Free Skate

A Celebration of Olympic-Sized Joy

There was a time in my life when every Sunday in the winter started with an early breakfast. Then, my dad and I would bundle up, climb into the car, and head to Geneseo for skating lessons at the college rink. It started back when I was so small that I had to reach up to hang on to the boards, my little mitten sliding along the ledge until I got my blades underneath me and would take off like a shot.

I learned to skate forwards, then backwards. I learned to spin and jump (never all that well. Don’t get too excited.) I loved the feeling of the wind in my face and, while I didn’t quite admit it at the time, I loved that my dad didn’t just sit in the bleachers. He had his own figure skates and took lessons too, gliding around in dress pants and a sweater, occasionally deploying the earflaps on his signature wool Kangol cap on especially frosty mornings.

When I got older, we started getting up even earlier so that I could practice figure eights with my coach. She was a college student making some extra money. At that hour, we had the rink to ourselves. I’d use a scribe to scratch out the outline of the eight on the pristine ice, then try my best to keep an edge.

I loved being there when the only sound was the hum of the lights that were still warming up, the scratch of our blades. The ice was perfect and there was always that faint smell of exhaust from the Zamboni. It was cold, quiet, and meditative in a way I wouldn’t have been able to verbalize or even know I needed when I was a teenager. It was simple: just effort and focus and laughter when I’d inevitably lose steam around a turn and start waving my arms and kicking a leg in the air to swim my way around the outline. (This is not good form, for the record.)

Figure skating figured into my life in a way that was routine, and I don’t think I ever really realized how special it all was. It still has a hold on me, and, like so many people, I love watching skaters during the Olympics. It reminds me of the days when I would watch the competitions with my parents, putting on my skating dress and leaping around the living room. My mother always worried I might break something either in the house or on myself.

“Don’t slip in those sock feet!” She’d warn.

Skating feels free, like flying, but for people who do it competitively, it can also be punishing, mentally and physically. I remember skating with girls who steered onto that track, including a friend who started spending her summers in Lake Placid. I started to wonder if I was supposed to want to be that serious, but then the weather would warm up, and I’d remember that sailing feels like flying too, and I wanted to spend my summers on the lake.

And so it went, season after season on the water, frozen or not.

Nobody I knew cared much about figure skating when I was growing up. They were more interested in things like football and baseball; a few friends were into skiing. Not much has changed, except when it’s time for the Olympics. The sport always seems to captivate everyone, and this year is no exception. Something about it, though, felt different to me this year, with the entire U.S. Olympic Figure Skating Team inspiring with displays of strength and beauty in all its forms.

Alysa Liu delivered a positively stunning performance. I watched her golden free program through tears, her skating so effortless, so exuberant, and so purely joyful. She is dazzling proof that we are beautifully designed to follow our own individual paths and that people soar when they put their hearts ahead of the world’s expectations. She and her teammates have inspired people around the world with a grit and grace that will linger long after they hang up their skates; their humanity and camaraderie stretching far beyond the Olympic Games or even figure skating itself.

At a time when a lot of us are looking for hope where we can find it, it’s probably not a far leap to understand why heroic Olympic moments hit so hard, but there is something else for me. Alysa looked, I realized, the way I felt as a kid, gliding around the ice rink on those early Sunday mornings, wind in my face, my dad in his hat, not a care in the world, flying.

This column originally appeared in my column in the February 26, 2026 edition of the Perry Herald in Perry, NY.