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The Once Unthinkable Revolution Coming to Figure Skating

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Is the sport ready? Some of its biggest stars think so.

April 19, 2022

It was spring 2022, and the Winter Olympics season had finally come to a close. Under the glare of fluorescent lights in a nearly empty arena in London, Ontario, two of figure skating’s most decorated athletes circled each other with ease. Four years—knocked askew by the pandemic, injuries, and illnesses—had just culminated in both receiving medals they’d worked toward for their entire careers. Now, with no upcoming competition, no pressure, and no expectations, they took each other by the hand and glided across the ice.

As piano echoed over the sound system, they began to dance, their bodies matching effortlessly, limbs stretching in identical lines, torsos coiling. With their arms wrapped around each other tightly, they unfurled to spin around in endless motion. Improvisation became choreography, and they alternated between carving across the ice and laughing at a botched move. Over and over, they practiced a Fred Astaire–style dip until it was easy. Cheek to cheek, then far apart with just a single push, the pair forged a new routine.

From the way they moved in perfect harmony, you’d never guess that they had never competed together. They looked every bit the pros they were. But there was one unusual thing about them: Both were women. For close friends like Gabriella Papadakis and Madison Hubbell—and any two figure skaters who want to compete with a same-gender partner—skating as a team had long been forbidden.

The International Skating Union, or ISU, expressly prohibits same-gender teams in competition. Pair skating and ice dance teams have both been defined as “one Woman and one Man” since the 1950s, and while athletes of the same gender can skate together in synchronized skating—which showcases teams of eight to 16—competitive rules for teams of two have remained strictly man and woman.

But several months after Papadakis and Hubbell had that private skate session, there was a startling change. In September 2022, in a unanimous ruling, Skate Canada, the country’s figure skating governing body, made history when it removed all gendered language from its competition rulebook, redefining teams as “Partner A and Partner B.” For the first time, same-gender teams and out nonbinary athletes using correct pronouns would be able to compete at Canada’s national events.

Online, the announcement was met with a combination of rainbow roulettes, Blades of Glory GIFs, and hate speech. Reactions flowed in: It was “a wonderful change.” Or maybe the sport was “repositioning itself as a grooming area for gay pedophiles.”

But the decision was actually just the beginning. A far bigger change may be coming now, one that took Papadakis and Hubbell by surprise and suggested a once unthinkable new course ahead for the sport. Now the skaters are waiting to see how far the ISU is prepared to go—and who, in turn, is really ready to embrace two figures like theirs under the competitive lights.

For people who grew up training in rinks around the world, as I did as a former skater, same-gender pairs were either a pipe dream or an option we wouldn’t even have thought to consider. Some skaters have publicly expressed a desire to see same-gender teams compete, but no one has officially challenged the ISU’s rule since 1998.

That’s partly because at times, the ISU’s enforcement of the rule has bordered on severe. At the 1998 Gay Games in Amsterdam, the organization refused to sanction the figure skating event because same-gender teams would defy its rules. Officials even threatened disciplinary action against skaters or judges who participated.

There are long-held beliefs for why the sport had to be this way, even among many skaters themselves. Ice dance, a type of figure skating in which two athletes perform technically demanding routines à la ballroom dance, became an Olympic sport in 1976. It’s arguably the most lyrical of the figure skating disciplines, so much so that it’s often hard for uninitiated fans to understand why one team scored ahead of another. Athletes gain points for artistry and aesthetics—there’s no finish line for skaters to cross, and with jumps forbidden, there are no airborne rotations an observer can count for signs of success. Instead, those points come for technical abilities like step sequences, pattern dances, and unison during side-by-side traveling spins, as well as for musical sensitivity, presentation, and choreography.

In practice, that means a larger part of the sport’s appeal comes from the sexy, passion-filled performances. While there’s nothing in the ISU rulebook that requires the routines to be romantic, they often are, and a team’s perceived chemistry seems to influence scoring. When Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir put on their steamy and perfectly executed tango to selections from Moulin Rouge at the 2018 Olympics, it won them their fifth Olympic medal, making them the most decorated team of all time.

Throughout their career, Virtue and Moir, who teamed up as children, were repeatedly asked if they were dating. They weren’t—but it often felt like the whole world wanted them to be. When they appeared together on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in 2018, DeGeneres only briefly asked about their athletic successes before launching into a segment focused on their “romance.” “You’re not together, but you should be,” she concluded.

