The Ultimate Debate Among Figure Skaters in 2026

This week, we are celebrating Russian skaters coming back to figure skating! Some of you might not know, but I am a figure skater, and I did train a lot when I was younger, but now, just practicing by myself. So for me, as both a skater and a fan of the sport, this is obviously a big moment this year. The fact that skaters are coming back to the sport means a lot of things because first, Russian skaters have been banned every since the Russian-Ukraine conflict in 2022 after the 2022 Winter Olympics and Russian skaters really did dominate the sport for nearly a decade, especially in the women’s single skating category. So, let’s talk about it!

Disclaimer: the below content is based on my personal opinions on figure skating only and are for entertainment purposes only.

The debate on Russian skaters being banned has been going around for quite a long time, but it officially started to heat up and boil after the 2026 Milan Olympics. The Milan Olympics happened with one Russian skater as an Individual Neutral athlete in each category, meaning that the chances of Russia winning the Olympics this year was very thin. There was one skater at the women’s single competition, Adeliya Petrosian, three-time Russian national champion in 2024, 2025, and 2026, so she is obviously seen as the best skater in all of Russia, at least at the time of the Olympics. The Russians have dominated the top or the entire podium at the Olympics for perhaps the last decade, with their Ultra-C elements and great artistry. They also dominated the Olympic podium with gold and silver medals from 2018 to 2022 with girls from the Eteri Tutberidze camp.

Pro-USA fans say that at this Olympics, “even if all the Russians came to this Olympics, they would still end up the way they were” because Adeliya came. Adeliya did not get first, due to two main factors: an ankle injury that severely hindered her ability to do Ultra-C jumps completely and not having experience in international competition as the Olympics was her only international competition as of the writing of the article. Whatever haters online have to say about her and her performance, they cannot take those two factors away from the truth.

Pro-Russia fans may say that there are no quads, very little Ultra-Cs, and the Olympics this year didn’t not show the greatest potential of figure skating at the time. Some even comment on Alysa Liu’s body, saying that she does not look like a skater at all or that she is just simply too fat. However, Alysa is simply doing what she thinks is the best for her and there has been no rule set by the ISU or anyone on how skaters must look or weigh. She returned to figure skating not because “the Russians are banned so I can win everything now”—she retired right after the 2022 Olympics at age 16, right when the Russians are banned from skating, and came back a few years later, when they are still banned. I appreciate either skater a lot for their skating and for who they are, so what I have said here is not just defending them from uneducated haters on the Internet but also showing everyone what is the truth here.

Before anyone says everything else and makes a judgement on my opinion, here are my takes on this whole situation. First, all that athletes can do in any sport competition is to qualify, participate, and celebrate if needed. This is all that they can do. Anything other than that is out of their zone, which includes who their opponents are, what their opponents are capable of, and most importantly in the case of skating, what their judges think of them. Figure skating is obviously an extremely subjective sport. Its subjectivity can influence Grade of Execution scores, performance scores, and if really obvious, what judges collectively think of a certain performance which can lead them to collectively giving a performance a higher score. All of this is out of what athletes can control. If people are unhappy about Russians not being at international competitions, they should blame the policies made, not the athletes on ice.

All skaters have their own strengths and weaknesses, which makes them the skater that they are. Some are better at jumps, some perhaps at footwork or spins, and comparing skaters for who they are is simply treating the sport with just one standard, when in reality, there are many. All that any skater can do at any competition is just skate at their best, and I think both Adeliya and Alysa did that.

Alysa cannot control what are the policies of each figure skating competition she is in, nor can any other athletes at any competition, so this is the biggest uncontrollable factor of each competition for athletes, yet, people blame the athletes for them. Each Olympic game has had its fair share of a factor that makes the public unsatisfied—the 2014 doping scandal, the 2022 incident that caused perhaps one of the best skaters at that time to not compete at her best—and so much more. However, the Olympics was never the measure of who is the best in the world, it is only the measure of who is the best out of all the athletes who are privileged enough to be at that competition. Yes, it may seem unfair that the Russians are banned this year, but at every Olympics and just in the world in general, there are so many skaters out there who cannot compete at those competitions because of so many other factors. This could be monetary (parents who cannot support their children with practicing the sport), social (no facilities around them that can help them) or other wider societal issues prohibiting them like war or natural disasters. What I am saying is that every year and in corner of the world, there are thousands of people who have the talent and potential to become professional skaters out there, but due to whatever factor it may be, they are not present at big competitions because their society doesn’t allow them to. If we also consider all of those skaters who are left out from the sport, we would soon realize that those elite competitions were never about measuring who is the perfect skater and the best, but simply who is the best in all of the skaters who competed.

Athletes before may have set the bar pretty high for athletes later, but that doesn’t make any Olympic champion less than one another, because at the end of the day, they are all Olympic champions, in the era they are in, and that, is what we should all acknowledge and understand because becoming one, getting a medal of any color, or simply being “enough” to compete at the games in any given era, is never easy and never will be.

Some people, especially on Chinese social media, say that Alysa’s scores are just the result of judges being super biased and inflating her GoEs and performance scores so that she would win. However, shouldn’t that be the judges’ fault? The figure skating judging system has always been incredibly biased, and of course judges have their preferences of which skater they think is better and which jump is done better or which performance is done better. The International Skating Union can’t even control anything like this because they cannot get into the minds of judges and tell them which skater to give the award to because judges don’t know each other before the competition, and even if they do, they all have their own preferences or shall we say “biases” on which skater is better and which skater deserves a higher score. Anything is possible under the possibility of bias, so why are we still looking at skaters when we see the scoreboard? Shouldn’t we question the judges?

When I say that we are celebrating Russian skaters coming back to competition, I mean that competitions will now be more fair and more aligned to the mission of sport being less relevant to politics. I hope that more people can realize that under the current situation of figure skating, there is no way that a competition is judged perfectly objectively or held with perfect fairness of all the best skaters in the world, but what we can do is to appreciate all the skaters out there for their uniqueness and personal accomplishments in the era that they are in.

What do you think of this debate? And who do you think will be the star of next season? Let me know in the comments below!