Promising Pair

Carolyn MacCuish and Andrew Evans surely felt plenty of those moments of awe, as some of the champions they've looked up to passed them in the hallways of the Metro Centre.
Now they own Canadian championships gold medals of their own.
MacCuish and Evans didn't wait long to make a splash at their first Canadians, winning the junior pairs crown this afternoon. The first-year juniors were tops in both the short program and the free skate, with their 122.02-point total edging out Montrealers Amanda Velenosi and Mark Fernandez (119.07) for the gold.
“Honestly, we're surprised,” said Evans, 18, of Caledon East, Ont. “We came in hoping to be top five, make the junior national team and get some trips around the world.”
That's a given now, considering Skate Canada sent them to a pair of Junior Grand Prix events this season. They finished sixth in Oslo and seventh in Liberac, Czech Republic.
“They have a great future,” said Jacinthe Lariviere, a former Canadian pairs champion (with Lenny Faustino) who coaches the young team at the Mariposa School of Skating in Barrie, Ont. with Lee Barkell and Shane Dennison. “They work really hard at home ... They know what they want, and they have a lot of confidence in each other.”
MacCuish and Evans previously trained in Toronto with coach Kim Hanford. But when Hanford retired, she directed them to the Mariposa camp. It meant MacCuish had to leave home in Burlington, Ont., at the tender age of 13 (she's 14 now).
“It's really young (to leave home),” said Lariviere. “I can tell you her mom misses her a lot, but she knows she's happy.”
Never more so than yesterday.
“Sometimes, it's a bit difficult,” said a smiling MacCuish, who boards with a family in Barrie. “But winning today makes it all worthwhile.”
(An aside: Dennison's wife, Jennifer Robinson, left Windsor, Ont., when she was 13 to move to Barrie, and has told the story many times of crying in the back seat of the car almost all the way on the drive to her new home. Six Canadian titles, and top-10 finishes at the Olympics and world championships later, things worked out rather well in the end, we think. Oh, yeah ... she still happily lives in Barrie).
The last two years, MacCuish and Evans were medallists at the Skate Canada Junior Nationals — silver as pre-novices in 2005, and bronze in novice a year ago. So this was their first trip to the “big Canadians,” as Evans called it.
“It's so much different but it's so much more fun,” he said. “We see all the people we idolized and watch them go by and just go 'wow.' ”
Welcome to the Canadian champions' club, kids.