It was there for the taking.

And the pairs teams of Kirsten Moore-Towers and Dylan Moscovitch of Waterloo, Ont., and Meaghan Duhamel of Saint-Leonard, Que., and Eric Radford of Lively, Ont., grabbed it for all it as worth at the 2011 BMO Canadian figure-skating championships late Saturday night at Save-on-Foods Memorial Centre.

Jessica Dube and Bryce Davison, 2008 world championship pairs bronze-medallists and sixth at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, are on the shelf due to a season-ending injury to Davison.

The path was clear leading to the two Canadian berths available for the 2011 world championships in March at Tokyo and the gold-medallist Moore-Towers/Moscovitch and silver-medallist Duhamel/Radford tandems proved up to the challenge.

Short-program leaders Moore-Towers and Moscovitch showed why they are widely tipped as the pair most likely to challenge Dube and Davison for national honours in the future with a near-flawless long performance that helped net 187.63 points from the short and long programs combined.

Because of circumstances, that future could turn out to be now for Moore-Towers and Moscovitch. They were well clear of silver medallists Duhamel and Radford (171.34 points).

“We’re still trying to digest the whole thing,” said Moscovitch, who has seen a meteoric rise since first teaming up with Moore-Towers in the spring of 2009.

“Everyone here tonight was trying to achieve what we achieved. It’s a huge honour to be crowned Canadian champions. Canada has such a great history in pairs. This is just a step for us but a big step for sure. We will remember this.”

The pair didn’t want their lead after the short program to breed complacency.

“We wanted to win but we

didn’t want to slide in based on yesterday [short program],” said Moore-Towers.

“Leaving the ice, we didn’t know what happened because we didn’t watch the other teams skate. But we were confident we had done enough.”

That they did.

“As a whole, the program kept flowing,” said Moscovitch.

Not so, however, for others.

There was heartbreak for the popular short-program second-place finishers Paige Lawrence and Rudi Swiegers of Saskatchewan, when a brief slip of the skate blade by Swiegers proved disastrous as they fell to third place and out of the world championships with 168.11 points.

Swiegers was almost hit by a teddy bear when he skated out to perform and won over the fans by pretending to duck the next time he skated by that section of the crowd while warming up.

But perhaps it was foreshadowing. He was hit by something far worse — the bronze medal — after the performance.

Mylene Brodeur and John Mattatall of Quebec were fourth with 163.12 points, Kaleigh Hole of Virden, Man., and Adam Johnson of Chatham, Ont., placed fifth with 140.86 points, Brittany Jones and Kurtis Gaskell sixth with 134.90 and Noemie Arseneault and Simon-Pierre Cote seventh with 131.65.

cdheensaw@timescolonist.com