Moir retired in 2019, but he still gets admonishments like these. “It was hard for my wife,” he told me. “Even at the grocery store, she’d get comments like, ‘What’s it like to let all of Canada down?’ ”

Eventually, Moir decided to spin this into a compliment. It meant that he and Virtue were selling their romantic storyline so well that it was all people cared about. While it’s true that some teams, like U.S. siblings Maia and Alex Shibutani, have had competitive success without the romance, many skaters still rely on it to boost the scores on their routines.

The expectation that ice dancing should be a heterosexual romantic performance has long helped keep the sport opposite-gender. In Hubbell and Papadakis’ case, neither is interested in stepping back onto the competitive circuit with a new partner. But the idea of exploring what a same-gender team can create on the ice together always held allure. The longtime friends trained with their partners at the same facility in Montréal for more than seven years, and although they were fierce competitors, they developed a deep friendship, connecting over the experiences and pressures of elite athletic success. Always admiring each other’s strengths, they often talked about skating together, perhaps at a touring show unrestrained by competition rules. “Part of that was the selfish desire to be able to go and travel the world with one of your best friends and get paid to work together,” Hubbell said. “But part of it was that we would have to explore a different side of our skating in order to make that work.”

This “different side” is actually more complex than it seems. Traditionally, female ice dancers are assigned the “following” role, while men take on the “lead,” or “supporting,” role. Papadakis and Hubbell found that two women negotiating these roles generated an entirely new dynamic of movement, and they began to realize just how one-sided their years of training had been.

“I remember specifically being told, ‘The guy is leading. The guy is deciding which steps we are going to do, and then the lady’s role is to follow and make sure she’s always in tune with her partner’s movements,’ ” Papadakis said. When teaming up with Hubbell, it wasn’t immediately clear who was to lead and who was to follow. They suddenly realized that details as small as which side to stand on and whose hand is held on top had to be renavigated and relearned.

“It’s inevitable that some things don’t feel natural,” Hubbell said. “For 26 years, I grabbed my partner’s hand with my palm facing down, every day, all day long. So of course, inherently, offering Gabriella my hand, her placing her hand in mine—there’s a thought process that has to take place.”

Then there were the lifts. Although women have been lifting one another in synchronized skating for 20 years, learning to lift each other in ice dance presented Papadakis and Hubbell with a new challenge: finding creative ways to leverage their body weight and overcome the fear of injuring a friend. “It’s an athletic endeavor,” Hubbell said. “And there’s artistry behind it, but artistry is not inherently sexual. She and I are both quite sensual people. It can look like we’re trying to convey some sort of intimate relationship. But then we put on another piece of music, and it can look like two people who are best friends, or two people who are fighting.”

They are still experimenting with who’ll lead, who’ll follow, and what it might look like if figure skating’s romantic gender binary dissolves.

Though they don’t intend to compete together, Papadakis and Hubbell’s experiment suddenly took on more weight earlier this year.

In February, about six months after Canada announced its intention to allow same-gender skating teams, the ISU held a meeting for athletes, coaches, and officials that hasn’t been previously reported. At the meeting, set to discuss the upcoming season’s competitive requirements, Kaitlyn Weaver raised her hand. Weaver, an openly queer three-time World medalist and Canadian champion who sits on the committee that pioneered Skate Canada’s new rule, asked whether the ISU had plans to expand Canada’s updated gender rules internationally. As she put it, “Do you have any plans going forward to have this be a part of the conversation globally?”

The response caught Weaver by surprise. ISU technical committee chair Shawn Rettstatt responded that yes, there were plans forming to propose a wider rule change in favor of same-sex pairs in competition. If the issue passes an internal review and becomes an official proposal, it’ll likely be voted on next year at the ISU’s International Congress in Las Vegas, a sprawling biennial event billed as an opportunity to make “major decisions about the future and direction of the ISU.”

It’ll need a two-thirds majority of votes to win. In an interview later, Rettstatt seemed cautiously upbeat about its chances.

“It’s a topic that definitely makes sense, and needs to be discussed further,” Rettstatt told me. He said it’s unclear whether these teams would compete in a separate category, or join traditional events instead; the rules could also vary by the type of figure skating. “Would it be equitable to each couple that was trying to compete within that event? Probably in ice dance it would be, because that is a discipline in which both partners have to have their own kind of strengths, and there’s a way that you could utilize that quite beautifully,” he said.

