Steel knuckles under velvet gloves: women's figure skating from the perspective of an ex-competitive figure skater
The doping scandal of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, in which 15-year-old Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva took centre stage, has exposed a system which exploits fragile, prepubescent female bodies and discards them when they reach their expiration date.
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Content warning: mention of suicide, eating disorders
A couple of months ago, I wrote an article on women’s figure skating, and described the sport as brass, or perhaps glass, knuckles under velvet gloves. I realise now that I’m not sure either is true: I am convinced a forged steel lies beneath, crafted by compressive forces. The recent doping allegations against Kamila Valieva have put a spotlight on these forces and cast a shadow over the 2022 Winter Olympic Games.
Kamila Valieva is a victim of a system that abuses and exploits girls and then discards them. Figure skating is, in many ways, an allegory for how women are shaped by male fantasy. It shows just how warped this fantasy is: the physically ruinous ‘female ideal’ in skating is an impossible structure which often fosters eating disorders and depression. For Yulia Lipnitskaya, the starlet of the 2014 Sochi Olympics, the weight of gold materialised itself in leg and hip injuries, as well as anorexia; she retired at age 18. When we were just 15, my friend, who was projected to skate on the rings this year, was told by her partner’s parents that she was ‘too fat’ and could no longer skate with their son. She was a size 6. She had left school and moved to the United States in pursuit of perfection, only to find herself, two years later, back home and left with her unrequited dreams.
Evgenia Medvedeva, on the cusp of Olympic glory weeks before her eighteenth birthday, bowed out with an Anna Karenina long program tinged with melancholy, earning her a medal of the wrong colour. Three years later she ended her competitive career with chronic back pain and a broken psyche; her “main victory”, she claims, “is that [she] is still standing here”. Her training partner, Alina Zagitova, aflame in her red and gold dress, clinched gold aged 15. By 17 she was burnt out, causing concerns about the sustainability of young female skaters’ health. Gracie Gold, the 2014 US national champion, found herself at her nadir when she had covered every mirror in her apartment and harboured suicidal thoughts. She spoke of navigating the intersections of perfection and insanity, where insanity is both an imperative for, and a symptom of, perfection. This perfectionism can quickly become pathological, seeping into work and relationships – with food, with people.
Yulia, Evgenia, Alina, Gracie, my friend, all these women belong to a subculture of female skaters who are still deconditioning their bodies and minds from physical and internalised oppression. These women have danced their swan song before adulthood, while most are in the first act of their career. Where some retired skaters spin a new narrative, presenting or coaching, other former dreamers perpetually chase after the elusive, bygone adrenaline-highs of their competitive years.
The relationship between coaches and skaters is both symbiotic and parasitic; as so much of the sport hinges upon external validation, there exists a kind of emotional dependency on coaches for praise. This fragile bond can swiftly fracture and splinter, and this inherent power-imbalance may also lend itself to different kinds of abuse. As with gymnastics, another female-dominated sport whose aestheticism has a harsh underbelly, figure skating has bred a toxic culture in which the price of gold is physical, verbal and emotional abuse, and the currency of perpetrators is silenced. Ice rinks are insular, almost microcosmic, yet the cocoon they form can shatter instantly. In Russia, where they train 12 hours a day, female coaches become surrogate mothers who watch girls come-of-age on ice, and skating becomes irrevocably subsumed into their identities. Skaters, as they twist their half-an-inch thick blade into the ice, balancing (on a toe-pick) between beauty and brutality, occupy a higher human register that is difficult to abandon when they step off that ice. It is a visceral thing, skating; you inhabit the sport and it inhabits you.
Skaters are cultural icons of femininity, embodying elegance, grace and class. Tonya Harding broke new ice; her flower-embroidered dress could not obscure her ‘masculine’ athleticism and she uncovered the encoded gender expectations of ‘ladies’ figure skating, breathing life into the latent cruelty of the discipline. The 1994 Nancy Kerrigan scandal that is entangled with her name produced cracks in this ice, in the sparkling veneer of beauty that veils the sport. The rink became a stage for controlled brutality. Kerrigan, Harding’s fiercest rival in US ice skating and, in her white dress, the ‘virtuous’ foil to Harding’s femme fatale, was struck on her landing knee after having just completed a training practice for the national championships. Harding, called an “ugly duckling” by skating experts, was heavily implicated; she grew up to be the black swan, juxtaposed against Kerrigan’s white. Female competitors must conceal internal suffering; they are made to conjure a façade of ease, a kind of perverse metaphor for womanhood. Harding rejected this illusory vision, not conforming to the docile ice princess - her muscularity was a testament to her exertion. It is perhaps ironic that skaters hurl themselves across the ice, crack ribs and sprain ankles to the overtures of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty. But the female skater’s image is artificial and stylised – again, much like femininity itself - manufactured by puberty blockers and weight loss drugs. Young female skaters like Kamila, often likened to Russian dolls, or now, perhaps, puppets, are caught in a liminal limbo, a perpetual stasis, on the threshold of girlhood but forbidden from entering womanhood.
The 2022 Winter Olympics women's free skating event, and, in particular, Kamila Valieva’s final skate, was cruelty cloaked in a crystal costume. It felt as though I was watching a dystopian film, something Hunger Games-esque, where, in the final chapter, the competitors dismantle the physical arena and the institution behind it. They understand that they cannot win in a game where they are all victims. But this was no fiction, and the Olympic Games became a fertile ground for broken dreams. Valieva, otherworldly all season, had her humanity probed to the haunting snare drum of Ravel’s ‘Bolero’. In the kiss-and-cry, the “irreparable emotional harm” which the court of arbitration had tried to prevent, was etched on her crestfallen face, her body doubled-over under the pressure of perfection and the burden of brilliance. The press, which had vilified Valieva as it does all young women, was an eerie presence, reified in the shutter clicks that became enmeshed in Ravel’s composition. The press latched onto her anguish and refracted it back to us, distorted. Alexandra Trusova, her 17-year-old compatriot, punctuated her free program with five quads, the same number performed by Nathan Chen, the men’s figure skating Olympic champion, yet slipped to silver. Her tears afterward refused to thaw, “I hate skating. I hate it. I hate this sport. I will never go out on the ice again! Never! I hate [it]! It’s impossible, it’s impossible!”. Anna Shchberkova, another member of the ‘quad squad’, launched her 159-centimetre frame to Olympic victory, but spoke of feeling “emptiness”.
If the rink is indeed a stage, then women’s figure skating has become a tragedy, with Kamila Valieva as its fallen heroine.
Editor’s Note, May 6, 2022: This article has received minor edits since publication.