Canada's Vanessa James and Eric Radford: We're not leaving Beijing without a fight

"That’s what the goal will be tomorrow: to fight.”

Those were the words of Vanessa James, one half of Canada's figure skating pair along with Eric Radford, and they face an uphill task to get on the podium in the pair skating event at Beijing 2022.

The Canadians finished with a disappointing score of 63.03 in the short program on Friday that sees them sitting in 12th place out of 16 teams ahead of the free skate on Saturday at 19:00 local time at the Capital Indoor Stadium.

“I was very disappointed in my jumps because I haven’t missed one since I’ve been here," James told Olympics.com afterward. "It’s very disappointing to not get it done when it counted. It’s something that we need to work on for tomorrow. I’m just going to have to concentrate and hone in."

James, 36, is now a four-time Olympian but competed for France at Vancouver 2010, Sochi 2014 and PyeongChang 2018.

“But it was an amazing performance for us. We felt really good and comfortable and at home on the ice. It feels good to be here, so we’re going to continue on.”

MORE: Top things to know about Canada's Vanessa James and Eric Radford

Radford, 37, is a three-time Winter Olympic medallist having won a gold medal in the team event and a bronze in the pair skating event at PyeongChang 2018, and a silver medal in the team event at Sochi 2014.

"She apologised to me, and she does not need to," Radford said of James' mistake. "It’s always a pleasure and honour to skate by Vanessa’s side.

"Like Vanessa said, this was a great performance. We skated from the heart. There was an unfortunate mistake but we are human, we can make mistakes. It’s just unfortunate timing. But we won’t make the same mistake twice, and tomorrow we’ll go out and have a really good skate.”

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