FS Comeback Camp: Olympic Qualifiers

It’s only June and the 2025-26 Olympic season is already primed for drama with three high profile comebacks. Mai and Alex Shibutani, Wenjing Sui and Cong Han, and Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron all appeared in the Grand Prix assignment lists. The reaction to this news spanned from, “OMG YASSS” to “Let someone else have a chance!” to “I have no idea what this means but that’s good for you, I guess?” To all of you I say: welcome to Olympic season figure skating. It’s going to get weird.

There’s nothing new about figure skaters staging comebacks, particularly Olympic season comebacks. All of these skaters are gambling, like many athletes before them, that the time is right to recapture their former glory, rewrite their career endings, or burnish their legacy. But successfully mounting a comeback requires everything to go right: training, timing, politics, momentum, and a generous dose of luck. There are things an athlete can do to tilt the table in their favour, but it’s rare for all of those variables to come together. A comeback also exposes all the machinery that usually hums away in the basement of figure skating: politics, injuries, grudges, and debts. Examining how that machinery operates in figure skating is key to understanding why a comeback is demanding, divisive, and risky.

How does a figure skater earn the chance to compete at the Olympics?

There are 142 Olympic entries available across all four of the figure skating disciplines: 29 skaters each for the Women’s and Men’s singles events, 19 Pair teams, and 23 Ice Dance teams. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) decides the overall quota of 142, but the International Skating Union (ISU), figure skating’s governing body, decides how those entries are distributed across their eligible member countries. The ISU also sets global qualification rules, including which competitions count for Olympic qualification and the scoring requirements to qualify.

The ISU has two designated qualification competitions for Olympics entries: the previous year’s World Championships (more commonly referred to as Worlds), and an in-season qualifying competition; the 2025-26 Qualifying Competition is this September in Beijing. Between those two competitions, eligible ISU member countries can qualify up to 3 entries per discipline. The combined placements of each country’s skaters in each discipline determine how many entries they qualify for that discipline at the Olympics.

The majority of the 2026 Olympic entries were allocated by Worlds back in March in Boston with this formula:

• 3 entries = top two placements is equal to or less than 13
• 2 entries = top two placements is equal to or less than 28
• 1 entry = highest ranked among single entries within the qualifying competition until all remaining entries are exhausted

Countries who earn 3 entries are allocated their spots first, followed by the countries who qualified 2. Whatever spots remain then form the pool of single entries. Only single entries are available at the Beijing qualifier. Those single entries most often go to skaters representing much smaller figure skating countries who could not compete at Worlds or did not make the free skate at Worlds. In some cases, a few single entries are claimed by countries who technically earned them at Worlds but did not have enough athletes present in the free skate to fully qualify their entries. There are a few edge cases that also pop up in qualification; if they appear this season I’ll update them here.

A brief aside here on the subject of Russia and Belarus. Skaters from these countries have been banned from ISU competition since the 2022-23 season. This means they were unable to qualify Olympic entries under the normal process. The ISU has decided that up to 6 skaters from Russia and 6 from Belarus may qualify for Olympic entries if they are “politically evaluated and screened.” These athletes would also be required to compete as Individual Neutral Athletes. Only 1 skater or team per discipline may qualify, and neither country is eligible for the Team competition in 2026 (which has it’s own qualification process I’ll leave aside for now).

Russia is a large federation with an extremely competitive pool of athletes. It has dominated Olympic medal tables throughout the history of the sport. The severe quota limits will prevent Russia, or rather, it’s INA-designated athletes, from qualifying a full group of skaters in each discipline. This means that Russia, for pretty much the first time in Olympic figure skating history, will not have the numbers required to put a chokehold on podium placements. I’ll return to why this matters in a bit.

Once the Olympic entires are split out by country, each domestic federation decides how to distribute those precious entries. The tv version of Olympic qualification sees a figure skater throw down an epic performance at their national championships and book a ticket to the Olympics. A good performance at nationals certainly helps, but as the sport has grown more competitive domestic federations have developed more robust qualification standards. These holistic qualification guidelines take into account a skater’s performance over time. Skate Canada’s 2026 Olympic selection criteria, for example, considers placements and scores from 2024 Worlds and the entirety of 2025’s competition results for Olympic team nomination.

Recognizing a skater’s body of work is intended to harmonize results across a season and provide tiebreaker criteria if a federation is struggling to decide who to send to the Olympics. A canon example of this is Ashley Wagner’s Sochi 2014 qualification. Wagner finished 4th at US nationals behind Mirai Nagasu, but was granted the spot over Nagasu based on a stronger international competition record leading up to nationals. Looking at a skaters’ performance across an entire season also gives a federation room to adjust for outlier performances at nationals. Adam Rippon’s Pyeongchang 2018 qualification is a classic example here. The US had qualified 3 Men’s entries to the Olympics. Rippon placed 4th at US nationals but was granted an Olympic entry instead of Ross Miner, who placed second. Rippon had a poor showing at Nationals but strong international results over the previous fall. Miner had a once-in-a-lifetime skate at nationals but very little preceding international success. Rippon’s body of work tipped the nomination in his favour.

Holistic performance evaluation also helps neutralize the bad luck that can derail a skater’s Olympic preparation. A spectacular example here is Yuzuru Hanyu in 2017-18. Hanyu missed half the Grand Prix and Japanese nationals due to injury, but was granted a qualification spot for Pyeongchang 2018 based on his incredible competitive track record. This was an excellent choice by the JSF: Hanyu would defend his Olympic title in 2018, the first male skater to do so since Dick Button in 1952.

Even in brief you can see the number of variables at play for determining which figure skaters compete at the Olympics. You can also see that the qualification machinery is set in motion well before the Olympic season even starts. Once the season is underway, each federation then has to reckon each skaters’ past performance against their Olympic potential and build the strongest possible team to send to compete.

All of this context matters because the athletes staging comebacks were not part of the qualification equation. None of them competed at the 2025 World Championships but, come this fall, they will be competing against skaters who played a part in qualifying Olympic entries. Those skaters did the hard work of securing future placements. Who should benefit from that work?

This is where the trouble will start.

Part Two of this series is right this way