European Figure Skating Championships: Costly mistake leaves Scottish ice dancers with bronze medal

After Friday’s rhythm dance, Gibson and Fear were in second place, just 1.5 points below Guillaume Cizeron and new partner Laurence Fournier-Beaudry, from France, who ultimately won with a season’s best of 135.50, taking their total score to 222.43.

However, a mistake in the twizzle element, which saw Fear drop a level, earned the British pair “grade of execution” (GOE) deduction, leaving them in third place with a score of 124.04 for the free dance and overall of 209.51, behind Italians Marco Fabbri and Charlene Guignard. Without the mistake, their score would have been likely to be around 130, placing them in second.

No British team has won European gold since Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean in 1994.

Gibson and Fear, eight-time British champions, have previously placed at the European Championships three times, with two silver medals and one bronze.

Fear said: “In the moment, I felt ‘that’s not ideal’, I knew it was very costly but we have experience in training and competition that these things do happen.

“You have to recover and get straight back into the next element or that can be costly with points. I was proud we recovered very quickly, we didn’t want to miss the experience of having this home crowd.”

They will now compete for a place on the podium at the Winter Olympics in Milan next month.

Fear said: “We get our Olympic kit on Monday here in Sheffield. We’ll have a travel day off and then get back to work.”

The top five teams were all within six points of each other after the rhythm dance. French team Evgeniia Lopareva and Geoffrey Brissaud and Lithuanians Allison Reed and Saulius Ambrulevicius finished the competition in fourth and fifth respectively after the free dance.

The European Figure Skating Championships is being held at Sheffield Arena this week in the first major figure skating competition of its kind in the UK for 14 years.

The skaters paid tribute to the near-sell out crowd of 6,500 people.

Gibson said: “We’re so proud to be British today, the crowd was incredible, the noise was like something I’ve ever experienced before and I’ll remember it for a long time.”

Fabbri added: “The crowd has been so supportive tonight for everybody, not just Lilah and Lewis.”

He said during the warm up, a hook had come loose on his boot, which his team worked hard to fix.

“In the end, I could fix it,” he said. “It was not easy. But as soon as I started skating again, the crowd were cheering for me, it was great.”

Alongside Gibson and Fear, ice dancers Phebe Bekker and James Hernandez from Guildford, Dundee-based pairs skaters Anastasia Vaipan-Law and Luke Digby, as well as women’s skater Kristen Spours and men’s competitor Edward Appleby, will compete in the Winter Olympic Games next month in both the individual and team competitions.