Let's Talk Olympic Figure Skating

Welcome to the eve of the Olympic Winter Games! While many viewers become armchair experts in curling or find themselves lugepilled by the end of the games, few things unify the Olympic audience like the sudden, overpowering, and voracious interest in figure skating. But for most viewers and media outlets, the Olympics is the only time they pay attention to figure skating. That gap between enthusiasm and expertise means there are a ton of Olympic figure skating puff pieces and attention-grabbing TikToks floating around right now promising to tell you Everything You Need to Know. Most of them are missing the context of what’s actually happened in the sport over the last four years.

I’m going to give you the real deal behind the hype-inducing headlines. I’m going to talk about The Quad God, backflips, and WTF is up with the Russians. By the time you’re done reading this you’re going to kill at figure skating trivia and win the group chat with your new-found figure skating expertise.

Want to skip ahead to your preferred bit? Here are the section breaks:

• Backflips Are Legal Now
• Ilia Malinin is a Quad G0d
• Deanna Stellato-Dudeck is a Total Boss
• The US Women’s Figure Skating Team Could End a 24 Year Title Drought
• The Russians are Back, Just Wearing Different Jackets

Backflips Are Legal Now

Backflips are a mythic element in figure skating. Indelibly associated with Surya Bonaly and her spontaneous one-footed backflip during the 1998 Olympics, the backflip was an invalid element…until now. So that must mean everyone is super stoked and there’s a backflip in every other program, right?

Nope!

This is a boring rule change. While the element was illegal up until now, the penalty for doing one was a measly 1 point deduction for an invalid element. Men’s singles skaters Ilia Malinin (USA) and Adam Siao Him Fa (FRA) have incorporated backflips into their programs for several seasons, electing to suffer the point deduction as the cost of wowing a crowd. There was very little stopping a skater from adding a backflip to their program until now, aside from the fact it’s dangerous. Now a backflip is legal, but worth zero points and still hella dangerous! Unless you can do it consistently and are very confident in your tumbling skills, there’s not much incentive to add one to your program now.

Three skaters/teams have incorporated the backflip into their competitive programs this season and you will see them all at the Olympics: Malinin, Siao Him Fa, and Deanna Stellato-Dudeck and Maxim Deschamps (CAN). Of the three, I think Deanna and Max have the coolest backflip because it’s executed as a pair element: riskier, more exciting, and it’s the best choreographed backflip in the field.

Ilia Malinin is a Quad G0d

If there’s one figure skater casual viewers have heard of before these Olympics, odds are high it’s Ilia Malinin. The hype is earned: he’s the first figure skater to land a quad axel, a feat that occupies the same rarified athletic atmosphere as Usain Bolt’s 9:58 100m sprint. By landing a quad axel, Ilia vaulted past a barrier many believed was impossible to clear.

The quad axel (a 4A if you’re savvy with a score sheet) is not the reason why Ilia is the odds-on favourite to win. What headlines often miss is that Ilia’s domination doesn’t come from the 4A alone: he can land every single type of quad jump on the books. This versatility is why Ilia has won his last 15 competitions in a row, and often by 30+ point margins.

To put this scoring into perspective, it helps to understand the base values of jumps and where it’s possible to rack up points. In the grand tally of a score sheet, a 4A has a base value of 12.50 points. That’s only only 1 point more than the next most difficult quad (the lutz, at 11.50) but a 4A is exponentially more difficult. A 4A is also only 3 points more than the lowest value quad (a toe loop at 9.50). Skaters are also limited to two repetitions of the same jump within a single program, and one of those must be in combination. In other words, Ilia can’t go out and skate a program filled with nothing but 4As. If the only quad he could land was the 4A, he would also be vulnerable to other athletes with a wider spread of jumps. Ilia’s ability to consistently land all the quads gives him more jump layout options than anyone else, making it difficult for other skaters to create strategic jumping passes to counter him. Ilia’s versatility is what gives him the potential to flatten the field.

