Canada earned two bronze medals to cap the ISU Junior Grand Prix figure skating circuit Saturday.Thirteen-year-old Nam Nguyen of Burnaby, B.C., took the bronze medal in men's singles and Mackenzie Bent of Uxbridge, Ont., and Garrett MacKeen of Oshawa, Ont., were also third in ice dancing.
In men's competition, Maxim Kovtun of Russia took the gold with 182.91 points, Ryuju Hino of Japan was second at 174.99 and Nguyen, fifth after Thursday's short program, followed at 169.55.
Last season's Canadian junior champion, Nguyen placed seven spots higher than three weeks ago in his international debut at the Junior Grand Prix season opener in Latvia and bettered his personal best score by more than 20 points.
"My goal here was to have a good performance and to get the medal is surprising," said Nguyen. "My long program still didn't match what I was doing in practice but the difference this week is I had a lot of fight. That made it an all around good program."
Highlights in his program skated to Beethoven's fifth Piano Concerto included a triple Salchow-triple toe combo and a triple Lutz-triple flip.
Peter O'Brien of Ameliasburgh, Ont., was ninth.
In ice dancing, Alexandra Stepanova and Ivan Bukin of Russia won the gold medal with 134.29 points.
Anastasia Galyeta and Alexei Shumski of Ukraine were second at 121.35, just edging Bent and MacKeen who totalled 120.69 in their international debut.
"We are very excited about the medal, it hasn't sunk in yet," said Bent, who at 14 is three years younger than her partner. "We skated our long program really well, it was nice to deliver that kind of performance. This is really a learning season for us."
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