THE CANADIAN PRESS
QUEBEC — Brian Joubert did it all, and Jeff Buttle took a fall.
The 23-year-old French world champion landed a quad and was so much better in every facet of the men’s short program than the 11 other entrants at the HomeSense Skate Canada International meet Friday night that he built a huge lead to take into the free-skating final.
Joubert was awarded 78.05 points and 21-year-old teammate Yannick Ponsero got 67.09.
Canadian champion Jeff Buttle was third with 66.85 and teammate Chris Mabee got 66.50.
Joubert was the only skater among the leaders to land a quad.
Buttle stumbled while gliding backwards during a cross-cut move on a circular step sequence and went into a Lutz, which sent the 25-year-old native of Smooth Rock Falls, Ont., crashing to the ice. It was a costly few seconds.
Buttle said he’d been feeling a "little bit off" during practices.
"The jumps weren’t easy today, that’s for sure," he said in summing up his performance. "I had to fight for them.
"I guess it was the cross-cut that I didn’t think I’d have to be fighting for, so trying to recover in time and still do the footwork into the Lutz, I think I ended up just trying too hard on the Lutz."
The judges were generous with Buttle.
"Despite the mistakes, I recovered and kept going," he said. "There’s really nothing else you can do, especially with the new (scoring) system.
"If you start to let all the little things go, that’s when it really starts to hurt. A fall is a fall and you get up and keep going."
It appears as if Joubert will keep going right to the top of the podium come Sunday afternoon, while Buttle will try to rebound to earn a silver or bronze medal.
Mabee fell out of a triple Axel landing.
"I hadn’t missed a triple Axel since I got here," said Mabee. "To miss it in the short program when it mattered is disappointing, for sure, but I have two opportunities (to land triple Axels) in the long and I plan to do them both."
Vaughn Chipeur, 22, of Edmonton was sixth with 65.65.
Meanwhile, in women’s singles, Mao Asada and Joannie Rochette continued to pay a price for failing to master the required elements that have to be served up in the two minutes 40 seconds allotted for the short program.
They are fantastic free-skating performers, but the demands of the short have so far kept them from the heights they would otherwise have reached.
Asada was third and Rochette fifth in the women’s short Friday night.
At the world championships last March, the 17-year-old Japanese would have won gold had she not struggled to fifth in the short in Tokyo. She won the free skating but was too far behind teammate Miki Ando to bump her off the top of the podium. She had to settle for silver.
The 21-year-old Canadian champion would have accomplished a career breakthrough had she not sunk to 16th in the short in Tokyo. She rebounded with the fifth-best free-skating routine, but was left 10th in the overall standings.
Their troubles in the short continue.
Laura Lepisto, a 19-year-old Finn ranked second in her homeland and competing in her first senior Grand Prix meet, was a surprising first with 59.18 points.
Emily Hughes, the 18-year-old American who finished ninth at the 2007 world championships with a solid short, showed her consistency in the technical aspects of skating with second-best marks of 58.72.
Asada got 58.08 and 22-year-old Yukari Nakano of Japan got 55.94.
Rochette, the three-time Canadian champ from Ile Dupas, Que., got 55.48. She landed a triple flip poorly and was sub-par on her double Axel and her triple Lutz.
"Everything was shaky," she admitted.
The poor flip landing forced her to reduce a scheduled triple-triple combo to a triple-double.
"It’s getting better every time in practice," she said of her oft-absent triple-triple. "It’s really getting there.
"It’s a matter of doing it when it counts now."
She said she might have been "over-excited" on this night.
"I felt like a kid wanting to try something new," she said. "I’m sure it will be better at the next competition."
It can’t happen soon enough if she ever wants to be a world medals contender.
She said she’d take coach Manon Perron shopping after the latest missed triple-triple. Perron gave her $100 after she landed the combo last summer, and now Rochette feels she should give her coach the $100 back.
"It’s good to have a little punishment," she said with a laugh. .
The women’s free-skating show is Saturday and Asada can still finish first overall, and probably will, while Rochette will land on the podium, too, if she rises to the occasion — as she’s so often done in the past.
