One year ago, Ami Nakai delivered two breakout performances to win her senior Grand Prix debut in France. Four months later, she earned an Olympic bronze medal.
This week, Nakai, now a headliner, needed to rally to repeat as Grand Prix France champion, again opening the season on top of the podium.
Nakai, an 18-year-old from Japan, jumped from third after Friday’s short program with the top free skate Saturday — 149.08 points, matching her personal best from France in 2025.
“This year, for the first time, I think I did feel the pressure, but I also thought this is yet another challenge for myself,” Nakai said through a translator. “So I think that I was able to show that I grew and made progress in that sense.”
GRAND PRIX FRANCE: Full Results | Broadcast Schedule
She totaled 219.74 points to prevail by 16.92 over Anastasiia Gubanova of Georgia. Italian Lara Naki Gutmann took third.
Nakai landed a triple Axel on Saturday after popping the jump in the short program.
She is the top returning skater from the Olympics with gold medalist Alysa Liu taking the year off and silver medalist Kaori Sakamoto retired.
Japan’s Yuna Aoki, who led after Friday’s short, dropped to fourth overall with a fifth-place free skate that included a fall.
Grand Prix France concludes Sunday with the men’s and pairs’ free skates, live on Peacock.
Earlier Saturday, French Olympic gold medalists Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron pulled away to win the ice dance with 207.57 points, distancing Diana Davis and Gleb Smolkin of Georgia by 13.64 points.
Americans Christina Carreira and Anthony Ponomarenko returned to the Grand Prix podium in third, after placing fourth and fifth in their two Grand Prix starts last fall.
France’s Adam Siao Him Fa topped the men’s short program with a 102.46-point skate that included a quad toe-triple toe combination and a quad Salchow.
Siao Him Fa, who was third, fourth and fifth at the last three World Championships, is trying to win his home Grand Prix for a fourth time.
Olympic gold medalist Mikhail Shaidorov from Kazakhstan sits fourth after falling on his opening quad Lutz, putting his hand down on a triple Axel and not having a jump combination.
In pairs, Olympic and world silver medalists Anastasiia Metelkina and Luka Berulava of Georgia outscored neutral skaters Aleksandra Boikova and Dmitriy Kozlovskiy from Russia by 1.49 points.
Boikova and Kozlovskiy are competing on the top international level for the first time since they placed fourth at the 2022 Olympics.
Before this season, the International Skating Union announced that skaters from Russia and Belarus can return to the Grand Prix for the first time since the war in Ukraine started, with neutral status, if they do not support the war.
Last season, one men’s and one women’s singles skater each from Belarus and Russia were allowed to compete in an Olympic qualifier, with three of the four qualifying to compete in the Milan Cortina Games as neutral skaters.