The ISU has a complicated governing structure that makes it hard to assess how wide the support for such a proposal might be. But for an official to talk about it so openly is a clear positive sign for advocates. Most skaters and officials I spoke to for this article—to their considerable surprise—think the proposal will be successful.

That the moment arrived so suddenly surprised Hubbell, who was also in the room when Weaver asked her question. Papadakis was taken aback, too. “Ice dance—and figure skating in general—has been a little stuck in the past,” she said.

And for a sport that has for so long been set in its ways, the potential change could be even more momentous than it seems.

Figure skating’s popularity has waned in recent years, and the sport’s Olympics viewership has been on the decline. Many chalk this up to complicated scoring systems and the shifting habits of American viewers, among other things, but the sport’s outdated image isn’t doing it any favors. Archaic gender rules have long reigned—it was only last year that female skaters were finally allowed to wear pants, and that the ISU stopped referring to them as “ladies.”

Hubbell thinks same-gender teams might help revitalize interest. “Frankly, if they don’t figure out that a demographic other than wealthy, white, heterosexual couples can be related to, they’re not going to have an audience anymore,” she said.

Hubbell and Papadakis plan to debut their routines—which will adhere to competition rules—on social media, where they hope to inspire voting members of the ISU to go through with the change. “As two-time Olympians and Olympic medalists, we have the opportunity to open that door and hopefully get people talking about it,” Hubbell said.

Papadakis, who is bisexual, is excited that the potential ISU ruling could create the opportunity to express a fuller range of stories on the ice. “I love to see a beautifully stereotyped man and woman—a beautiful prince-and-princess waltz—but not because we’re forced to, but because a couple thought it was beautiful and wanted to make it their own,” she told me. “But I always felt that was imposed on us, which, for me, never felt authentic. And I don’t think I’m the only one thinking that.” Training with Hubbell allows her a fuller expression of her identity, which once felt unattainable after 20 years of skating with a male partner. “It’s just nice to explore something that exists in me but I had never explored on the ice before,” she said.

ike Papadakis, Weaver, who pushed the change in Canada, internalized figure skating’s gender norms, hiding her identity as a queer woman until she retired in 2020 at the age of 30. The on-ice chemistry she and her partner Andrew Poje perfected over a 15-year partnership became their calling card, and Weaver feared that prejudice from fans and judges who discovered the truth would affect their results. She felt compelled to adhere to a feminine outline, and she remembers being sexualized for her “ideal” body type as young as age 6. “Either you’re a sexy woman, or you’re a little young ingénue, and there’s not a lot in between,” Weaver told me. “If you don’t feel comfortable playing the role of a sexy woman in the presence of a man, then that adds another layer of suppression.”

This dynamic made headlines in the run-up to the 2022 Olympics, when Russian coach Alexander Vedenin claimed that Papadakis and her skating partner, Guillaume Cizeron—an out gay man—would not succeed in their bid for Olympic gold because Cizeron “does not have a ‘traditional orientation.’ ” He claimed that his Russian team could express “true love,” and thus had the edge. Cizeron and Papadakis ultimately stood at the top of the podium last year, winning for a contemporary routine that celebrated an iconic gay-club dance form, waacking, to boot.

For Cizeron, it was just one of many moments in which his sexuality was twisted into an impediment. “I would get comments, like that people wanted me to be more ‘masculine,’ ” he said. “I think one of the main comments that I still get is, ‘Oh, I love the way you skate, because you’re gay, but you don’t look gay.’ ” Cizeron laughed as he told me this, the absurdity of the “compliment” sinking in. But it wasn’t always something he found funny. “Those comments, at some point, made me feel inadequate,” he said. “It made me feel like I had to become something. I felt like I couldn’t give them what they wanted to see.”

For many young athletes operating in the confines of an artistic sport, the need to give judges what they want leaves them with an anxiety that extends beyond athletic concerns. The “wrong” aesthetic image can be a problem beyond an athlete’s ability. This is particularly true when it comes to figure skating’s fixation on gender roles, and the many ways that can warp the self-image and performance of the skaters themselves.

For young girls in the sport, success is predicated on finding a male partner—a commodity that can be limited. Daphne Backman, who runs Icepartnersearch.com, a dating-site-like platform for aspiring ice dancers, said that of the 160 skaters listed on the site, only 36 are boys.

“It does create a big gender imbalance in power dynamics,” Papadakis said. “Because men have all the choices, and girls, if they want to achieve some sort of high level, they have to be better than, like, a thousand other girls. It’s definitely a pressure that I think is unhealthy.”

