Canadians 3rd and 4th in pairs event at the world figure-skating championships

Meagan Duhamel and Eric Radford had a good, not great, free skate at the world figure-skating championships Thursday in Saitama, Japan.

A fall by Duhamel on the landing of their side-by-side triple salchows may or may not have cost them one step on the podium. But the top Canadian team still came away with a bronze medal.

The winners were 30-year-old Aliona Savchenko and 34-year-old Robin Szolkowy of Germany, who eased to the gold medal as the class of the field in what in all likelihood will be their final skate together.

The veteran duo, bronze medalists at the Sochi Olympics, easily outdistanced the Russian pair of Ksenia Stolbova and Fedor Klimov, who jumped ahead of the Canadians to take the silver.

Canadian Kristen Moore-Towers and Dylan Moscovitch, with a clean program and their customary eye-popping lifts, finished just off the podium in fourth place.

Second after the short program, Duhamel and Radford were fourth in the free skate. Moore-Towers and Moscovitch finished ahead of them in the long program even though overall, Duhamel and Radford posted a season's best score.

Moore-Towers and Moscovitch also finished fourth at the last year's world championships.

With the bronze medal, Duhamel and Radford also matched last year's result.

Earlier on, No. 3 Canadian team Paige Lawrence and Rudi Stiegers skated to a 12th place finish in their first world championships.

Click here to see the full results.

The ladies' short program was scheduled to begin at 4 p.m. in Japan (3 a.m. EDT). Featured Canadians are Kaetlyn Osmond (5:37 a.m. start) and Gabrielle Daleman (3 :15 a.m.). You can catch it online here.