I never thought I would be interested in ice skating. Sure, I watch it during the Olympics—the graceful jumps and dizzying spins catch my eye—but apart from those years, I’ve stuck with more ‘mainstream’ sports. As I scrolled through Instagram, I saw a post of Alysa Liu, previously retired, returning to competitive figure skating. Her program, backed by Laufey’s “Promise”, had me rewatching it over and over. My curiosity came at the perfect time, the 2025 World Figure Skating Championships were being held in Boston on March 25.
This competition was my first look into figure skating, and it is certainly very complex. First, I had to figure out how to watch the programs. The official website for Worlds offered little help, so a quick Google search redirected me to NBC…but I didn’t have Peacock. Thus, I clicked a few buttons and found it on Hulu! Because of the three-hour time difference, watching the programs live was difficult with school filling the majority of my day, so I wasn’t able to watch the competition in full.
Regarding the actual skating, I was pretty lost. Over the course of watching, I gathered the skaters received two scores: a base score for completing the skill and then a grade for how well the skill was done. I found it kinda crazy how the judges can score a past skill and yet pay attention to what is happening on the ice as well. Listening to the announcers definitely helped me gauge how well the skaters were doing, as an amateur everything looks impressive. In addition, there are lots of words thrown around that I’m not sure what the difference between them is. Skaters do spins in the air, called axels, lutzs, Salchows, and loops and it sounded like the most difficult one was the quad lutz. I also learned that Ilia Malinin, an American skater, is really good at doing quads and he holds the record for the number of quads done in one program (I think). I still don’t know if a quad is four or four and a half spins. There are also spins on the ground, the most intriguing one to me is the camel spin because it doesn’t resemble a camel at all.
It’s quite stunning the things people can do on ice. During every performance, my heart beat furiously in fear of the skaters falling. I really can’t watch that because it makes me sad. Overall, I think I’ll definitely be tuning in to more figure skating! It seems like there are so many things happening and no one is guaranteed to win despite being favored.