Anita STRAUB / Andreas STRAUB (AUT) | Junior Ice Dance Free Dance | Riga 2025

And so opening this final group, Anita Strava and brother Andrea Strava, a team that have been just off the podium before. They were fourth in Ostrava last year. Can they do enough to climb up from fifth place after the Rhythm Dance to take a medal here in the Riga? towards the Amelie soundtrack. Just beautiful music, so clear in its beat and its rhythm, offering a perfect soundtrack to this skater's choreography. And Anita and Andreas, I think this is for me, Ted, where again, I could never be in a panel because I feel like for the four years, now the fourth year that I've joined you in this Junior Grand Prix, I feel like we've seen them growing up. We've kind of been on the journey with them. So then I think, oh, no, I want them to get a medal. They deserve a medal. So I can't see beyond. You do get attached, you get attached to, I wouldn't say any one or team or whatever, but you get attached to all these juniors because you see them early on, the passion, the love, the purity of them participating. And as they grow and things change and they go up and down, it's just really wonderful to be part of that life or be part of this family. Absolutely. I mean, I know it seems silly, but these headbands that you're seeing, they've become a factor. The seniors normally get them. And you can see from Anita, the excitement, as we've seen from others, the excitement, oh, my goodness, I have, you know, the person that creates these for the skaters knows me now. They're willing to create one for me. They know the costume colors that I've got. It's all part of the experience. Did they give you one? Well, I suppose I need a costume. I look back at the Twizzles, as much as I'm just saying all that I've said about how desperately keen I am for them to have success, I have to acknowledge it was a little bit of a mismatch. I'm not sure if it'll be a level four. They're both in at four. And here we see the rough getting into the final position, a little bit of a balancer, but not a big deal. Yeah. And that's like that creative execution criteria. Judges wanted to see, as I mentioned earlier, unique or creative choreographic movements to help foster the creative execution. You see that in the choreo slide just delivered as we look now to the dance spin. A couple hitting their difficult features for level. And as ever, as is always the case, the teams just need to continue to push for greater ice coverage, speed, flow and glide, be deeper into their knees and their ankles to facilitate pushing those components ever higher. Galena joins them. Pretty impressed with those. Are they real flowers? No, they're not real, but they're given in with the colors of the skater's costume. Oh, my gosh. And so it's a lot of work. It is a lot of work. And I don't think we've seen it on the junior ranks. No, we haven't. I've never seen that. So that's it. I see on the seniors. So I forget the name of the lady who makes them. She's contacting everything on social media. Big shout out to her. She creates these and gifts them to the skaters. And so often we'll see the seniors waiting and adorning these. And now the juniors who presumably have seen that, the seniors will be so proud that they've made the cut. Exactly. 83.92. That is second for Anita and Andres in the free dance with a total competition score of 136.11. And that'll put them for the moment into first place.