Madison Chock and Evan Bates skate during the free dance competition at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, Saturday, Jan. 10, 2026, in St. Louis. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)
January 10, 2026 - 1:04 PM
ST. LOUIS (AP) — Madison Chock and Evan Bates danced their way to a record-setting seventh U.S. Figure Skating title on Saturday night, showcasing their trademark creativity, athleticism and precision in their final competition before the Milan Cortina Olympics.
Now, the countdown is on for the moment they have waited for the past four years.
“We like to build momentum through the season,” Bates said, “and it's a great feeling going into a big event knowing you skated well the previous event. So we're going to roll with that momentum into Milan.”
Chock and Bates have dominated ice dance ever since they finished fourth at the Beijing Games, arguably the most disappointing and frustrating placement for any Olympian. They have won the past three world titles, the past three gold medals at the Grand Prix Final, and they have nobody within sight of them when it comes to competing against fellow Americans.
Performing a flamenco-styled dance to a version of the Rolling Stones hit “Paint It Black” from the dystopian sci-fi Western drama “Westworld,” Chock and Bates produced a season-best free skate inside Enterprise Center and finished with 228.87 points.
Emilea Zingas and Vadym Kolesnik were second with 213.65 points and Christina Carreira and Anthony Ponomarenko were third with 206.95, making those two pairs the likely choices to join Chock and Bates on the American squad for the Winter Games.
There wasn’t much drama in the dance competition.
At least for the top step.
Yet sometimes the winning programs aren’t necessarily the ones that win over the crowd. And while Oona Brown and Gage Brown only finished fifth, the sister-brother duo — former world junior champions — earned the first standing ovation of the night for their moody, creative and almost cinematic program set to selections from the film “The Godfather.”
“I think that was one of the best — if not the best — performances we’ve had,” Gage Brown said afterward.
The Browns ended a stretch in which several couples taking the ice made some kind of significant mistake, whether it was a skater stumbling to the ice, someone getting out of synch with their twizzles, or some other calamitous misfortune.
Then it was a parade of near-perfect programs, each couple trying to upstage the previous one.
Emily Bratti and Ian Somerville were the first to knock the Brown siblings from first place, then reigning bronze medalists Caroline Green and Michael Parsons took over first place with their program, set to “Escalate” by Tsar B and “Son of Nyx” by Hozier.
Carreira and Ponomarenko, the U.S. silver medalists the past two years, knew a podium spot would probably earn them a spot on the Olympic team when they took the ice. And they delivered with a sharp program in which they seemed to channel the feeling and the characters from the 2006 psychological thriller film “Perfume: The Story of a Murder.”
“We had a bit of a rocky start to this season,” said Carreira, who was born in Canada but receiver her U.S. citizenship in November, making her eligible to compete at the Olympics. “I'm happy we got our act together and delivered a good performance here.”
It wound up being good enough for bronze.
That's because the 23-year-old Zingas, who made the difficult witch from singles to dance about four years ago, and the 24-year-old Kolesnik quickly assumed the top spot with a program set to music by Sergei Prokofiev from the ballet of “Romeo and Juliet.”
“It hasn't been an easy journey,” Zingas said, “and I think our unique approach to this season, and our unique style on the ice, really helped us, and it's really an emotional moment to be sitting here.”
Zingas and Kolesnik only held the top spot for about four minutes — the length of the free skate by Chock and Bates.
It almost seemed to be a forgone conclusion that they would win Saturday night. But the real pressure now begins: Chock and Bates finished eighth at the 2014 Olympics, ninth four years later, and came in fourth at the Winter Games in 2022.
Yes, they helped the Americans win team gold in Beijing, but even that was somewhat tainted. They never got a medal ceremony there because of a long investigation into Russian doping, which pushed their presentation all the way to the 2024 Summer Games.
They would love to help the U.S. win another team gold. But their target is unquestionably the ice dance title itself.
“It’s going to be a lot more of what it has been — we know what to do, we have our plan and we’re executing,” Chock said. “We don’t plan on deviating from it. We’re going to stick to it. Trust ourselves, trust our team and do what we know to do.”
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AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics
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