All of that hype and confidence could be undercut by one inconvenient fact: the Olympics are a fickle beast. Ilia is not the first American technical wünderkind to roll up to the Olympics with big game and even bigger medal hopes. Cast your memory back to the blissful, pre-pandemic days of Pyeongchang 2018 and you may remember Nathan Chen (USA). Nathan was another multi-quad technical juggernaut and tipped to win in 2018…right up until he completely unravelled during the short program. This is Ilia’s first Olympics, and while he has been very consistent up until this competition, the Olympic Effect is unpredictable: Some athletes thrive under Olympic pressure, and others wilt.

Deanna Stellato-Dudeck is a Total Boss

If you’re old enough to remember watching Tara Lipinski upset Michelle Kwan in Nagano, owned a Spacemaker pencil case, or unironically wore Moon Shoes, Deanna Stellato-Dudeck (CAN) is the hero you need to watch.

Figure skaters do not age gracefully and rarely enjoy careers much beyond their mid-20s. At 42 years old, Deanna (along with her partner, Maxime Deschamps) is the 2024 Pairs World Champion, a victory that made her the oldest figure skating world champion in any discipline ever. As a former figure skater closing in on 40 myself, the mere thought of returning to compete, let alone in Pairs, makes every inch of my bones scream.

Age alone would make Deanna a stone cold legend, but even more remarkable is that she returned to figure skating after a 16 year absence. She retired in 2001 after an abbreviated singles career marred by multiple injuries. In 2016 she decided to return after attending a work retreat when she was asked “What would you do if you could not fail?” After writing this out, I can’t decide what’s most improbable about the story of Deanna’s comeback: that a figure skater switched disciplines and created a successful competitive career in their late-30s, or that a team building exercise actually changed someone’s life. Either way, the answer for Deanna was figure skating and we’re all the better for it.

Deanna and Max have an excellent chance to win a gold medal. They’re superb competitors, engaging to watch (see: backflips, best in the game), and I will scream my goddamn head off when they compete on behalf of every Elder Millennial told to pack in their dreams at 25.

After writing this post, the Canadian Olympic Committee released an announcment that Deanna and Max will not compete in the team event, which starts on February 6th, due to injury. I will burn as many prayer candles as it takes to see them skate the individual event.

The US Women’s Figure Skating Team Could End a 24 Year Title Drought

Leaving aside the international community’s current ambivalence about America: the Nation, Olympic viewers are absolutely going to love the US women’s figure skating team. Amber Glenn, Alysa Liu, and Isabeau Levito are a group tattoo away from being the tightest bunch of national teammates heading to the Olympics. It’s also more than possible they could sweep the podium with the power of friendship and a triple axel or two.

While once synonymous with figure skating dominance, US women have spent years wandering the wilderness beyond world and Olympic podiums. From 1990-2006, American women won 10 out of 16 World titles. From 2007-2022, an American woman only reached the World podium twice (Ashley Wagner with a 2016 silver medal, and Alysa Liu with a bronze in 2022). Sasha Cohen was the last US women’s Olympic medalist (silver, 2006) and we have to go all the way back to the JNCO-wide days of 2002 to find Sarah Hughes as the last American woman to win Olympic gold. Chalk it up to generational turnover, declining domestic interest in figure skating, the rise of new skating nations, or the arrival of dubiously-trained Russian baby jumping beans. Whatever the reason, it’s been a long time since an American female figure skater could look forward to her picture on a Wheaties box.

The medal drought could end in 2026. Amber is the current Grand Prix Final and US National champion, Alysa the reigning World Champion, and Isabeau is a former World silver medalist. They are all formidable technicians, charismatic performers and, by reports, genuinely good people. If you don’t love Isabeau doing jump stunts for Redbull, or Alysa’s Lady Gaga program, or Amber’s superb triple axel and unabashed queer joy, you have coal where your heart should be and I must insist you get off my lawn.

