• Youth was served as the 2010 U.S. Figure Skating Championships wrapped up at the Spokane Arena on Saturday night.
• They ascended the mountain that is United States ice dancing. Now Meryl Davis and Charlie White will take on the world.
• Columnist John Blanchette gives a roundup of “House Rules” for the next time around.
• Many downtown business managers said this year’s 10-day event produced sales far exceeding their usual Januaries. Others said the impact has been slight.
  

Rachael Flatt edged out Mirai Nagasu to win the senior ladies title, with Ashley Wagner earning third.

Sasha Cohen’s comeback hit a bump as the popular 2006 Olympic silver medalist stumbled in her free skate.

Check the full results for the senior ladies free skate program and overall.

Press conference audio

• Medalists discuss free skate programs

All eyes are on Sasha Cohen, with Mirai Nagasu sitting in first place by a tenths of a point and Rachael Flatt trailing by about the same.

Read John Blanchette’s column on Cohen, check the full standings, and click through for today’s skating order.

Meryl Davis and Charlie White upset Tanith Belbin and Ben Agosto to take first place in the ice dancing comeptition. Full results are here.

Press conference audio

• Medalists on their performances

• Meryl Davis on the depth of U.S. ice dancing

• Tanith Belbin on returning to Olympics

• Bronze medalists Evan Bates and Emily Samuelson on the Olympics

It’s the final day of competition at the Arena. First up is the Championship free dance. Preview the competition, check results as they’re posted, and click through for the full skating order.

A number of videos related to the U.S. Figure Skating Championship are cropping up on YouTube, some from the skaters themselves. Senior ladies skater Ashley Wagner has posted a couple of video blogs, or vlogs, for instance.

Click “continue reading” to view a selection of them.

Photos out of tonight’s Championship Dance original dance program. Check back in a while for more.

Meryl Davis and Charlie Davis finished in first place for the event, with Tanith Belbin and Benjamin Agosto and Emily Samuelson and Evan Bates in second and third, respectively.

Scott Hamilton, skating star turned skating commentator, is at the Arena in a visible way. During the slow times, he often walks through the stands, chatting with people.

Friday afternoon, he signed an autograph for 7-year-old Craig Anderson who is pictured here with Hamilton, and Craig’s mom, Kirsten Anderson, and Craig’s grandma, Elsbeth Ellis.

The Andersons live in Ephrata. Grandma Elsbeth lives in Trail, B.C. They’ve been here the entire championships, staying in a motel in north Spokane.

In between competitions and practices, when nothing’s going on, they remain at the Arena. They take walks or chat with other regulars near their seats in Row N, right next to the media seating. They don’t get bored, they said. Craig has a DS to occupy him.

Why the intense devotion? “We’re Canadians,” Kirsten explained. “We love figure skating. And we couldn’t afford the Olympics.”

Stylists-in-training and their instructors from Paul Mitchell: The School Spokane have volunteered their time to prepare faces and hair for skaters before their performances.

“It’s such a great opportunity,” said instructor Candy Javier, pictured here on the left.

“Everyone has been so kind and nice,” said student Andrea Pohle, also pictured here.

In a makeshift salon “backstage” from the ice, these stylists are learning how to do the special “air brush” makeup that looks good on HD TV.  

They often have less than 30 minutes to get the skaters ready for show time, another great experience.

The stylist volunteers have done  makeup and hair for the majority of the skaters. Even the bigger names don’t travel with their own makeup/hair people. (Sometimes, it’s just their moms.)

Javier said that even a judge or two have stepped in for a face refresher.

And Johnny Weir? Nope, he never even asked for a touch up.

A server at Frank’s Diner named Gage got a great tip today, according to Pam Scott of the Spokane Regional Convention & Visitors  Bureau.

Gage was waiting on a skater’s parents but didn’t know it. She asked them if they were going to see any of the figure skating. They told her their son was a skater. They then asked her if she’d seen any skating so far. Gage told them it didn’t fit into her finances, but she was happy for Spokane.

So for her tip, the parents left her their two tickets to the Sunday Skating Spectacular.

Update (9:15 p.m.): I’ve added some links to other coverage of the Senior Ladies short program at the end of this post. Click “Read more.”

