Canadians win two bronze at Nebelhorn Trophy

OBERTSDORF, Germany – Jeremy Ten of Vancouver and ice dancers Alexandra Paul and Mitchell Islam of Barrie, Ont., won bronze medals on Saturday at the Nebelhorn Trophy senior figure skating competition.

In men’s competition, Nobunari Oda of Japan took the gold with 262.98 points, Jason Brown of the U.S. was second at 228.43 and Ten followed at 205.56. He ranked third in the short program Friday and fifth in the long.

‘’This is quite exciting,’’ said Ten, 24. ‘’I’ve worked really hard over the summer and it’s great to finally see it pay off this early in the season. Today I wasn’t at my best so I know there’s a lot of room to grow. In the whole program there was a lot tweaking involved to get all the combos in. I didn’t let anything go and fought through the mistakes at the beginning.’’

Ten was coming off a tough 2012-13 campaign which included an eighth place finish at the national championships. Now he throws his hat into the ring as a contender for one of those three available Olympic spots after achieving the qualifying score Saturday.

‘’This off-season, I just needed to have a reset and reevaluate where I was in my career,’’ he said. ‘’I changed my training venue for a month this summer and that really set me up for the year. I remembered the reasons I was skating and fell back in love with the sport.’’

In ice dancing, Madison Hubbell and Zachary Donohue of the U.S. were the winners at 147.11, Ksenia Monko and Kirill Khaliavin of Russia were second at 142.14 and Paul and Islam, the leaders after Friday’s short program, followed at 141.99.

“It was a tough ending to a really great competition for us,” said Islam, who joined forces with Paul in 2009. “There were some technical issues today that hurt us Still it’s a building block for the rest of the season and we have lots of positives to take forward.”

The couple were anxious to unveil their new programs to the international skating world.

“This year we’ve been really working on our performance,” said Paul. “We also got all new lifts which are more impressive and should bring us better technical scores. Today we gained a lot of confidence knowing that with a few mistakes we can still pull through.”

In the team standings, Russia ranked first, the U.S. second and Canada third.

Louis Daignault