Lesley Hawker, 26, of Barrie, Ont., was ninth in the short with 46.96 and Cynthia Phaneuf, 19, of Contrecoeur, Que., was 10th among 12 with 46.02. .
Meanwhile, the crowd loved Jessica Dube and Bryce Davison, but it was clear after their performance that the Canadian pairs champions have a ways to go before they are capable of winning a world championship medal.
World bronze medallists Aliona Savchenko and Robin Szolkowy earned a first-place score of 69.44 in the short program.
Dube and Davison, making several errors, got 63.12 and are second going into the free skating Saturday.
The timing of their difficult Axel lasso lift was slightly off, Davison didn’t execute one of his spins as proficiently as usual, and their death spiral was "a tiny bit short" in Davison’s mind.
"Those things are so small and so technical that if you don’t pay close attention and you get caught up in your performance sometimes, especially early in the season, those things will happen," said Davison. .
It wasn’t a total loss. They even felt this was a better short than they produced in winning Skate America gold last weekend.
"Our level of performance here was much higher," said Davison. "We were putting more into each movement and we were even enjoying ourselves a little bit more out there, which for us changes a lot."
The Colisee Pepsi crowd ate up every second of their two minutes 40 seconds in front of the judges.
"Everyone cheering for us, it was just awesome," said Dube.
Dube, 20, and Davison, 21, finished seventh at the last two world championships. They’ll have to clean up their mistakes if they want to be in the elite group where Savchenko, 23, and Szolkowy, 28, reside.
Japanese-born Yuko Kawaguchi, 26, and Alex Smirnov, 23, of Russia were third with 60.00. .
Anabelle Langlois, 26, of Grand Mere, Que., and Cody Hay, 24, of Grande Prairie, Alta., were fourth with 53.98. Langlois put a hand to the ice to steady herself on her throw triple Lutz landing. The two were 10th at the 2007 world championships.
"There’s a lot of things we felt were really good," said Langlois. "We felt pretty comfortable.
"The crowd was awesome. We were a little disappointed we didn’t hit the (scoring) levels we had set up for ourselves on some of our elements. We put in a triple twist this year. It didn’t get the points we were hoping for. We need to put in a lot more work into it.
"But we improved on a lot of things — more speed and more presentation. Still, we saw the second mark was quite low. So, there’s quite a lot of work still to do."
Meagan Duhamel of Lively, Ont., and Craig Buntin of Kelowna, B.C., were fifth among six with 52.78. .
Duhamel, 21, and Buntin, 27, just teamed up in June. He’d won three Canadian titles and placed as high as fifth at world championships with previous partner Valerie Marcoux.
"Just to step on that ice and hear "Meagan Duhamel and Craig Buntin representing Canada" felt so good," said Buntin. "There was such a smile on my face.
"It’s been such a roller coaster over the last five or six months."
He had a difficult time finding a new partner.
"There is nobody out there who can fully appreciate or understand how I feel right now except for this little girl right here," he said as he glanced towards Duhamel. "Just to make to where we are, I’m really, really proud." .
In ice dancing, Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir grabbed a big early lead by earning 36.25 points for their Yankee Polka compulsory.
Virtue, 18, of London, Ont., and Moir, 20, of Ilderton, Ont., won the world junior title in 2006 and were sixth in their senior world championship debut last March in Tokyo. They continue to build a solid base for a shot at a medal at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.
"We want to take the next step up into the top (group) in the world," says Moir. .
Italians Anna Cappellini, 20, and Luca Lanotte, 22, were second with 32.23.
Melissa Gregory, 26, and Russian-born husband Denis Petukhov, 29, of the United States were third with 32.03.
Allie Hann-McCurdy, 20, and Michael Coreno, 23, who are coached by former world champion Victor Kraatz in Burnaby, B.C., were seventh with 25.51, and Kaitlyn Weaver, 18, and Andrew Poje, 20, of Waterloo, Ont., got 25.07 for eighth place among 10 couples going into the original dance Saturday.