Lewis Gibson and Lilah Fear underlined their Winter Olympic Games credentials by claiming bronze at the NHK Trophy in Tokyo.
The three-time Ice Dance national champions went into Saturday's Free Dance just 0.03 points ahead of Spain's Sarah Hurtado and Kirill Khaliavin but an entertaining performance to ‘The Lion King' impressed the judges and sealed the final spot on the podium.
A score of 115.49 in the Free Dance took their overall total to 191.91, behind only American pair Madison Chock and Evan Bates and Russian winners Victoria Sinitsina and Nikita Katsalpov.
It is the British pair's first ISU Grand Prix medal since they won Skate Canada bronze in 2019 and marked a notable improvement from their seventh-placed finish in the same competition in Vancouver a fortnight ago.
"We did a lot of work in four days between Vancouver and now," Fear said.
"There were things we were happy with [in the performance] but there were a few technical errors, so we really made ourselves uncomfortable last week, we really pushed those and we feel like it came along in four days.
"We had a lot of improvement to make and a lot of feedback from that competition. We still know where we want to grow and we see so much potential in this programme."
Lilah Fear and Lewis Gibson 🇬🇧 have only been skating together for five years, but the ice dance duo has earned a reputation as fan favourites.
— Olympics (@Olympics) November 11, 2021
However, the pair also have other goals for themselves. @ISU_Figure @TeamGB @Lewisgibson4 @lilah__jo
Gibson and Fear started their 2021/22 campaign by claiming bronze at the CS Finlandia Trophy in October and will now continue to build towards Beijing, with January's European Championships taking place in the meantime.
The duo are looking to become just the second British pair to win an Ice Dance medal at the Winter Olympic Games, following in the footsteps of Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean, and Fear is excited for what is to come.
"We're not satisfied yet, but we're really proud of the performance we put out," said the 22-year-old.
"We are so pleased [to have won the bronze]. We had more of a disappointing Grand Prix two weeks ago and we were really hungry to come out here to make progress and I feel like we did that.
"We've never experienced an Olympic season before, it's just new for us. It feels normal so far, but then there's an extra competition thrown in that's pretty exciting and pretty important, so I think those feelings will arise going into that."
Gibson, 27, added: "We want to work on the consistency of all of the elements, so it's just nice and seamless throughout the whole programme.
"It was so great being in front of such a welcoming crowd, it really makes a difference."