With the possibility for same-gender athletes to partner together, there’s the hope that some of the expectations placed on young women can shift. A taller, more muscular girl, instead of being ostracized, could perform the lifting role, using the skills her body naturally gives her.

“I think that there’s something very visual about the fact that our bodies make similar lines,” Hubbell said of skating with Papadakis. “I think people have always shied away from that, because the traditional pairing is somebody shorter and somebody taller, and somebody that weighs more and somebody who weighs less. It could even serve to heal the culture of body dysmorphia and eating disorders just a little bit, or at least the feeling that how you appear is more important than what you do.”

Women and girls must contend with the expectation for a waifish appearance against the modern scoring system that rewards increasingly demanding feats of strength. “The tradition and image of an ice dancer comes from ballet and ballroom,” Hubbell said. “It’s a beautiful woman who is graceful, who is thin, who has a very certain body type.” With the ranks of judges and officials stacked with members of a previous generation, both Papadakis and Hubbell said that many of the sport’s gatekeepers simply don’t realize the level of athleticism required of today’s female athletes—and it shows.

Hubbell, who retired after the 2022 season, is now coaching in Ontario alongside her fiancé, Spanish champion Adrián Díaz. Her post gives her the chance to guide a new generation of skaters toward a different future. Her school has many talented young female students, and the possibilities of teaming them up together seem obvious to her. But she said the girls are still reluctant to give up on the chance to compete in a traditional pairing, telling her that they’ll wait one more season, one more year—and then, if they still can’t find a male partner, they’ll think about skating with another girl.

Some worry about the exposure that would come with being part of a same-gender team. Émile Couture, a 21-year-old Canadian figure skater, said he stepped away from competitive ice dance feeling uninspired by skating with a female partner. Earlier this year, he uploaded a unique profile on Icepartnersearch.com. “I am actually looking for another guy to compete with on a national level in Canada,” his bio reads. “My short-term goal would be to successfully compete at Nationals next year as the first man-man couple and pioneer this new challenge.”

Couture has not yet had a response, but he said support from coaches and friends has been overwhelmingly positive. He thinks the same-gender team would not only allow him to perform routines that feel more authentic but would also pave the way for teams composed of two women and nonbinary people. “I think the world of ice dancing could go so much broader, and really let people express themselves,” Couture told me.

The ability to do that will depend on where a skater lives. Even if the ISU votes to degenderize figure skating next year, a particular country’s laws and culture are still likely to come into play. Some countries, like Russia—which criminalizes the promotion of same-sex relationships or the implication that they’re “normal”—are unlikely to honor expanded ISU rules or send same-gender teams into competitions, even if the athletes in them aren’t queer. Canada got a taste of the potential backlash last year; scroll through the comment thread on Skate Canada’s tweet announcing their rule revision and you’ll see the onslaught.

Even if the rules do change, it could be years before we see same-gender teams standing on podiums. The path to an Olympic or World medal is a long one, and it takes years to perfect partnerships, skill sets, and routines. But it’s skaters like Weaver, Cizeron, Hubbell, and Papadakis who’ll make up the new generation of coaches, choreographers, officials, and judges—a more progressive cohort that’ll reshape the parameters of the sport.

“I just want to start to normalize it,” Hubbell said. “If I can prove that she and I can lift one another and it doesn’t make one of us more ‘manly’ than the other, then maybe I can prove that partnership is really just a skill set. It’s something you practice. It’s something you learn. And each team is going to have strengths and weaknesses. Your worth in the sport is not inherently tied to one particular stereotype.”

After another year of experience, taking acrobatics classes, and working on lifts with her female students, Hubbell is excited to skate with Papadakis again. Last year, they had tried balance lifts, one partner’s blade gingerly placed on another’s boot, hands clasped, with a free leg raised into a careful arabesque. They tried holding each other’s waists, spinning around, centripetal forces and physical strength binding them together. Thinking it would be easy, Hubbell tried cradling Papadakis while gliding into a spread-eagle position, legs akimbo, toes pointed east and west. It was most definitely not easy, and Hubbell realized just how much faith partners have to have in each other as they launch their bodies into each other’s arms. But it didn’t deter them—it was just a new challenge in a sport they’ve known their whole lives. They’re ready for the next one.

—Slate

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The Once Unthinkable Revolution Coming to Figure Skating

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