Zhaokai Pang and Madeline Edwards kicked off the international junior Grand Prix figure skating season with a second-place medal at Courchevel in France.
Edwards, 18, and 19-year-old Pang of Burnaby won the silver medal in ice dance in the first stop on the International Skating Union junior GP circuit following a tight battle against two Russian teams.
Edwards and Pang led after the opening short dance with a 51.84 score, just six points shy of their personal best that was achieved in their bronze-medal performance at the World junior championships last season.
Their final score of 129.62 was less than three points back of eventual champion Alla Loboda and Pavel Drozd, who garnered 132.44 points to take the gold.
The other Russian pair of Anastasia Shpilevaya and Grigory Smirnov placed third at 121.42.
Ukraine's Alexandra Nazarova and Maxim Nikitin had a strong third-place free dance to finish fourth at 120.88.
"Our big objective is to return to the world juniors and hopefully improve our result," said Pang in a Skate Canada press release. "This is exactly the kind of start we wanted to our international season. What stood out for me wasn't any particular move, but the energy we displayed from start to finish."
Last season, the former Canadian junior champions placed seventh in their senior national debut.
It was the pair's fifth career Grand Prix medal.
"We were extremely happy with how we skated," said Edwards in the release. "We were really comfortable and relaxed which is a feeling we really wanted to improve over last season. ... The talent here is very deep. The result was something we were trying not to be overly worried about at this point in the season. We just wanted this new program to show our maturity and personalities."
Last year, the Megan Wing and Aaron Lowe-coached ice dance team won a silver medal in Mexico and a bronze in the Czech Republic.
Edwards and Pang prepped for France with a first-place finish at the recent B.C./Yukon SummerSkate competition at Burnaby 8Rinks.
The two B.C. Centre of Excellance skaters will compete again next month in Aichi, Japan at the fourth stop on the junior GP circuit.
Brianna Delmaestro and Timothy Lum of Burnaby, who nipped Edwards and Pang in the ice dance free skate at the recent SummerSkate, will compete later this week at the junior Grand Prix event in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
The Burnaby ice dance team of Danielle Wu and Spencer Soo will also tackle a junior GP event in Ostrava, Czech Republic from Sept. 3 to 7.
