axel. Kim nailed all of her jump elements, including a triple flip-double toe loop-double loop combination and then a triple lutz-triple toe loop combination later on.
Kim Chae-yeon performs her free skate program during the women's singles figure skating competition at the Asian Winter Games at Heilongjiang Ice Events Training Center Multifunctional Hall in Harbin, China, Thursday. Yonhap
Kim had the best score with only Sakamoto left to skate, and the usually steady Japanese star looked wobbly on her landings and finished behind the South Korean teen.
Kim earned extra execution points for all jumps, and received full marks for her spins and step sequences.
Sakamoto, on the other hand, lost points for her fall and also for an inadequate landing of her triple lutz at the start of a combination jump later in the program.
Kim had 79.07 points in the technical score and 68.49 points in her program components score. Sakamoto earned just 65.92 points in the technical score and 71.95 points in her program components score.
Kim is the second straight South Korean woman to win the Asiad singles gold medal, following Choi Da-bin from the 2017 event in Sapporo, Japan.
The other South Korean in Thursday's event, Kim Seo-young, finished seventh overall with 150.54 points. She had 99.31 points in the free skate.
(Yonhap)