Georgia's Nika Egadze leads after European men's short programme

Georgia's Nika Egadze soared to the top of the leaderboard at the European Figure Skating Championships on Thursday, landing two clean quadruple jumps in a dazzling short programme that left the crowd buzzing.

The 23-year-old opened with a quad Salchow-triple toe loop and then reeled off a quad toe loop.

His only error was reaching to grab his skate on a spin and missing, but he laid down a programme that was otherwise strong enough for 91.28 points heading into Saturday's free skate.

"I'm so happy for this. After today's short program practice, I was waiting for everything because it was so bad practice," Egadze said.

"Oh, spins," he added. "I was practising spins so much after Skate Canada (where he finished fifth in October). I had two months of practices. I was really practising it good. But today, when I was taking my leg, I didn't catch my leg."

Egadze's coaching team includes Eteri Tutberidze, who coached Kamila Valieva, the 15-year-old Russian skater at the centre of a doping scandal during the 2022 Beijing Olympics.

Estonia's Aleksandr Selevko scored 88.71 points to sit second, while his younger brother Mihhail was third with 88.28 in the final international competition for Europe's Olympic-bound skaters ahead of the Milano Cortina Games.

Matteo Rizzo was fourth in a great start to his campaign for a place on Italy's Olympic team.

Rizzo, who scored 88.00 points, is in a battle with Nikolaj Memola for Italy's second spot on the team, with Daniel Grassl, who is in fifth place with 84.82, already locking up the first.

"I hope that I let everybody enjoy it as much as I did, because I was really pressured today, and I hope I delivered the emotion that I had inside to the crowd," Rizzo said.

"You have no idea how much I practised it. I practise it a lot; we had to do a lot of work at home because the goal was to skate clean."

Memola, who has been hampered by injuries, was 10th in Thursday's short programme with 77.77 points.

It was a disastrous day for Kevin Aymoz of France. This season's Skate America champion crashed hard on two jumps and then stumbled awkwardly on a step sequence, leaving him in 27th place.

The pairs free programme was scheduled for later on Thursday.

(Reporting by Lori Ewing; Editing by Ken Ferris)