What does it mean to be a fan of an unsafe sport?

I love figure skating, but there’s too much space for abuse to thrive

As the curtain pulled slightly back — millimeter by millimeter — on abuse and sexual violence in figure skating over the past year, I kept finding myself asking, what is my role here?

I’ve been a figure skating fan since 2002 when Jamie Salé and Michelle Kwan stole my whole entire heart in Salt Lake City. I started skating myself, working my way up through basic skills and beyond. I wasn’t competitive — too much pressure and too much money. But I loved to fly around the rink on half swizzle pumps. I loved to spin!! I loved spirals. I loved back cross overs. I really loved toe loops and I even kind of loved struggling over my single loop for literal years (ya girl wasn’t an edge jumper).

My rink was safe, for me at least. It was an extension of home — the place I’d go before and after school with friends who made me laugh and introduced me to new music. I had teachers and coaches who challenged me and made me a better skater, leader, learner and teacher. I had no fear. No one hurt me. I was lucky.

I stopped skating when I went to college in 2011, and I mostly stopped being a fan too. But over the past three years, I’ve come back to it, thanks to the skating community on Twitter. After years away, I found myself up at all hours of the night watching my favorite skaters and chatting about the competition with my new friends.

I love watching skating. But over the last year, more and more skaters went public with stories of abuse. In 2019, SafeSport reported “a culture in figure skating that allowed grooming and abuse to go unchecked for too long.” In one recent case, a skater-turned-coach, John Zimmerman, that I’d been a fan of since those 2002 Olympics, was accused of using intimidation to cover up for an adult skater who I was also a fan of, Morgan Ciprés’, sexual harassment of a 13 year-old.

I think that even before it was making news, it was difficult to ever be a skating fan and not have a nagging worry about athlete safety. This is a sport where many girls peak when they’re still children. Eating disorders are common. Relationships between skaters and authority figures like coaches as well as between skaters and skaters can be murky. Gender norms can be very traditional and painful. Racism is rarely talked about, but it’s hard to imagine that it’s not a problem.

So what does it mean to be a fan of a sport that’s hurting the athletes you love? I come from a family of football fans and was always asking, “How can you watch this? How can you watch people destroy themselves and others and enjoy it?” But that was hypocritical.

I don’t want to stop watching skating. But I also don’t want to support a sport that steals childhoods and causes immeasurable damage to some athletes. So how do I as a fan help make skating better?

I don’t know the answers. For now, I’ve been trying to amplify, to the best of my limited ability, the voices of skaters and others who are calling out these safety issues. Kiira Korpi, a retired Finnish national champion, has been outspoken, as has retired U.S. national champion Ashley Wagner, who herself opened up about being a sexual assault survivor in 2019.

Journalists covering skating are few and far between — there’s really been only one columnist, Christine Brennan at USA Today, who has been covering sexual abuse allegations in figure skating in the U.S. over the last year. (Imagine how much might be uncovered with reporters investigating!) So whenever someone in media creates the space to tell survivors’ stories or ask the hard questions of officials, I try to support them as well.

I also try to make sure that my place in the skating world (which is pretty exclusively on Twitter), is one that is safe for survivors. I still get sick to my stomach thinking about my fan tweets about Zimmerman and Ciprés and how they might have helped create a silencing effect on anyone who knew the truth. I immediately denounced my support for them when the news broke, but what damage may already have been done?

Another thing that nags at me are those things that we know about — or think we know about — that aren’t really talked about. We don’t really say their names or the rumors because that’s what they are, rumors, and that could be dangerous. But I keep wondering, how many rumors are true?

Shouldn’t we be making a bigger deal about what former and current skaters training under that coach say about their nutrition? Should we be louder about that man who dated so many of his students? Why did that ice dancer get kicked out of that rink? Why didn’t that federation step in when it was first clear that skater was struggling? Is it bad to let these murmurs drift around? Is there something we can do?

It feels like the problems and solutions are so big, so structural. They require a complete culture change. National federations and the International Skating Union (ISU) need to make those changes. There’s no sign that they’re interested in doing that. The ISU leaves the safety of athletes up to the federations. Just recently the director of U.S. figure skating claimed that he did not agree with the cultural issues identified by SafeSport. The French Federation has long been dismissive of survivors. Korpi has been critical of the Finish Federation’s failure to recognize structural safety problems. And the Russian Federation clings to the coattails of a training rink that’s skaters are physically and mentally exhausted by the time they reach adulthood.

So I don’t know what I do. I don’t know what my role is. All I know that I want to make skating safer.