Lukas Britschgi produced the free skate of his life to take men’s singles gold at the 2025 ISU European Figure Skating Championships in Tallinn on Saturday (1 February).

Down in eighth after the short program, the 2023 bronze medallist sprung to the top of the scoresheets thanks to his superb routine to music from Ryan Taubert’s album ‘Lux’. Nikolaj Memola took silver with two-time defending champion Adam Siao Him Fa rounding out the podium in the Estonian capital.

The Swiss opened with a fine quad toeloop-double toeloop combination and followed that up with another quad toeloop. He also landed two triple Axels, one in combination with two double Axels, with a shaky landing on his closing triple flip the only fault in the jumping department.

The 26-year-old from Schaffhausen scored 184.19 for a total of 267.09 which would not be surpassed. Memola came closest with the 1.95m-tall Italian adding 18 points to his previous free skate best to go into second.

Matteo Rizzo, fourth overnight, fell on his opening quad toeloop and struggled with his jumping thereafter. And Poland’s Vladimir Samoilov could not repeat his heroics from the short program, falling on a triple flip in a patchy routine which saw him slip from third to 10th.

Short program runner-up Nika Egadze looked nervous at the start of his free skate as he tripled what should have been quad toeloop and then popped a quad Salchow. He did find his feet, hitting a quad Salchow-triple toeloop combination, but it was too late to challenge the leaders as his total of 243.87 moved him into third with just the two-time reigning champion to go.

In his emotive free skate to the Dune soundtrack, Siao Him Fa never looked comfortable with his jumping in his first competition back from the ankle injury which ruled him out of last month’s Grand Prix Final.

A fall on his opening quad toeloop was followed by a solid quad Salchow and a slightly shaky triple flip. But his landing on his triple Axel was not what he would have wanted, and the rest of his jumps – backflip aside – were similarly lacking in accuracy.

He was third on the day with 164.87 which left him in third place overall, as Britschgi celebrated the most unlikely of triumphs**.**