It is perhaps a tired trope to say figure skating is founded on tears and tantrums. After all, competitors learn their fate in a place officially called the “Kiss and Cry Zone”.
If you want drama and divas, with the occasional whiff of controversy, it pays to know your Lutzes, Salchows and Axels, with their dizzying degrees of difficulty. Because there is nothing quite like dancing on ice at the Olympics for sequinned stories of daring and deceit. From Tonya Harding to Kamila Valieva, you watch in wide-eyed wonder but know you are never far from another #SkateGate.
The redemption arc so beloved of these Games was made for figure skating and, in the absence of the Russians, the Americans are coming in Milan, all saccharine sweetness and pearly-white smiles, as if they have stepped straight off the Disney Channel and onto the ice.
Alysa Liu won her first national title aged just 13 but quit the sport after the last Olympics at 16, claiming the emotional toll was too much to take. “There were many, many times when I didn’t enjoy it,” she said, on Instagram naturally, in a post since deleted. Two years later, to the strains of an obligatory Lady Gaga mash-up, she was back and arrives in Italy as the defending world champion.
“Coming back turned out to be tougher than walking away ever was,” she said, after a solid short programme in Friday’s team event that ranked just behind her main rival, Japan’s effortlessly elegant Kaori Sakamoto. “I had mapped out my retirement a full year in advance, but I spent a long time reflecting on whether returning was truly what I wanted, making sure I was doing what felt right for me and my future.
“In the end, I know I made the right decision. Honestly, it’s a wild story. I still can’t believe how I managed to return and become world champion again, and now I’m at the Olympics, it’s pinch-me stuff.”
You must go back 66 years to find the last time the United States won both the men’s and women’s figure-skating titles, but they have arguably never had a better chance, with Ilia Malinin expected to add Olympic gold to his two world titles.
Malinin is nicknamed the “Quad God” for his ability to defy gravity, becoming the first skater to land all six types of jump – toe loop, Salchow, loop, flip, Lutz and Axel – in a single competitive programme. In Milan, he hopes to make it a magnificent seven, but his quest for the never-achieved quint, five full rotations in the air, will wait until after the Games.
“It’s pretty close,” he said. “It’s in the works and very nearly there, but you won’t see it at the Olympics. Too many fans see us as robots or animatronics. But we’re athletes, and this takes an incredible amount of mental strength, agility and stamina. On top of that, you have to make it all look effortless so you can be judged.”
You get a different sort of interview at figure skating. After a solid Olympic start, British hopes Lilah Fear and Lewis Gibson joked they were torn between what they wanted most, an Olympic medal or a comment from Victoria Beckham. The pair’s Spice Girls ice-dance routine is already a firm fan favourite. Mel B was the first to show her support, but it is winning over the judges, too.
World bronze medallists last year, Fear and Gibson are seeking to become the first British figure skaters to win an Olympic medal since Torvill and Dean in 1994. Their “Wannabe” routine ranked third in the rhythm-dance section of the team competition, a strong statement of intent ahead of their main event next week.
“We love Mel B, she’s great, but we want the other four to comment, too,” said Fear, a Team GB flag bearer at Friday night’s opening ceremony at the San Siro. “Where’s Victoria? Get into the comments section, girls. We’ll teach you all to skate whenever you want.”
“Everyone loves the Spice Girls and you could feel the energy from the crowd. Hopefully they like the way we’ve structured our music, too. I’m so proud of us for doing exactly what we needed to do when the pressure was on. We skated how we wanted to and we’re in a good position, though we’d like to be higher. I think we’re in a great place and it just cements how we are feeling.”
American defending champions Madison Chock and Evan Bates topped the ice-dance team standings, followed by the European champions: France’s Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron. Fear and Gibson’s season-best score of 86.85 was the best of the rest, the perfect response to disappointment at the recent European Championships in Sheffield, where they dropped from silver to bronze after the free dance.
Everyone is terribly nice in figure skating, which makes the arrival of coach Eteri Tutberidze timely, a figure some might consider an Olympic villain. Moscow-based Tutberidze could hardly be more Russian if she were wrapped in a fur coat, standing stoically in the snow. Her hard-knocks Sambo 70 skating school is notorious, and she controversially coached Valieva, the young Russian whose positive doping test overshadowed the last Games.
Tutberidze has found a loophole in Russia’s ban by coaching the Georgian team here. Russian Adeliia Petrosian, competing as a neutral athlete, is also her skater, but the two are said to be working separately, a claim that stretches credibility.
“It’s not our decision the coach is here,” said World Anti-Doping Agency president Witold Bańka. “If you ask me personally about my feelings, I don’t feel comfortable with her presence here at the Olympic Games, for sure.”
So, cue the music and ready the judges. What happens next will be dressed up as sport and sold as spectacle, but figure skating has never really been about certainty. It remains, as ever, a theatre of ambition – beautiful, unforgiving, and only pretending to be serene.
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