Luna Hendricks shocked with her short dress and won first place. Amber Glenn is second. Isabeau Levito is third.

After a whole series of Challenger events, the long-awaited Grand Prix series, where the world’s best figure skaters gather, has finally begun. The competition kicked off with the girls’ performance at Skate America, who delighted the Texas audience with the variety of their short programs and, of course, a few unexpected surprises in the ranking of participants.
The star of the stage was Luna Hendricks, who has already won medals twice at the World Championships. She had certain expectations from this performance and, with all other conditions remaining the same, should not have made any serious mistakes. In this case, she could have held on to the first place. One of the characteristics of Hendricks is her ability to experiment with different looks and make striking performances on the ice. For her new performance, she chose modern dance music and added Madonna’s “Living for love” to it, which made her performance energetic and original. She also paid special attention to her costumes, staying true to her style with a minimal skirt length, which allows her to afford it given her slim figure.

Overall, Hendricks’ performance was not outstanding. The second triple lutz-triple tulup in her combination in the second half of the program was risky, as there is always the possibility of a mistake that could have lowered her score. Nevertheless, Hendricks decided to go beyond the safe options, even though her physical condition was not ideal. An observer might have noticed an undercurl on her second jump, which was also noted by the technical panel. Nevertheless, she received a confident 75.92 score, which earned her first place.

In second place was unexpectedly Amber Glenn. Previously, she was not spoiled with generous marks by the judges due to her instability, despite having a triple axel in her arsenal. She delights the audience with her unconventional choice of music, and this year she chose a remix of the hit song “Heads will roll”, which was to the audience’s liking. This performance was dynamic and modern, something that figure skating often lacks.

There were no comments on the technical aspects of Amber’s performance. She didn’t risk a triple axel, but her performance was clean and confident, with high scores. She got 71.45 points, which was a new personal record for the American.

The top three was closed by Isabeau Levito, who portrays a snake in her short program, which is even reflected in the design of her costume. It is important to note that some of the music in her program was used in the free dance of Madison Chock and Evan Bates in the 2019/20 season. Interestingly, Madison helped Isabeau with ideas for the choreography part of the program. Levito and Chock spent a lot of time together on the Stars on ice tour and at the annual training camp for U.S. figure skaters. Because of the age difference, Levito even joked about calling Choc “mom.”

Although the choreography was successful, small flaws in the technical portion prevented Levito from outperforming Glenn. The technical panel noticed an unclear rib on the triple lutz and an underperformance of the combination spin, which lowered the judges’ scores. She ended up with a score of 70.07 and temporarily placed third.

The judging team in the USA impressed with their objectivity, noting even mistakes from the leaders. Some questions remained regarding the evaluation of step lanes, as almost all skaters received the maximum level of difficulty. But overall it was strange, considering that it was the beginning of the season and all skaters seemed to be in good shape.

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