Junior champs win pairs

St. PAUL, Minn. -- There was no way to predict what might happen in the pairs competition at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships.

It made no difference that all three of last year’s medalist teams were back. None had yet competed this season because of injury and burnout.

The reigning U.S. champions, Brooke Castile and Ben Okolski of Detroit, were sidelined by her leg and foot injuries.

The two-time U.S. champions, Rena Inoue and John Baldwin of Santa Monica, spent the fall deciding whether they wanted to compete again and the early winter doing ice shows.

The 2007 U.S. bronze medalists, Naomi Nari Nam of Irvine and Themi Leftheris of Long Beach, sat out after her hip surgery in August.

That odd situation opened the way for 2007 U.S. and world junior champions Keauna McLaughlin of Los Angeles and Rockne Brubaker of Algonquin, Ill., to become the leading U.S. pair on the circuit last fall.

And then they had to withdraw from the free skate at December’s Grand Prix Final because Brubaker had inflammation and swelling in a foot.

Needless to say, Wednesday’s short program was a crapshoot. And the winners, by 1.3 points, were McLaughlin and Brubaker, who captured the ethereal feeling of their music, Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.” Inoue and Baldwin were second.

“We don’t go anywhere to skate for second,” Brubaker said.

But this is their final competition of the season, no matter what happens in Saturday’s free skate final.

McLaughlin, 15, is three months too young for senior worlds, and Brubaker, 21, is 10 days too old for junior worlds.

“We just want to make a big bang next year,” McLaughlin said.

Castile and Okolski, 7.59 points behind the leaders in third, botched their side-by-side jumps and wobbled through a spin.

Nam and Leftheris, who wound up eighth, each fell on a different element and looked like a team that had missed 12 weeks of practice while she recovered from the surgery.

Brubaker said the other U.S. pairs’ problems were irrelevant to their situation.

“The U.S has some good teams, but we know that the best teams were the Canadians, the Germans and the Chinese,” Brubaker said. “We feel like we have an opportunity to do something the U.S. hasn’t done in a long time.”

That would be winning an Olympic pairs medal, which hasn’t happened since 1988.

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Philip Hersh covers Olympic sports for The Times and the Chicago Tribune.