Return to form. In some ways, the senior ladies short program Thursday night was the Sasha Cohen show. Yes, 16-year-old Mirai Nagasu, of Montebello, Calif., was in first place after the event. But 2006 champion and Olympic silver medalist Cohen, making her comeback to competition, had the crowd glued to her every move. She also had the media’s attention. As one Twitter user commented after Cohen’s performance, “Section 124 in the Spokane Arena is completely empty right now. Not one person. It’s the media seating.” Read more on the short program from Dave Trimmer.

Let’s dance. In Thursday’s other main event, ice dancing favorites and defending champs Meryl Davis and Charlie White scored a personal best to lead the field heading into tonight’s original dance and Saturday’s conclusion. Five-time champs Tanith Belbin and Ben Agosto were in second and, as Greg Lee writes in today’s paper, the only real question is which team will lock up the bronze and the final spot on the Olympic roster.

Aiming for gold, circa 2014. Rebecca Nappi caught up with novice men’s silver medalist Emmanuel Savary, 12, and his older brother at the Arena. The Delaware skater dreams of Olympic Gold in 2014, when he’ll be 16. “It was where he belonged, on the ice,” said Joel Savary, his brother. “He was happiest there.”

Compliments to the host. U.S. Figure Skating officials heaped praise on Spokane at a Thursday press conference. “Skating goes all over the country and we have not experienced anywhere else the experience we have had here in Spokane,” president Patricia St. Peter said. … It is just phenomenal.” Spokane is near the ticket-sales record it set in 2007 with two days of competition and Sunday’s exhibitions remaining. Read the story.

The much-anticipated Senior Ladies competition kicks off tonight at 7:30. Among the programs stirring excitement is Sasha Cohen’s. She is competing for the first time tonight since winning an Olympic silver medal and a bronze at the World Championships in 2006. But skating fans will have to watch 14 skaters perform before it’s her turn.

Click “Continue reading” for tonight’s skating order.

See the post below for standings after Thursday’s compulsory dance event.

Ice skaters competing in Compulsory Dance this morning, performing the same selected dance – the Golden Waltz – to the same music. The skaters compete at 6 p.m. Friday in the Original Dance and 11:40 a.m. Saturday in the Free Dance.

The top-standing skaters after this morning’s competition:
1. Meryl Davis/Charlie White, 45.42
2. Tanith Belbin/Benjamin Agosto, 45.02
3. Kimberly Navarro/Brent Bommentre, 37.60
4. Emily Samuelson/Evan Bates, 37.36

People have been praising Arena workers for the spotless Arena. Workers come by and pick up litter at every turn. And supposedly, skating fans are a tidy bunch, compared to hockey and Shock football fans.

I was hoping to interview two of the maintenance workers this afternoon for one of my snapshots, and I even had two women picked out. But Kevin Twohig, the man in charge, said no to the interviews.

He said the Arena’s more than 500 workers are all in it together and focusing on just one or two wouldn’t be fair. He wants the community to focus on the event, not the employees of the Arena.

But kudos to those cleaners anyway. They’ve been getting lots of praise.

Scottie Bibb, public relations head honcho for U.S. Figure Skating, counted up for me today the number of media folks at the championships. She issued credentials for 230 print journalists and photographers. This includes newspapers, magazines and the skating publications.

Another 30 broadcast media got credentials, and NBC has about 150 folks, she said. That’s more than 400 journalists running around (though some of the media folks went home between the two big weekends.)

Not bad, for an industry — print and broadcast —  that’s allegedly dying.

And one more note from Bibb: She said the late-night Figure Skater folks are very appreciative to the Davenport for serving them food and drink when they get back very late from the Arena. They are working 16-18 hour days.

Here are some rumors around the Arena. Don’t know exactly how to check these out, so if any of you know, let us know.

Supposedly these celebrities have been spotted at the championships: Ben Affleck, Ryan Seacrest and Meryl Streep.

I’ll do more digging tomorrow (if time) but if anyone caught a glimpse or a photo, tell us about it.

It could just be the type of talk that happens at skating championships in those long hours between competitions.

Not whiskey talk, but Zamboni talk, perhaps.

(Zamboni is the machine that cleans the ice.)

And speaking of whiskey, it is kind of strange to watch people drink beer while women skate. The white wine fits, but big beers? A little odd.

All through the Arena, and even on the shuttle buses, you’ll see folks lugging medium size suitcases, usually black, behind them. They are about the size of carry-on roller bags you see on airplanes.

