A season of tragedy and triumph for U.S. figure skaters

Alysa Liu won one of Team USA’s three golds at the World Championships. (ISU photo)

The figure skating season that ended nine days ago at the World Team Trophy in Japan was one of overwhelming tragedy and historic triumph for Team USA.

The tragedy happened Jan. 27, when 28 members of the U.S. figure skating family were among the 67 people who died in a crash between their plane and a military helicopter near Washington, D.C.

Among the 28 with ties to the skating community were 11 young skaters, plus some of their parents and coaches, all returning from a development camp following the U.S. Championships in Wichita, Kansas.

At that point, with a pall hanging over them and hearts heavy with pain, the top U.S. skaters still had nearly three months left in the season, with three championship events left:  Four Continents, World Championships and World Team Trophy.

For nearly all of them, going back to practice was both incredibly difficult and necessary, as the U.S. elite sought ways to honor the memories of those who had died by honoring the sport they all loved with their best efforts.

Ilia Malinin, who had won a third straight U.S. title three days before the crash, said there were days right after the accident when his emotional distress was so great he simply found it unbearable to be on the ice, the same ice where some of those killed had occasionally practiced.

“I'm also really glad I was able to get through this and really just have this mindset of skating for them,” Malinin said during a media teleconference the week before the World Championships in Boston.

“I'll always have them in my head and in my heart.  This worlds, I really want to dedicate to everyone on that flight, just really give my all in that performance.”

 Malinin did that in winning a second straight world title, as did his U.S. teammates, winning three gold medals at worlds for the first time.

Ice dancers Evan Bates and Madison Chock unsurprisingly won their third straight title, doing it with a brilliant free skate to Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five.”

Madison Chock & Evan Bates winning their third straight world title. (ISU photo)

The music has a time signature, 5/4, that is tricky to count for both choreographers and performers, making it harder both to place and to execute the element or movement on the right beat.  It was a challenge handled admirably by Chock, Bates and the several choreographers who worked with them.

The other gold medalist, Alysa Liu, was a singularly unexpected winner, given that she had retired from skating for two years.  Hers was the best story of the figure skating season – and will stand as one of the best sports stories of 2025.

From my first conversation about the comeback with one of her coaches, Phillip DiGuglielmo, which took place just before her return to international competition in October, he insisted Liu would be a medal contender – at nationals.

DiGuglielmo might have been sandbagging a bit.

Liu was second at nationals, where a botched layback spin at the end of the free skate cost her more points than the final c difference between her and champion Amber Glenn.

With a joy that celebrated her new relationship with skating, which she had come to hate by the end of her first career in 2022, Liu skated flawlessly at both the worlds and the World Team Trophy, which Team USA won easily.  She became the first U.S. woman to win the singles world title since Kimmie Meissner in 2006.

“We have to say when we first spoke back in August or September, I was hopeful she would just be in shape and ready to compete,” DiGuglielmo told me via text after the World Team Trophy.  “Maybe in the back of my mind there was a little voice saying, ‘world champion.’  All that work paid off.  She is something really special.’”

Now Liu is a medal contender at the 2026 Winter Olympics, where the field is to include one Russian (Adeliia Petrosian?) after a three-year International Skating Union ban on all Russians since their country’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine following the 2022 Olympic Games.  Russian women have won the last three Olympic golds.

A few more reflections on the season past:

Amber Glenn had career breakthroughs this season. (ISU photo)

*Amber Glenn not only won a second straight national title but also was unbeaten in three events on the Grand Prix circuit, where her best finish in 10 previous appearances had been third.  Glenn’s titles included the Grand Prix Final, first win there by a U.S. woman since Alissa Czisny in 2010.

In the process, Glenn got a record international short program score for a U.S. woman and, in winning the French Grand Prix, became at 25 the oldest U.S. woman to win on the Grand Prix for the first time.

Perhaps more importantly, she shook a past tendency to lose control of a program after an early big mistake – even if mistakes were still very costly to her at worlds, where she finished fifth after entering as a gold medal contender.

Glenn continued her no guts, no glory approach to the triple axel.  She received negative grades of execution on six of her 14 triple axel attempts, falling on two – including the one in the short program at worlds.  Props to her, though, for adding the jump to the short, which made Glenn one of just three women to try one in the short at senior international competition  this season.

*Ilia Malinin, for whom no challenge is too big, left one unconquered in a season that made him the strong favorite for gold in Italy next year.

