Pereira & Michaud win pairs bronze at figure skating world championships

Lia Pereira and Trennt Michaud are world championship medallists.

The duo skated to the bronze medal in the pairs event at the 2026 ISU Figure Skating World Championships in Prague, Czechia on Thursday.

For the first time in their career, Pereira and Michaud broke the 200-point barrier with their personal best total score of 216.09. That put them on the podium behind the new world champions, Minerva Fabienne Hase and Nikita Volodin of Germany (228.33), and silver medallists Anastasiia Metelkina and Luka Berulava of Georgia (218.41).

“I think it’s a little hard to describe right now,” Pereira said when asked how they were doing. “The roller coaster of emotions before we step on the ice and then while we’re on the ice and throughout the program. We’re really proud of how we handled all of it. We skated our hearts out there and left it all out there and I think that was shown so we’re very happy.”

Pereira and Michaud started the event with a personal best short program score of 75.52 on Wednesday, skating even better than they did during their Olympic debuts at Milano Cortina 2026 where they also placed third in the short program.

“We took a lot of confidence from that,” Michaud said in reference to what they learned from their Olympic experience. “As an elite athlete you want to be able to step on [the ice] and do the best you absolutely can the very first time, but having the experiences at the Olympics, skating great programs at the Olympics and then taking that from here into this helped us be able to perform the way we wanted to today.

“Knowing that if we focused on ourselves and what we could do, we could achieve what we wanted to. And we’ve done that today so it’s pretty cool.”

At the Olympic Games, Pereira and Michaud dropped back to eighth place overall after the free skate. But this time, with the world championship podium in their sights, they were able to earn a personal best in the free skate.

They scored 140.57, six points higher than their previous best, which was set during the Olympic team event. The only notable error in the program was Michaud putting his free foot down on the landing on their side-by-side triple salchows. Just as importantly, they achieved level four on all of their lifts, their triple twist, and their pairs spin, while their death spiral was at level three.

Pereira and Michaud actually finished second behind only the Germans in the free skate. But the Georgians had a buffer of almost four points on the Canadians after the short program, which kept them ahead of Pereira and Michaud overall.

Canada’s second pairs team, Kelly Ann Laurin and Loucas Éthier, placed 19th.

Earlier in the day, Stephen Gogolev placed fifth in the men’s short program with a personal best score of 94.38. He had a clean performance that included a quad toe-triple toe combo, a quad salchow, and a triple axel. He also got level four on his three spins and his step sequence. That put him into the final flight for Saturday’s free skate. He sits 2.11 points back of a podium position.