Turns out those are skaters and coaches dragging those bags behind them, and in the rolling bags are their skates and costumes. They take them with them everywhere because there really isn’t a safe place to stow them. And like women’s purses, they are a sort of security blanket for the skaters.

Juniors compete in the novice free dance Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2010.

Sasha Cohen practices at the Spokane Arena Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2010, in preparation for the ladies short program.  The ladies short program is set for Thursday at 7:30 p.m.

The senior ice dance partners take to the ice for practice.  The compulsary dance competition is Thursday, Jan, 21, 2010, at 10:30 a.m.

Repeat visitors to this blog have probably noticed the Twitter widget in the right sidebar. In it you can find what figure skaters – many of them Olympians – are posting to the social networking service.

The posts range from mundane to introspective, but all are succinct.

Below are some of our favorites from over the last week. We’ll keep watching the stream and adding those tweets that stand out for their humor, pith or sentiment.

More tweets from skaters

In 2005, when Jamie Neely and I did “Zagquest” at the Big Dance in Tucson, we marveled over the way the basketball players looked “like long and thin creatures from another dimension.” You can’t adequately describe what athletes of their ilk look like close-up.

At the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, it’s just the reverse. Most of the skaters, who look average-size on camera, are indescribably small when you see them close-up. Small, compact, fit like “creatures from another dimension.”

Realized today, the basketball players and the skaters stand out in our culture because the rest of us live and work with people who are generally average in size.

My niece Gretchen, who lives in Los Angeles, says when you see movie stars in person, it’s a similar disconnect. The women often have large heads and teeny, tiny bodies (a formula that looks great on camera). And the men? Most are short, very short.

S-R photographer Kathy Plonka and I got to go “backstage” in the Arena where the skaters hang out in a special lounge and where there’s a medical room. The only people usually allowed back there are skaters, coaches, parents and other support staff for the skaters.

We got back there to do a story on the medical room where health care providers look after the skaters. As we walked by the skater entrance to the Arena, a skater was waiting to get on. Her coach stood near by. They both looked extremely tense.

The skater’s coach saw me, saw Kathy and her cameras, and literally said “Shoo” and waved wildly at the small space between us and them.

I laughed, a nervous kind of laugh, because I didn’t know if we had violated some etiquette without knowing it. He scowled and looked away.

I saw him later in the “kiss and cry” area with the skater. He didn’t look too happy there, either. 

Former Olympic gold medalist Kristi Yamaguchi will be signing autographs at FanFest in River Park Square on Saturday, according to the official Twitter voice of the 2010 U.S. Figure Skating Championships.

Yamaguchi, who won gold at the 1992 Olympics as well as two world championships (1991,1992) and the 1992 U.S. championship, will be at the mall from 3:30 to 4 p.m. Saturday, according to event officials.

She’s scheduled to join the other former U.S. gold medalists on the Spokane Arena ice on Sunday for the final performance of the 2010 championships.

Photo: Kristi Yamaguchi appears at a 2008 fundraiser. (Associated Press)

We know our photographers aren’t the only ones toting cameras around the Spokane Arena. If you’ve been taking snapshots of the action or your group enjoying the skating and would like to share, we’d love to see them.

Visit this page to upload your photo. It’s as easy as adding a photo to Facebook. And you can see your work right here on this blog.

Questions? E-mail us.

Repeat performer? Mirai Nagasu wowed the fans in Spokane as she captured the junior ladies gold medal in 2007. Now she’s hoping to do the same as a senior. It wouldn’t be her first championship: She did so in 2008. Dave Trimmer talked with Nagasu about her expectations, the return of Sasha Cohen and other things.

Monday’s mentions. There was plenty of action at the Arena on Monday, even if it wasn’t as star-studded as the weekend’s events. Novice skater Ashley Cain had a particularly busy day, finishing the ladies free skate in first and taking gold in the pairs competition with Joshua Reagan. Read about other winners in junior pairs, novice men and novice pairs or check out the full results.

Staying sharp. Rebecca Nappi chatted with Larry Muxlow, a skate sharpener and repair technician. In exchange for rinkside seats, Muxlow has to make sure nicked laces, loose screws or dull blades play no part in a skater’s performance.

Photo: Joshua Reagan and Ashley Cain performed well enough to place 1st in the novice pairs finals during the U. S. Figure Skating Championships, Jan 18, 2010 in the Spokane Arena. (Dan Pelle / The Spokesman-Review)