Emily Chan and Spencer Akira Howe performed their finest free skate of the season to climb from ninth after Sunday's short program and place seventh in the pairs event at the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026, on Monday.

Ellie Kam and Danny O'Shea, members of Team USA's gold-medal winning squad in the team event, joined their teammates in the top 10 with a ninth-place finish.  

This marks the second consecutive Olympics in which the United States has placed two teams in the top 10. In 2022, Alexa Knierim and Chris Knierim led Team USA in sixth while Ashley Cain and Timothy LeDuc placed eighth.

"We got to this Olympic Games because Alisa [Efimova] and Misha [Mitrofanov] weren't able to get their passport," Akira Howe said. "We wish they could be here with us. There are so many great teams in the U.S. that have surfaced in the last few years, and we hope to continue to be part of that group."

Performing to the soaring romantic ballad "Unfinished Melody" from "Ghost: The Musical," Chan and Howe kicked off their program with one of the most challenging side-by-side jump elements of the event, a triple Salchow-double Axel-double Axel sequence, that generated 11.02 points. Their elegant lifts, perfectly timed to crescendos in the music, shined with two of them earning more than eight points.

Chan's fall on a triple toe loop was the only major flaw in the compelling program, which garnered 130.25 points, a new season's best. The Boston, Massachusetts-based skaters' 200.31 total is also a season's best.
"We're stoked that we were able to deliver two strong performances and finish our Olympic Games the way we did," Howe said, adding, "We worked so hard to get to this stage. And once you make it, your brain doesn't know how to process it. ... We just feel grateful to be here, and to be able to skate as well as we did. It's a huge blessing for us."

In the lead-up to the Games, Chan shared how the skaters and their coaches, Aleksey Letov and Olga Ganicheva, focused on the details necessary to gain every point possible out of each element. It paid off with Level 4s on five of their elements, including their triple twist, combination spin and all three lifts.

"We feel trained and ready coming into this event," Chan said. "And I think that honing down and putting attention into those small details and then relying on all the training that we've done this whole entire season — putting those two things together will give us the biggest score that we can get."

Chan and Howe's Olympic showing is all the more remarkable, as their training has been balanced with Howe's commitments as a private second-class in the U.S. Army's World Class Athlete Program, a unit whose primary mission is to support nationally ranked soldiers participating in Olympic sports.

Howe enlisted in October 2024 and, at the conclusion of the 2024-25 season, attended basic training in Fort Carson, Colorado. His goal is to someday become an Army chaplain.

"[The Army] is definitely a bigger commitment, but at the same time, my duty right now is skating," Howe said at the 2026 Prevagen U.S. Figure Skating Championships. "I think the biggest thing for me is my attitude shifts and my perspective. I take skating not just as work and as a job, but also a duty at this point, and so if anything, I feel like it's actually fueled my training."

Competing at the Milano Ice Skating Arena for the fourth time in nine days at these Games, Kam and O'Shea were again electric in their free skate to a medley by Cinematic Pop that included "Sweet Dreams," "Eleanor Rigby" and "Everybody Wants to Rule the World."

Despite a tough start in which Kam fell on the landings of a triple Salchow and throw triple Lutz, she recovered to solidly land a throw triple loop.

The Colorado Springs, Colorado-based skaters shone in the final third of their program, with three superb Level 4 lifts, all among the finest in the event. Their final Axel lasso lift tallied more than nine points.
They scored 122.71 points for their free skate and ended with 194.58 points total.

"It's definitely a mixed bag of emotions," Kam said. "I'm a little disappointed. I wish I could have held out a little bit longer for another clean skate. …. We had a great practice this morning and an even better warmup. I felt like we were ready to leave it all out there, and we did, just not in the way we thought it was going to go. But I'm still so proud of everything that we've done here. I feel like all the work that we've put in at home has carried through to this competition, and we're excited to keep pushing until Worlds next month."

"Skating on Olympic ice is literally a dream coming true," O'Shea added. "This whole time we've been here is an amazing experience. It's definitely one where we're feeling a little tired by the end of it, but we're proud of the whole body of work we put out across the time we've been here."

Rounding out the Olympic Games program for figure skating is the women. The women's short program is set for Tuesday at 12:45 p.m. ET.

For full results and to follow Team USA at the Olympic Winter Games, including the full schedule, bios, news and more, visit the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026 Competition Central.