Every four years, figure skating makes me feel many things

The Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics are coming up next month, and as recently as six months ago, I thought I wouldn’t care.

Famous last words.

At parties or other social settings, if I happen to share the personal fun fact that I was a figure skater for 15+ years, people do that nice thing where they look impressed and then presume I was really good.

I have learned to not downplay my accomplishments. But while I enjoyed some moments of fleeting beauty and triumph, a Michelle Kwan I most decidedly was not.

This piece of writing is about falling in love with something at a young age, experiencing how a long-term relationship with such a thing evolves, and learning to be open to what the future holds. Fair warning, this piece also became much longer than I’d planned for. A prior version of the title? “Every four years, figure skating makes me feel something.”

For one thing, I started any real training way too late — at around 9 years old — and showed no signs of being a prodigy. My parents knew before I would admit it, but sweet souls they were, they never forced me to stop skating. They helped me set the DVR to tape figure skating competitions the rare times they were broadcast on TV, somehow scraped together money for all the expenses that come with skating, and generally supported me in the ways they could. They saw that I loved it, and that was enough. Best Parents award. Luckily, when I hit my teens I was then able to help teach skating classes and work in the rink’s shop, sharing some of the burden for funding my passion and making some pocket money too.

So if I wasn’t ever an Olympic competitive hopeful, what did I do as a figure skater?

Once you get to a certain stage in skating, you need private lessons to meaningfully advance, and I started those in middle school, but mainly to help me work on my U.S. Figure Skating Association test attempts. Similar to martial arts belt systems, the USFSA testing ladder features standardized moves and techniques that skaters need to demonstrate mastery of in order to move on to the next level. For context, most competitive singles skaters (singles meaning they compete as individuals in either women’s or men’s events) who train seriously as kids pass the required singles tests well before they graduate high school. Me? I got through about half of them by that time, due to a combination of not being able to practice as much as some other skaters could, susceptibility to performance jitters, and just not having natural talent.

Leading up to each December, I asked my parents to sign me up to perform in my local rink’s Nutcracker on Ice shows, and I also competed as an individual occasionally in local competitions. But despite wanting to imitate the glorious solo performances and careers of Michelle Kwan, Sasha Cohen, Patrick Chan, and countless other stars I idolized, I found greater joy in training and competing with my local Theatre on Ice (TOI) team. I was on it from middle school through much of high school. I was even a co-captain for two years — not quite “peaking in high school” level, but close. Each year, our coaches choreographed a story-based program (what casual skating fans may call a routine) and dreamed up costumes, props, and even on-ice sets that our incredible team parents fabricated using the fees each skater’s family paid, along with a healthy dose of creativity. We’d travel to compete at nationals each year. TOI is also the reason why I can say I’ve been to Ohio, because well, candidly there was never and has not been another reason for me to check that state off my list.

So think of TOI as Disney On Ice, but scrappier and scored. You might be scratching your head now, but yes, you read all this correctly. I can’t find a good official history on it, but I believe TOI began in Europe. (Checks out, doesn’t it?) It eventually made its way to the U.S., including my local rink in Texas. Figure skating is not typically thought of as a team sport, but besides TOI, I should mention that there is also the longer-running discipline of synchronized skating. Looking back now, I was so lucky to have my TOI experience. Because without it, I’m not sure I would’ve kept skating throughout my school years.

The truth is that figure skating, and specifically training as an individual skater, was lonely for me much of the time, despite having friends at the rink. The feeling would get exacerbated when I would see friends improving faster than I did. Or when some friends shifted to skate in the mornings before school, while I was staunchly an afternoon skater. Asking my parents, who worked restaurant jobs and got home after 10 P.M. in the evenings, to take me to the rink before school was impossible. And to be honest? I didn’t have the ability to get up that early anyway. And eventually, some friends left skating altogether in high school, while I remained stubbornly attached to the sport. This was despite often wondering why the elite level skaters at my rink were so clique-y and didn’t want to be my friends, and why I wasn’t having as much fun anymore. High school me had fallen for sunk-cost fallacy, but didn’t know what that was yet. I had spent so many years on and around the ice. How could I leave it behind? Wasn’t it what made me me?

And so I filtered the colleges I applied to based on where I could still skate. One of those was Harvard. Somehow, I got in. Story for another time.

In my freshman and sophomore years, I taught lessons for Harvard’s recreational sports program to help make up what financial aid didn’t cover, but I ended up stopping any skating training of my own. This was deeply ironic given that A) I’d made figure skating my identity and personality (which hopefully we’ve established by now that this is not best practice); and B) that I ended up in Boston, home to the Skating Club of Boston, one of the most storied figure skating clubs in the U.S. with its many champions. Part of the reason why was so simple that it’s almost silly: Boston is effing cold, or wicked cold, as the local slang goes. And yes, reader, that was enough of a deterrent for me to seek other hobbies. So I ended up finding a new home in a student dance troupe, which kept me both active and social. But really, it came back to feeling lonely. The idea that college should be about meeting new people helped me finally override my tendency to continue something simply because I felt like it was what had made me special, and because it was what I’d always done. And the bewildering, heartbreaking, but also maybe totally normal thing is…it wasn’t even that hard to let go. And from there, my connection with figure skating waned.

