MARITIME MAGIC

With just one of the three gold medalists from 2018 competing at this year’s Canadian Championships, the doors were wide open for new stars to emerge.

Stephen Gogolev, 14, kicked off the competition in Saint John, New Brunswick, by stealing the short program show with a technical tour de force that overwhelmed his much more experienced rivals. The 2018 Junior Grand Prix Final champion was one of only two men to cleanly execute a quad Salchow-triple toe combination in the short program. Gogolev, who admitted feeling more comfortable with the senior environment than he did last year, won the segment with a score of 88.77.

At 27, Keegan Messing is nearly twice Gogolev’s