Malinin set his mind on becoming the first person to do a free skate with a quadruple jump as the opener of every jumping pass (which also meant he was first to attempt all six types of quads in the same program.)  He tried it three times but never managed to land all seven cleanly, coming closest at nationals with five.

“I really want to nail this down, and I think I’ll spend this offseason trying to master it, because I think it is my perfect layout for the Olympics,” he said after landing four quads judged fully rotated and clean at worlds.

And this, with thanks to the data-crunching genius at skatingscores.com: Over the season, Malinin averaged 7.0 jumping passes with a quad per competition – short program and free skate.  That matched his average from the 2022-23 season.  Those averages are the highest ever.  Reigning Olympic champion Nathan Chen is second, with an average of 6.75 per competition in 2016-17,

Ilia Malinin’s aeronautics led to a second straight world title. (ISU photo)

(That statistic includes only events in which skaters did both short and free.  It also includes only jumps listed with a “4,” on the official protocol, which means “pops” are excluded because of uncertain intention)

Incidentally, while Malinin’s winning score at 2025 worlds was 15.20 points lower than his winning score in 2024, his margin of victory (31.09) was 6.98 points greater.

There are those that carp over Malinin’s free skate programs being so quad oriented, to the detriment of “pretty” skating.  Chen faced similar criticism.

“Whatever he is doing certainly is working,” Chen said in Boston.  “I don’t think you need to do any wholesale changes at this point in time.

“You can also see improvement with everything else (in his skating.)  It doesn’t seem lost on him that there’s other aspects of skating that are also very important.

“More broadly speaking, if you look at the way the point system is structured, if you throw down big jumps and land them, you get the points.  So, it doesn’t make sense (for Malinin) to try to avoid that.”

*And then there is Jason Brown, who continues to find success in the sport despite not having ever landed a clean quad and having not even tried one since the 2021-22 season.

Brown almost certainly cannot win global championship medals without a quad.  (His highest finish at worlds is fourth in 2015, a time when few men did even three free skate quads; even then, Brown was nearly 20 points from the podium.)

But he triumphs in other ways, winning over crowds and judges with his elegant skating – and helping ensure the U.S. men get the maximum number of spots for worlds and Olympics.

For the third straight year, Brown’s world placements – eighth, fifth and fifth - were critical to getting the third spot, which required that the top two U.S. men have finishes that added up to 13 or fewer.  In all three cases, even with Malinin placing third, first and first, the third U.S. man did so poorly (22, 20, 21) that Brown’s contribution was decisive.

Jason Brown in his stunning interpretation of music by Arvo Part. (ISU photo)

That was also the case at the 2017 worlds, when the two U.S. entrants (Chen, 6th; Brown, 7th) hit the magic number on the dot, earning the third spot for the 2018 Olympics – none of which, ironically, went to Brown.

This season was perplexing for Brown, who struggled with boot issues and had to petition for a world team spot after withdrawing from nationals.  He finally solved the problem a month before worlds.

At worlds, after a rare short program mistake left him 12th, he rallied with a fourth in the free skate.  At the World Team Trophy, he was second in the free to Malinin.  Brown finished that high largely because his component scores in those two events were the top two in the world in international competition this season.

Those scores were well deserved for a program that I felt was not only the most beautiful of the season but also the most beautiful in Brown’s career.

The music, “Spiegel im Spiegel” (Mirror in the Mirror) by Estonian composer Arvo Part, is not easy to interpret.  It is both minimalist and performed at an unvarying and strikingly slow tempo.  In the recording Brown used, it had just two instruments: a piano and a dark-toned violin.

Working with that limited musical palette required restraint and delicacy from both the choreographer, Rohene Ward, and from Brown.  It also asked Brown to skate with constant flow and as close as he could to one speed throughout the four minutes, no mean feat when also needing to gather the body’s power for seven jumping passes.

Brown pulled that off wonderfully, even with a glitch on one jump at the World Team Trophy.  His gestures were intimate and unembellished.  His flow was unbroken, even in executing a cartwheel, when he pushed off while landing that element.

Eleven years ago, also in Boston, Brown had done what had always seemed to be the defining program of his career, to high-energy music from “Riverdance.”

But who Jason Brown is now as a performer and competitor is better expressed by the “Spiegel im Spiegel” program.  I have now watched it once live in the arena and a dozen other times on video, and each time it is more captivating.

It is also proof that in even the era of the quadg0d, an athletic marvel who is pushing the sport seemingly beyond the limits of gravity, Brown and Malinin can both be the apotheosis of figure skating.