The Russians are Back, Just Wearing Different Jackets

Technically, there are no athletes representing Russia or Belarus at these Olympics. However, a select number of Russian and Belarusian figure skaters have qualified to compete as Individual Neutral Athletes. Adeliia Petrosian, Viktoriia Safonova, and Petr Gumennik competed in an qualifying event back in September to secure their Olympic spots. Their presence at the qualifying event marked rare appearances in ISU-sanctioned competition. Petrosian last competed internationally as a Junior in 2021. Safonova, representing Belarus, last competed at the 2022 Olympics. Gumennik’s last competition was during the 2021 Grand Prix series. No Russian or Belarusian figure skaters have competed in ISU-governed competition since the 2022 Olympics, a direct consequence of international sanctions against those countries for the war in Ukraine. Unless you make a habit of hunting down video streams to follow Russia’s domestic competition scene, you have only glimpsed these skaters for years.

Figure skating has experienced the unthinkable for the last four years: what competition looks like without Russians. I say unthinkable, because Russia has always been a powerful figure skating federation, boasting generations of talented athletes, choreographers, and coaches. It’s also been a deeply problematic federation that has been implicated in doping, encouraged dubious training methods, interfered with judging, and exercised a heavy influence on the political and technical direction of the sport. To experience figure skating without that influence has been startling. In this writer’s opinion, figure skating became interesting again—not fully cured of it’s ills (one miracle at a time here, folks), but a sport where the competition results weren’t always pre-ordained by the presence of a tween jumping prodigy.

There is a contingent of fans who love Russian figure skating in all its problematic grandeur. They would argue that people who prefer the Russian-free experience are yearning for a time that no longer exists, a 90s twilight where the sun has long since set. This argument has its origin in the perpetual conflict between figure skating’s twin hearts, artistry and athletics, but it glides past troubling history.

Recent generations of Russian skaters have distinguished themselves as impeccable technicians, particularly in women’s singles. This phenomenon is strongly associated with coach Eteri Tutberidze and her seemingly endless supply of teen girls who jump quad after quad after quad. Before the 2022 ban, Eteri’s skaters were the closest thing to a sure podium bet in this sport. Their technical base value was so high that even on a bad day they could outstrip their competitors’ scores by a wide margin. Russian skaters undeniably pushed figure skating into the technical stratosphere, and it left many other skaters scrambling to reach that standard.

All that technical brinksmanship came at a cost. An Eteri-coached athlete, Kamilla Valieva, was at the center of the 2022 Olympic doping scandal, resulting in Valieva’s implosion at the games and Russia stripped of their team event gold medal. Valieva’s doping case revealed what many within figure skating have long suspected: Russian athletes weren’t skating clean. The truth was grim consolation for skaters who wrecked their bodies and their prospects in doomed attempts to keep pace. Russian figure skating dominance was part Potemkin Village.

And so, three Individual Neutral Athletes will compete in Olympic figure skating, but there is little neutral about them. Their inclusion here will be controversial, for reasons of politics and performance.

I’ve largely stuck to the skating commentary here because, quite frankly, I don’t have the time or expertise to unpack Russia’s long history of using athletics as a propaganda tool. If any of the INAs wins an Olympic medal, I don’t doubt they will show up waving on state television afterwards. On performance grounds alone the presence of the INAs is also contentious. I also don’t have the capacity to unravel Russia’s history of state-sponsored doping, but if you haven’t already watched it, I can’t recommend the documentary Icarus enough. To whet your appetite, a quote from that film: “There never was anti-doping in Russia. Ever.”

Closing Pose

There are many stories I could write about heading into these Olympics. I’m planning to write a couple more pieces in advance of the opening ceremonies on Friday, and a lot of commentary throughout the games. If you haven’t already subscribed to website updates, check out the RSS feed at the top of the page. I’m also very active on Bluesky and have an ongoing figure skating Tumblr, Edge Call Skating, where I run a gif feed of what I think all the best competition bits are. I hope you’ll hang out with me for the Olympics and beyond!