The junior portion of the championships wrapped up on what was Day 7 in Greensboro, North Carolina, with winners declared in the junior men’s, dance and ladies’ competitions.

After building a nearly 11-point lead following the short programs, Andrew Torgashev didn’t rest on his laurels and instead lapped the competition with a brilliant 149.63 in his free skate. He finished with a final score of 225.24, which set a record, per U.S. Figure Skating:

“I was a bit surprised myself, but then I thought, why do I have to be surprised?” said Torgashev after his victory, per Craig Davis of the South Florida Sun Sentinel. “I’ve been doing that in practice for the last four weeks.”

The battle for second place was rather close, with Kevin Shum beating out Paolo Borromeo and Aleksei Krasnozhon by 3.06 and 3.14 points, respectively.

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Twenty-three years ago, when the then-reigning national champion attempted to defend her title, she performed to a baffling mix of the Robin Hood score, jazz saxophonist Gato Barbieri’s “Europa,” and “Sleeping Bag” by ZZ Top. It wouldn’t be the grandest imbroglio of the skater’s career – what with the later whack attack on Nancy Kerrigan – but at the time, with Harding’s teased tuft of bangs flopping in the wind, a torso’s worth of gold-sequin snowflake appliqués flying over the ice and ZZ Top crackling from a faltering sound system, her performance was transfixing, if not dazzling.

The year before, Harding had also skated to a peculiar cut that veered anarchically between snatches of musical genres, and part of the excitement of watching her compete derived from this mysterious incoherency. One moment, Harding might be plowing down the ice toward a triple Axel, a blonde, badass chevalier, the next, working her neck to the call of early Nineties percussion. A Harding program was something like a malfunctioning iPod Shuffle, and it was thrilling. Today, its wild card musical styling remains a rarity in the skating world, with skaters favoring reiterations of Swan Lake, Carmen and, perhaps lacking prescience, “Nessun Dorma” (“None Shall Sleep”). Hence: lyrics.

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