Kostner wins fifth European title

ZAGREB (AFP) –

Italy’s Carolina Kostner (C) poses flanked by Russia’s Adelina Sotnikova (L) and Elizaveta Tuktamysheva on the podium in Zagreb on January 26, 2013 after the women free skating event of the ISU European Figure Skating Championships.

World champion Carolina Kostner of Italy won her fifth European women’s figure skating title here on Saturday.

With a total of 194.71 points, Kostner narrowly held off the challenge of 16-year-old Russian prodigy Adelina Sotnikova, who scored 193.99.

Another young Russian, Elizabeta Tuktamysheva was third on 188.85.

Kostner came to the championships, her first event of the season, as reigning world and European champion, but she was pushed all the way by the young Russian challengers.

Her free progamme, in which she skated to Ravel’s Bolero, saw her finish second to Tuktamysheva, who scored 1131.67 to Kostner’s 130.52.

But it was enough for the 25-year-old Italian to collect her eighth European medal and continued her remarkable run of never finishing out of the first three in these championships, since she burst on to the scene in 2006 with a bronze medal.

Last year in Nice, she won her first world title but, after her failure in the Vancouver Olympics, she totally re-thought her training strategy and spent a season working in the United States before returning to Germany to work with her long-standing coach, Michael Huth.

Spain’s Javier Fernandez performs during the men’s free skating program during European Figure Skating Championship in Zagreb, on January 26, 2013. Fernandez won the gold medal.

Earlier, in the men’s competition, Javier Fernandez became the first Spaniard to win the European title, clinching it with a fine free programme in which he landed three quadruple jumps.

The 21-year-old totalled 274.87 points, to finish ahead of France’s 2011 European champion Florent Amodio with Czech Michel Brezina in third.

He is just the fourth man in the history of figure-skating to execute three quadruple jumps in a single free programme after Timothy Goebel of the United States in 1999 and Brian Joubert of France in 2006.

Fernandez first achieved that feat at the Grand Prix Finals held in Sochi in December. He currently trains in Canada with Brian Orser, who coached South Korean Kim Yu-Na to the Olympic title in 2010.