My first figure skating coach once told me that discomfort was a distraction. Though that wasn’t exactly how he put it, since his limited, Russified English forced him to explain things in a looping kind of way. My fluency was a sign of the hours I had spent with him over the years. This was in an inner-city suburb of Sydney, where developers converted an airport hangar into an Olympic-sized rink. Through the summer, its cavernous interior billowed with fog, and when it rained, we placed buckets on the ice to catch the water: the drips formed craters that—if they caught your toe-pick at the right angle or speed—could possibly end your career. Though, of course, the fog, which clouded over everything, was easily just as perilous.

You had to learn to skate in any condition. And no matter what kind of day it was, my coach was stepping outside in his worn-down skates for another cigarette, saying something like: I’m going to go to the canteen, where I will ask them for a styrofoam cup; I’m going to take that styrofoam cup to the stands, where I will beg every person for a dollar; I’m going to use that cup of dollars at the gun store, where I will buy myself a pistol; and with that pistol I will finally shoot myself. By which he meant that practice was going badly that morning.

I guess around that time, I’d adjusted my leotard during a competition. It was during those moments spent waiting by the boards before they call your name to begin. Once that happens, you have thirty seconds to assume your starting position before the judges, shortly after which the music and the stopwatch begin: two minutes and forty seconds for the short program, four minutes for the free skate that follows. Any regular person would be forgiven for thinking that the competition happens within those defined periods of time. But in fact, the opposite is true: you quickly learn to assume that you are constantly subject to judgment. Later in my career, I’d attend scheduled “practices” before competition, for which full costume and make-up were basically required: officials would circulate through the stands to judge if you made a mistake. By then, I’d moved to Michigan to train at a more competitive rink, where the locker room was exposed by an internally-facing glass panel: from any part of the rink, our coach could look through that window to judge what you were eating. I learned this all in some capacity back in Sydney when my first coach told me that he’d noticed my finger pulling the lycra down when it should have been resting gracefully by my thigh instead. This all makes him sound like a man of dictatorial inclinations, which he was not, certainly a rarity in the sport; in fact, he was a kind-hearted man and incredibly insightful. But seeing me adjust my leotard in competition had made him want to ask the canteen for a cup.

That rink is closed now, I heard, underfunded like the rest of them. I assume this has something to do with the fact that—except for every four years at the Olympics—hardly anyone is really watching the sport. Even at championship events, skaters perform in stadiums that seem mostly empty, except for the judging panel—but even they aren’t really watching, as it turns out, at least once you count the reports of corruption and score fixing. There is no comprehensive explanation for this decline, only signs that the sport feels outdated to younger viewers; this year’s 2024 Prevagen U.S. Figure Skating Championships bore the name of its primary sponsor, an over-the-counter supplement that claims to “improve memory” in cases of “normal aging.”

As part of an ongoing attempt to make the sport more engaging for younger viewers, the International Skating Union—the sport’s governing body, composed of the judges, officials, and administrators from each country’s federation—periodically updates its rules and regulations. In theory, departing from tradition allows skaters a greater degree of artistic freedom. It recently ruled that women could wear pants, for example (provided that fifty percent of their body remains costumed; “clothing must not give the effect of excessive nudity,” reads the ISU handbook, meaning that “illusion,” or nude-colored flesh, does not count towards the percentage. For the several years that I competed internationally in ice dance, every season would begin by studying the latest edition of this handbook with our coaches, as if we all had to learn the sport over again: the Union started experimenting with the given “rhythms” that were usually adapted from ballroom—instead of waltzes, tangoes, or the quickstep, we were gradually subjected to styles that the Union called “street dance.” I’ve seen that next year, each team will skate a “dance party.” All of the disciplines once required that skaters perform the “figures” from which the sport derives its name, moves that trace circular patterns onto the ice; now these, too, have been deemed out of style. In their place, skaters are permitted to perform certain moves that were formerly deemed “illegal” in competition but, for years, have proven popular on the commercial show circuit: they can now touch the ice, for example, and the boards. They can also skate to music with lyrics.

