Lilah Fear and Lewis Gibson posted a season-best score in their first performance at Milan-Cortina 2026 but Team GB struggled overall in the team event.<\/p>\n
A total of 10 teams \u2013 including Great Britain for the first time since 2014 \u2013 compete for points across the four disciplines: men’s, women’s, pairs and ice dance. The best skater in each discipline gets 10 points, the second best gets nine and so on.<\/p>\n
Qualification consists of a short program and rhythm dance, with the top five teams progressing to the finals to skate for a medal.<\/p>\n
Britain are currently in eighth place with 11 points and need a score of nine or more from men’s skater Edward Appleby on Saturday afternoon to stand any chance of staying in the medal race.<\/p>\n
Ice dancers Fear and Gibson performed a stunning rhythm dance routine on Friday morning to their trademark Spice Girls mix.<\/p>\n
Fear \u2013 who will carry the British flag at the opening ceremony on Friday night \u2013 wore it here as a sparkly Ginger Spice inspired dress, as she and Gibson landed their planned elements with gusto.<\/p>\n
They recorded a score of 86.85 points, their best of the 2025-26 season to put Team GB third after the opening ice dance section.<\/p>\n
However, Britain’s hopes of fighting for a medal took a blow during the pairs.<\/p>\n
Anastasia Vaipan-Law and Luke Digby, who have finished in the top 10 at the European Championships during the past two competitions, started strongly on their Olympic debut.<\/p>\n
But Vaipan-Law fell during the throw triple salchow, resulting in no points for that element and an overall one-point deduction.<\/p>\n
And in the women’s singles Kristen Spours missed her double axel, resulting in it being marked as an invalid element.<\/p>\n
British champion Spours, 25, was a doubt for the Games after having disc herniation surgery last June and then taking an indefinite break to prioritise her physical and mental health.<\/p>\n
The battle for team event gold in Milan is expected to be between United States and Japan, and they are the top two after day one – the former leading the latter by two points.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lilah Fear and Lewis Gibson posted a season-best score in their first performance at Milan-Cortina 2026 but Team…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":411513,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-411512","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411512","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=411512"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411512\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/411513"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=411512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=411512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=411512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}