Fast forward to about six years post college, around 2021 or so, I did restart training because I resurrected my goal of completing at least one of the USFSA testing ladders. I chose to work towards completing the “Skating Skills” (formerly called “Moves in the Field“) ladder, since I had three of the eight tests left. Each Skating Skills level test consists of set patterns of skills for generating power, turning, and generally maneuvering around the ice. Or to be frank about it, everything that’s not the jumps and spins that most people know figure skating for. And to be really frank about it, at 30 years old, re-training Skating Skills felt more achievable than working on jumps, potentially literally busting my butt, and maxing out my insurance deductible.

I don’t want to overwhelm with technical detail, but to be truthful I will share (like I did in my vlog) that I eventually ended up revising or — ahem, truthfully — downgrading my goal to pass the last Skating Skills test on the adult (21+ years) track, rather than the standard track. This essentially meant that they judged me against a slightly more forgiving scale. And in late spring of 2024, after 2 attempts on the standard track, I finally passed on my third attempt on the adult track!

Objectively, this moment was nowhere close in magnitude of course, but let me just say: passing the test was my Olympic gold medal moment. It doesn’t matter that I’d ended up sending in a filmed test for this third attempt, since there wasn’t a live testing session that worked with my schedule. It doesn’t matter that I got my result via email, while I was probably doing something mundane like working or chores. The satisfaction of having stuck to my goal and making it happen — through moving cities (thanks, return to office), finding a new coach, getting up early to take the subway to the rink, hanging onto a relationship that was probably doomed from the start — didn’t light me up like fireworks, but instead coursed through me like magma. That kind of satisfaction reminded me that yes, I can be that bitch if I wanted to. And so it was worth every penny I spent on ice time, coaching fees, and the like.

As a kid, I envied the other kids who’d completed the testing ladder and got to wear a snazzy jacket from US Figure Skating with the words “GOLD MEDALIST” emblazoned across the back. And finally, at 31 years old, I had earned mine. How often do I wear it now? Honestly…not a lot.

Because shortly after receiving my jacket, I went through a painful heartbreak. And for a while last year, the emotional aftershocks of the severed connection had me questioning nearly everything about myself. Do I still like myself? What is still me, not them? What did I really like, versus “like because I’ve always liked it?” Who did I want to be now?

I still don’t necessarily have all the answers to these questions. But now, in letting myself get caught up in all the marketing and hype being drum up before the Milano-Cortina Winter Olympics, I know I still love figure skating.

I scroll the r/figureskating subreddit to catch up on news about how other countries and skating federations selected their Winter Olympic teams, and any other tidbits users post about the skating world in general. Consuming figure skating on social media has been such an interesting change from how I got any info about the sport growing up, which was via TV broadcasts, library books, or US Figure Skating’s SKATING magazine for members.

I cheer hard for Amber Glenn of Team USA who, at 26 years old, has set a record for being the oldest U.S. women’s skater to qualify for the Olympics since 1928. Like many sports, figure skating heavily favors the young. I’m also a little biased since Amber is from Dallas, Texas, and I also grew up in the state. But I also cheer hard for any skater’s dreams coming true, regardless of nationality.

I can’t wait to be glued to my laptop and phone when the Olympics competition starts, with shock and tears — both the good and bad kinds — guaranteed to come. I sob a little whenever there’s an interstitial video package or interview about the sacrifices a skater’s family has made for their training, when coaches bear hug their skaters in the kiss and cry, when skaters fist-pump after a clean skate, when skaters overcome immeasurable grief to give the performance of a lifetime, when when when when when.

Over twenty years — two-thirds of my life — have passed since I first started skating seriously, and although I mourned for a long time about what was and also about what never was, I’ve finally found peace with my history with the sport.

Now, I’m remaining open-minded and curious about how my relationship with it may continue to evolve. Yes, my friends know they can expect my unsolicited opinions about every Olympics development for the next month or so. Yes, I’m curious if I’ll find myself lacing up my skates again and braving the cold hardness of the ice. Yes, if I ever have kids, I know I’d want to be the one to at least introduce them to it.

Figure skating, in the grand scheme of things, is such a rarefied, arbitrary, and costly activity. I felt silly about fifteen dozen times while drafting this piece. Yet as with so much else, writing about it is my way to honor my experiences.

Because thanks to my skating journey, I’ve learned how to practice, persevere, and perform under pressure. And I like to think that it’s even taught me a little about love. After all, love is many things, and it’s also never wasted.