Meno and Sand Fall but Get Quite a Lift

As she sat there, dazed and confused about what had just transpired on the Nashville Arena ice Wednesday night, Jenni Meno wore the stunned, goggle-eyed look of someone who had just been dropped on her head.

Which is precisely what had happened moments earlier, when the best pairs skating team in the United States fell apart on the final element of its short program, a simple maneuver melodramatically titled “the death spiral.”

The move involves Meno’s partner, Todd Sand, spinning in a pivot position while holding Meno’s hand, spinning her in an orbit around him and lowering, gently and gradually, to mere inches above the ice.

The move isn’t supposed to involve Sand losing his balance, and then his grip, and Meno bumping her head on the ice as she skids into a crash landing.

Meno wasn’t hurt--only “shocked,” she said later.

Shocked that their customarily precise program had collapsed and crumbled at the end, shocked to have ended the short program competition at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships in second place . . . and shocked, perhaps, to have finished as high as that.

Meno and Sand completely botched one element of their program, and were shaky on two others, but they are three-time defending national champions. Incumbency has its privileges in figure skating, and the judges weren’t about to drag the country’s elite pairs team out of contention after the first night of competition.

So, they propped Meno and Sand up with artificially high required-element scores. No judge rated them lower than 5.2 out of 6.0 on required elements--and seven judges gave them scores of 5.8 for artistic presentation.

That let Meno and Sand finish the night in second, behind Kyoko Ina and Jason Dungjen and ahead of Shelby Lyons and Brian Wells.

With the short program accounting for 33% of a team’s final score, Meno and Sand will enter Friday’s long-program competition well within striking distance of a fourth consecutive gold medal.

Their newly beefed-up short program features their most demanding move first--a side-by-side triple toe loop, which they completed without incident, although Sand was a bit slow coming out of the third spin.

The program ends with a lift, which Sand bobbled as he brought Meno back down to the ice, followed by the death spiral.

The lift is where the routine began to unravel.

“I think I lost a little concentration on the lift,” Sand said. “We got behind on our music and I rushed the death spiral a little bit. I can’t remember ever missing one like that.”

Neither could their coach, John Nicks.

“I haven’t seen them skate like that in the four years they’ve been together,” Nicks said. “Obviously, we have to do better than that.”

Figure Skating Notes

With the compulsory and original dance programs completed, the top three positions in the championship ice dancing competition are held by teams who train or live in the Detroit area--Elizabeth Punsalan and Jeord Swallow (Detroit Skating Club) are in first place, Eve Chalom and Mathew Gates (Detroit Skating Club) are in second and Kate Robinson and Peter Breen (both train in Bloomfield Hills, Mich.) are in third. Medals will be awarded tonight after the completion of the free dance competition.

Also scheduled for tonight: Men’s short program. Defending world champion Todd Eldredge is the prohibitive favorite, bidding for his fourth U.S. title.