Morris, Homan improve to 3-1 at Beijing 2022

BEIJING — Canada's defence of its Olympic mixed doubles curling gold medal is looking a lot more promising.

The path to repeating as figure skating team champions, however, is on perilously thin ice.

After splitting its opening two mixed doubles matches Thursday, Canada's tandem of John Morris and Rachel Homan picked up a pair of wins Friday to move into a tie with Britain for second place in the round-robin standings at 3-1.

Morris, from Canmore, Alta., and Ottawa's Homan opened with a 7-5 win over Switzerland. The Canadians scored three points in the first end, and had an answer any time the Swiss duo of Jenny Perret and Martin Rios looked to close the gap.

The Canadians followed with an 8-6 win over host China. Homan and Morris had a 4-1 lead after a steal of two in the third end, and held a commanding 8-4 lead entering the eighth and final end.

In team figure skating, Canada sat sixth after the opening three events and faced an early elimination from a competition it won at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games.

A squad already short on depth was missing Keegan Messing, who remains in Canada awaiting two more negative COVID-19 tests.

Roman Sadovsky, a 22-year-old from Toronto, stepped in for Messing in the men's short program but had a shaky skate and finished eighth out of nine skaters.

Sadovsky underrotated and two-footed the landing on his quadruple Salchow to finish with 71.06 points.

"Kind of disappointing honestly," Sadovsky said. "Only because those are mistakes that I don’t usually make. The quad Salchow is a comfort jump for me. It was very successful this season. There was just a slight mishap on the takeoff that didn’t allow me to pull in."

Friday's events featured a few practices and preliminary competitions leading