Perhaps its commitment to modernization has led it to believe that, when it comes to figure skating, viewer “engagement” can be boosted in the same way that it is on social media: by manufacturing a product that is in every way more spectacular, commanding attention. But even with these revisions, the sport feels terribly antiquated. That feeling was especially hard to ignore as I watched the rhythm dance events this past season, in which every ice dance team was required to skate to music from the 1980s: some women wore unitards, yes, but also a lot of pastel eye-shadow, side-ponytails, and spandex treated to look like studded leather. World-class athletes, making the best of the Union’s rule changes, slid on the ice while thrusting in a manner designed to recall Flashdance; they leaned on the boards, close enough for the judges to feel their labored breath, and simulated the motions of a Jane Fonda aerobics class. Watching them, I thought of something that Mirai Nagasu, the first American woman to land a triple axel in competition, had said in a 2022 interview: when asked about the relative scarcity of women figure skating in pants, she suggested that skaters were wary of deviating from convention. “I think, as athletes, we’re all people pleasers,” she offered.

Admirers of figure skating usually defend it on the basis of its artistry. But there is a limit to the latter, I think, when it is contrived—and specifically contrived for the kind of judgment that fundamentally values, above all else, the sustainment of illusion. In most other sports, the struggle of endurance is made plain: footballers grunt through the scrimmage, tennis players heave while they hit, and swimmers gape their jaws open for air. But in figure skating, athletes are awarded not only for the difficulty of a certain motion, but also their success in concealing the struggle it took to perform it. I think of Michelle Kwan’s defeat by Tara Lipinski at the 1998 Nagano Olympics. Sports Illustrated painted the difference between them this way: Kwan, “all business,” had opted to stay with her parents in a hotel near the stadium, where her father unambiguously reminded her of the “job” she was there to do; meanwhile, the “relaxed and cheerful” Lipinski, who had been to Disney World fourteen times, treated her time in the Olympic Village with a sense of touristic adventure. Her winning skate was an extension of that “joyous odyssey.” Whereas with Michelle, a sense of struggle pervaded; the pressure visibly bore down on her, in her skating. “It was not the feeling of flying,” confirmed Frank Caroll, her coach.

Gymnasts and cheerleaders know about this, too, but the fact of blades in figure skating only augments its capacity for illusion: the ideal skater, in a state of suspension, conceals the forces of earthly reality—gravity, inertia, and every other kind that isn’t accounted for by physics. She endures the falls as she does the men, the politics, the hunger and the pressure, and the concussions; she endures and is sometimes awarded if she can make that struggle look like the feeling of flying. That in itself is a kind of art, but one that feels closer to being artful, embroiled in the duplicity that illusion requires.

Three years after I’d retired from figure skating—at what felt like the tragic age of twenty-two—I found myself in New York, where I’d moved to try and write, confronted by a canvas at the Whitney. Almost expansive as a sheet of ice, I thought, and marked in the way that ice tends to look after any session: etched with figures, perhaps pockmarked by rain, mauled by toe-picks vaulting skaters into flight. I later learned that the artist, Joan Mitchell, had been a “Figure Skating Queen of the Midwest” but retired from competition at seventeen after placing a “disappointing” fourth at Nationals. Reading about her, I was alarmed at how it seemed that she carried the sport with her: in her later years, she struggled with lung cancer, arthritis, and two hip replacements but continued to extend herself, literally, to paint her enormous canvases. When asked about the physical strain, she replied, “I just got up on that fucking ladder and told myself, This stroke has to work.”

I had once fallen in love with the sport and stayed in it, believing in its artistry. But standing in front of Mitchell’s Hemlock, I saw the struggle—the kind of scene typically smoothed into glass by a Zamboni, as if it had never happened.