I did promise to get to the pairs eventually, right? It’s my favorite discipline, after all! The trouble is the competition schedule: by the time I had finished editing the ladies’ short it was already time for the men’s, and then the ladies’ free, and then the men’s free, and now I’m about to get on a plane back home from Helsinki and I still have to edit the pairs free skate as well. Hopefully I can finish that on the plane, if my laptop battery holds out! Meanwhile, here is the pairs short program. As with previous SP posts, there’s one slideshow for each warm-up group and then separate galleries for each of the skaters in the last group (who had the best qualifying scores to get into the competition and so could be presumed to have the best shot at winning). As it happened, defending champions Duhamel and Radford had a poor short program and placed seventh, and Sui/Han from the sixth warm-up group moved up (and ended up winning the overall, but I’m getting ahead of myself). With the earlier groups, generally the only shots I have are opening and closing poses, plus bows.

Group 1: Ioulia Chtchetinina/Noah Scherer (SUI), Ekaterina Alexandrovskaya/Harley Windsor (AUS), Zoe Jones/Christopher Boyadji (GBR), Anna Duskova/Martin Bidar (CZE)

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Group 2: Goda Butkute/Nikita Ermolaev (LTU), Emilia Simonen/Matthew Penasse (FIN), Lana Petranovic/Antonio Souza-Kordeiru (CRO), Lola Esbrat/Andrei Novoselov (FRA)

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Group 3: Sumire Suto/Francis Boudreau-Audet (JPN), Tatiana Danilova/Mikalai Kamianchuk (BLR), Xiaoyu Yu/Hao Zhang (CHN), Tae Ok Ryom/Yu Sik Kim (PRK)

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Group 4: Daria Beklemisheva/Mark Magyar (HUN), Minerva Fabienne Hase/Nolan Seegert (GER), Haven Denney/Brandon Frazier (USA), Natalia Zabiiako/Alexander Enbert (RUS)

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Group 5: Valentina Marchei/Ondrej Hotarek (ITA), Liubov Ilyushechkina/Dylan Moscovitch (CAN), Miriam Ziegler/Severin Kiefer (AUT), Julianne Seguin/Charlie Bilodeau (CAN)

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Group 6: Vanessa James/Morgan Cipres (FRA), Alexa Scimeca Knierim/Chris Knierim (USA), Nicole Della Monica/Matteo Guarise (ITA), Wenjing Sui/Cong Han (CHN)

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Group 7:

Aliona Savchenko/Bruno Massot (GER)

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Ksenia Stolbova/Fedor Klimov (RUS)

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Evgenia Tarasova/Vladimir Morozov (RUS)

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Meagan Duhamel/Eric Radford (CAN)

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