UPDATED
Jessica Calalang and Brian Johnson won silver in the Pairs finals in Nashville Saturday night, but it wasn’t enough to get them to the Olympics, reports Fanzone.
That after Ashley Cain-Gribble and Timothy LeDuc took the crown, winning by more than 15 points over the second-place finishers.
Two teams will be sent to Beijing for the Winter Games, but the selection committee chose Alexa Knierim and Brandon Frazier for the second slot after the 2021 champions withdrew when Frazier tested positive for the coronavirus, reports NBC Sports.
It was the same thing the committee did for the women’s team, naming Alysa Liu although she had pulled out of the finals-also due to a positive COVID test.
This is Calalang and Johnson’s third silver medal in the row at Nationals.
“That wasn’t the performance that we wanted,” Calalang said to Fanzone. “We wanted to take the approach to just stay present, stay in the moment, so I feel like we accomplished that. We really took everything step by step, and in that performance, we really had to fight for each element. It wasn’t easy, but we got it done.”
It’s been a long road for Calalang to even get to the finals. Last February, she received word that she had tested positive for a controlled substance. The news stunned Calalang who couldn’t figure out what she took that may have caused the test results. She retraced her footsteps, trying to solve the mystery. She did her own testing of various products she had tried, but none come back positive.
Then in September came the good news. Both the US and World Anti-Doping Agency concluded cosmetic products she had used caused the false positive.
“It’s a huge relief,” she said at the time. “My parents and family provided me with emotional support the whole time,” she shared. “They did a lot of the groundwork for me when I couldn’t function. I have family in the biochemical industry that helped me for connections to do specific research in my case.”
Calalang is Filipino American.
Audrey Lu and Misha Mitrofanov took the bronze.
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