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Show I Cook falls to sixth MINNEAPOLIS For Bountiful's premier figure skater Holly Cook, a disappointing season ended in disappointment as two falls in the final freeskate program dropped her to sixth place in national skating competition Saturday. Cook, who burst onto the skating scene last season, winning the Pacific Coast championships and gliding to a bronze medal in both national and world competition, watched as Portland's Tonya Harding's Har-ding's history -making performance catapulted her to a national championship. Harding performed the first successful triple axel by an American woman in Saturday's freeskate program, a particularly poignant personal per-sonal achievement, considering Harding fell attempting the same move in the 1991 Pacific Coast Sectionals held in Bountiful just one month before. Harding took third in the 1989 nationals but only managed to eke out a seventh place finish in Salt Lake at the 1990 nationals due to illness. il-lness. Favored Kristi Yamaguchi and Nancy Kerrigan finished second and third in Saturday's competition held at the Target Center in Minneapolis, Min-neapolis, Minn. Harding, Yamaguchi and Kerrigan will represent the United States in the 1991 world championships destined for Munich next month. After Saturday's performance, a disappointed Cook, 20, told reporters she is anxious to return to Colorado Springs in preparation for next year's competition which may include an Olympic appearance ap-pearance if she can return to one of the top three spots in the 1992 Cook found herself behind in preparation for this year's competition competi-tion as a month-long exhibition tour after last year's world championships cham-pionships and the inability to find uncluttered practice time in Bountiful, Boun-tiful, cost her valuable training time. Eventually Cook began training in Colorado. In Saturday's competition, Cook successfully executed her first two jumps but fell on her second and third triples which were a salchow and a triple loop. Later, Cook lost additional points leaning out of a jump and, instead in-stead of performing a triple loop in a scheduled combination jump, she tried doubling it In the technical scoring, Cook's scores ranged from as low as 5.2 and as high as 5.5, the highest available being a perfect 6. Judges were equally stingy in the artistic impression category with marks ranging from 5.1 to 5.5. Tonia Kwiatkowski and Tisha Walker claimed fourth and fifth places ahead of Cook. After last-year's dream performances at nationals and worlds, Cook said her next goal was to skate in the Olympics-a goal which Cook's coach Kris Sherard told reporters her star pupil was still reaching for. |