Good international experience for junior short track speedskaters

January 11, 2010—Chinese Taipei

It was a rough couple of days for Team USA during the last events of the 2010 World Junior Short Track Championships in Chinese Taipei. The ladies drew tough heats in their 500m events and didn’t make it out of the preliminaries. The men fared a little better with Robert Lawrence (Gaffney, SC) making it through the preliminaries, heats and quarterfinals before ending his run in the semifinals. Cole Krueger (McMurray, PA) also advanced out of the prelims and heats, but couldn’t get past the quarterfinals. Julian Wood (McMurray, PA) was disqualified in his preliminary 500m race.

Both the Men’s and Ladies’ Relay teams fought hard but were eliminated in the 3000m relay event. Overall the Ladies Relay earned a fifth place spot while the men took 6^th overall.

Another difficult draw in the 1000m had Team USA struggling. Morgan Izykowski (Bay City, MI) made it out of her heat but didn’t get past the quarterfinals while Lawrence and Krueger skated out of their 1000m prelims but finished out of the top two in their heats and didn’t advance.

At the end of the weekend, Krueger was ranked 10^th overall, followed by Lawrence in 11^th and Wood in 38^th. For the ladies, Izykowski took the 19^th place spot, with Mary Grace (Northbrook IL) in 25^th and Petra Acker (Clifton Park, NY) in 32^nd. The overall winners of the event were mainly Korean skaters with Jihyun Choi, Mi-Yeon Lee and Jaewon Song leading the ladies and Jinkyu Noh taking first for the men. Noh was followed by Canadian skater Antoine Gelinas-Beaulieu and Korean skater Seyeong Park.

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