Japan\u2019s skaters stole the spotlight as the Americans largely struggled in their attempts to end a two-decade medal drought<\/p>\n
Japanese teenager Ami Nakai was the surprise leader after the short program of the Olympic women\u2019s figure skating competition on a night when her country\u2019s skaters largely stole the spotlight from Team USA\u2019s Blade Angels<\/a> in their bid to end America\u2019s two-decade medal drought.<\/p>\n Nakai delivered a clean, commanding skate on Tuesday, highlighted by a soaring triple axel for a personal-best score of 78.71, edging three-time world champion Kaori Sakamoto (77.23) into second. Only Alysa Liu of the United States was able to break the Japanese hold on the top spots, scoring 76.59 to come in ahead of fourth-placed Mone Choba (74.00).<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Japan\u2019s skaters stole the spotlight as the Americans largely struggled in their attempts to end a two-decade medal drought Japanese teenager Ami Nakai was the surprise leader after the short program of the Olympic women\u2019s figure skating competition on a night when her country\u2019s skaters largely stole the spotlight from Team USA\u2019s Blade Angels in … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66591\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}