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While the rest of America fell in love with figure skating at the Olympics this February, my 2026 skating journey began a month earlier than that. This year’s pre-Olympics U.S. Championships took place in St. Louis, not far from where my parents live, and I was so excited to go, I booked tickets a full year in advance. Then, a few days before the event, I suddenly panicked that I wouldn’t like it. I’m a lifelong figure skating fan, but up until January, I’d only ever watched on TV. What if it didn’t feel the same in person? What if I couldn’t follow the scoring without the dulcet tones of Johnny Weir and Tara Lipinski to guide me? What if I made some big faux pas with the clapping etiquette? Would I regret spending that money on an all-inclusive pass instead of just watching from my couch?
Thankfully, it took just one practice session watching Alysa Liu warm up in her adorable rehearsal skirt and Jason Brown throw himself into his program to become totally addicted to in-person skating. I had the absolute time of my life throughout the entire Nationals week, watching future “Blade Angels” Alysa and Isabeau Levito cheer from the sidelines while Amber Glenn delivered her title-winning free skating; Ilia Malinin get showered with Toothless plushies; Madison Chock and Evan Bates go full diva every time they stepped on the ice; and Jimmy Ma serve up one of the most transcendentally campy programs I’ve ever seen in competition. (I shared some of it on Instagram.)
The 2026 U.S. Figure Skating Championships
I immediately wanted to attend more live skating events. So after the competition wrapped up, I texted some friends to see if they wanted to go to Stars on Ice when it came through Chicago in May. Two took me up on it, another asked if he could decide whether he wanted to go closer to the date. I said probably. I figured prices might go up a little bit after the Olympics, but there were still rows upon rows of empty seats available and the arena was anticipating a low enough turn out that they hadn’t even opened the upper level for sale. I told him his odds of buying last-minute tickets were pretty good.
Then Milano-Cortina happened.
Needless to say, the arena wound up opening their upper bowl. In fact, they wound up selling out every single seat in the 18,000-person venue. Suddenly Stars on Ice didn’t feel like a novelty, it felt like an event. I added a pre-show “Stargazer” pass to my ticket, battled the worst traffic I’ve ever experienced in my life, and wound up about 500 people back in an early entry line that eventually stretched across the entire parking lot. I would guess there were about 1,000 people there just to watch the skaters warm up before a Q&A session with Amber and pairs team Ellie Kam and Danny O’Shea.
The “Stargazer” pre-show event
As someone who’s been following skating pretty closely for the past decade, it’s been surreal to watch the sport have this major cultural moment this year. Hardcore skating fans have known Alysa Liu since she was 13 years old; winning national titles and placing sixth at the Beijing Olympics four years ago. To normal people, however, she’s a “breakout star” who reignited America’s love of figure skating like a lightning bolt. Her gold medal win bumped her Instagram following from about 300k to 8.4 million. She even walked the Met Gala red carpet four days before my Stars on Ice show (and performed two more SOI shows in between).
While the energy at U.S. Nationals had been electric, it was also clearly the energy of a crowd of dedicated fans who were deeply passionate about the sport. (I bonded with some people in my section over the fact that we’d all stayed up late the night before the Olympic Team announcement listening to analyst Jackie Wong’s predictions.) Stars on Ice, however, felt like attending a rock concert. Every jump and spin at the practice session was met with not just polite applause but full-on screaming. Someone stood up at the Q&A to say they didn’t have a question, they just wanted to thank the athletes for giving America something positive to believe in during these difficult times.
Those good vibes only increased during the show itself, which sort of felt like being back at the Eras Tour at times. At various points throughout the night, the skaters told us we were the loudest crowd they’d had yet, which I initially assumed was just something they say every night but may actually have been true based on how they posted about the show afterwards. (Ellie has praised all the crowds for their amazing energies, but Chicago is so far the only one to get a mind blown emoji about our volume.)
If we were especially loud, it’s because the show was great! To be totally honest, I was expecting it to be way chintzier and more ramshackle than it was. I’ve watched enough galas to know that skaters who usually perform alone or in pairs aren’t always the best at translating those skills to big choreographed group numbers. But while camp is a crucial part of the Stars on Ice experience, I thought the show was actually quite impressively put together. There was a witchy theatricality to the dramatic opening number set to Tommee Profitt’s “Fearless” and a lot of Broadway-style fun in the first act closer “Too Darn Hot.” The “Quad God” did no fewer than eight backflips (four of them in a row!) across the evening. Ilia loves a crowd and a crowd loves Ilia, and the show was choreographed to take great advantage of that fact.
I was also thrilled that even though Jason Brown didn’t compete at this year’s Olympics, the crowd still went absolutely nuts for his hometown show. For me, Jason is up there with Michelle Kwan, Nathan Chen, Kaori Sakamoto, and Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir as one of the most captivating performers in the history of the sport, and so much of that was on display throughout the night. He was clearly the artistic standout in the group numbers (even more so than the ice dancers, which surprised me!) and his solo performances were a brilliant showcase for his range as a skater.
