Cha Jun-hwan of South Korea holds up his silver medal won in the men’s singles at the International Skating Union Four Continents Figure Skating Championships at the National Indoor Stadium in Beijing on Sunday in this AFP photo. (Yonhap) Figure skater Cha Jun-hwan finished second at his final Olympic tuneup competition in China on Sunday, thanks to his best free skate of a season plagued by nagging ankle issues.
Cha earned a season-best 273.62 points overall at the International Skating Union Four Continents Figure Skating Championships at the National Indoor Stadium in Beijing, ending up only 0.11 point behind the winner from Japan, Kao Miura.
Cha scored his season-best 184.73 points in Sunday’s free skate, the highest mark among 24 contestants, a day after putting up 88.89 points in the short program to rank sixth.
Miura only had the fourth-best free skate score of 175.14 points but he had led Cha by nearly 10 points in the short program and hung on for his second career Four Continents title.
Sota Yamamoto of Japan finished third with 270.07 points.
The Four Continents championships are open to non-European skaters, with those from Asia, North America, South America, Africa and Oceania taking the ice.
Cha, the 2022 Four Continents champion who also grabbed silver in 2025 and bronze in 2024, is headed to his third consecutive Winter Olympics in the Italian city of Milan next month.
He placed 15th at his Olympic debut on home ice at the 2018 PyeongChang Games, and then finished fifth four years later in Beijing — the best Olympic performance by a South Korean male figure skater.
The 24-year-old has been dealing with nagging ankle issues all season, brought on by his difficulty finding the pair of boots that fit, and it has forced him to alter his programs as he now attempts two quadruple jumps in the free skate, down from his usual three.
With Sunday’s clean free skate, though, Cha showed those problems are now mostly behind him.
He opened his program with the clean execution of the quadruple salchow and the quadruple toe loop, which set the tone for the rest of the way. Cha then nailed his triple lutz and triple axel, and later earned additional execution points for a series of combination jumps, step sequence and spins.
Cha was still in first place overall with only Miura left to take the ice. The Japanese skater, who had also won the 2023 Four Continents, failed to land two of his first three quadruple jumps cleanly, but still scored enough points to hold off Cha with 273.73 points overall.
Whether Cha’s performance Sunday will bolt him to medal contention in Milan remains to be seen, given the absence of some big names at the Four Continents — including Ilia Malinin of the United States, the two-time world champion, and Yuma Kagiyama of Japan, the 2022 Olympic silver medalist.
Cha will be joined at the Olympics by Kim Hyun-gyeom, who finished 17th at the Four Continents with 208.92 points.
The third South Korean skater in action Sunday, Lee Jae-keun, scored 211.22 points overall to finish 16th. (Yonhap)