His 2024 free skate “Spiegel im Spiegel” highlighted all the grace and elegance he’s famous for, but it was his energetic take on Aladdin’s “Friend Like Me” that truly blew me away. I knew Jason was a showman, but I didn’t fully comprehend his true showman prowess until I saw him serve up this half-musical-theater, half-magic-show number complete with props, costume changes, and the worm on ice. It’s so clear this is what he was born to do, and I hope he keeps skating forever.
Most of the skaters similarly did two solos throughout the night, showing off different sides of their personalities in between the group numbers. On a recent episode of their Runthrough podcast, former Olympians Ashley Wagner and Adam Rippon mentioned that Stars on Ice is a really powerful place for skaters to hone their identity as performers and find a signature style that connects with an audience, and it was fun to see that in so many various ways throughout the evening—from newer Stars on Ice skaters like Andrew Torgashev and ice dancers Christina Carreira and Anthony Ponomarenko to those who have been around the circuit for a while now.
Alysa’s “Promise” is one of those skates I could watch a million times and never get sick of. I love the playfulness of Isabeau’s take on Madonna’s “Material Girl” and I really hope she gets to bring that energy to her competitive skating in this next Olympic cycle. Amber is somehow both effortlessly cool and yet clearly one of the hardest workers on the ice too. (She was drilling her triple axel in the pre-show practice.) She rightfully received some of the loudest applause of the night revisiting her iconic “Like A Prayer” and “That’s Life” skates. And while I’m a little sad Ilia didn’t return to the “Running”/“Hope” mashup he performed at the Nationals gala (my single favorite thing he’s ever done), contrasting his Cooper Nielson-esque take on Yungblud’s cover of “I Was Made For Lovin’ You” with a hoodie-clad hip-hop number is also very authentically Ilia.
The crowd treated the skaters like they were rockstars, and it was insanely fun to enjoy that atmosphere with two friends who aren’t skating obsessives but were just as delighted as I was by the night. My former podcast co-host Ned Baker is from Detroit and activated like a sleeper cell agent at the first notes of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself.” We all lost our minds at the Blade Angels doing “Golden” from KPop Demon Hunters. And I’m still laughing thinking about the fake-out group backflip in the all-boys Bruno Mars number that opened the second half of the show.
There were two performances that made me unexpectedly emotional too. The cheesiest part of the show follows the skaters as they “reenact” the Olympic Team Event, with each doing a little snippet of the program that helped the U.S. win gold. I figured it was a chance to film some programs I was too locked in at Nationals to capture, but I literally had to put my camera down when the strings of Danny and Ellie’s “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” started because I got so choked up. (Below is a clip of them doing “Shallow” instead.)
While normies might think that Danny and Ellie didn’t really contribute much to the team win because they came in fifth and fourth place while everyone else got first or second in their events, they were actually the only skaters on the team who did better than they were projected to do—serving up the literal skates of their lives in the most high-pressure moment of their careers. Considering the U.S won the event by a single point, there’s a strong argument to be made that they’re the ones who actually earned us gold. It was a fairy tale ending for Danny, in particular, who has been trying to go to the Olympics for years now and finally made it at 35 years old. Reliving that moment in front of a sold-out crowd genuinely gave me chills.
I was also totally enraptured by the performance that Chock and Bates did to James Bay’s “Slide.” Madi and Evan have also been around forever (their first Olympics together was Sochi way back in 2014!) and while they’ve delivered iconic skates about aliens, snakes, bullfights, and bedsheets over the years, there was something about this one that felt like such a beautiful tribute to their partnership-turned-marriage. They stripped everything down to simple lyricism and the power of their connection—and I love that they did a portion of it in hold, which feels like the lost art of ice dance these days. While it’s always been clear that Madi is a generational performer, Evan kind of emerged as the secret star of these Olympics for me. And this program was a perfect celebration of both of them.
After 21 skates over two and a half hours, the night ended with the crowd losing their minds for Alysa’s viral “Stateside” routine (which felt like the “event” skate of the evening), a brief closing number, and one last backflip from Ilia. Then Evan pushed Jason out to the middle of the ice to take a hometown bow while Ilia started a chant for him. It was a very sweet example of the camaraderie that’s come to define this current era of skating.
Did it take us a full hour to get out of the parking lot after the show ended? Yes! But that’s a price I’ll happily pay for the joy of watching figure skating have this “moment” in American culture again. I’m hoping the momentum can continue towards something like the popularity the sport enjoyed during the ’90s—especially if that would entice some beloved skaters to come out of retirement and rejoin the show circuit. (Or at least let Jimmy Ma join the SOI crew!) But, either way, I will be adding Stars on Ice to my list of yearly traditions. I’m just sorry it took me this long.
I posted even more snippets of the show on Instagram, and Karen Taylor on YouTube has a great collection of videos from the night as well.
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