Figure Skating’s Dirty Little Secret: Eating Disorders
I first fell in love with figure skating as a little girl perched on the couch, watching these beautifully thin people in their beautiful costumes doing their beautiful routines that I could barely comprehend. Their glowing smiles were splayed across their lips, and their cool, confident composure radiated warmth. Watching them through pixels of a television set made them seem other-worldly and undeniably beautiful to me.
Still today, I love watching figure skating. I love how effortlessly skaters can glide across the ice through crossovers and edges. I love the spins, the jumps, and the spirals each skater has hammered down to perfection. I love the sound of the music filling the limbs of a skater and controlling her every movement. The years of hard work and the ardent passion have been condensed into high tensions and daring risks that a skating routine inevitably contains.
But behind each defiance of the laws of physics comes a chase for perfection. Figure skaters hunt for precision in their every move, their coaches, their choreographer, their program, and most of all — their bodies.
The average American female figure skater stands at 5'3 and weighs just 108 pounds. That’s a body mass index (BMI) of about 19.1–4 pounds less would make the BMI 18.4 and underweight.
For skaters, their thin bodies are not just maintained by physical appearance but a desire to succeed. As skaters must turn, twist, and rotate their bodies to the top of the podium, they are pressured to keep their bodies slim to gain momentum. Under the pressure to win, many of skaters turn to desperate means — eating disorders.
American Gracie Gold and Russian Yulia Lipnitskaya, both of whom finished in the top five in Sochi Olympic women’s singles figure skating, struggled with eating disorders towards the end of their careers. Their short but promising careers came to a halt as they battled these disorders. Lipnitskaya was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa, and Gold sought treatment for an eating disorder as well. Both skaters retired and did not attempt to qualify for the Pyeonchang Olympics, despite being in the running for an Olympic medal only a four years prior.
The pursuit of a perfect body doesn’t only affect female skaters — male skaters often feel the need to starve themselves to maintain a low weight as well. American figure skater Adam Rippon revealed that his daily diet once consisted of nothing but three slices of bread, accompanied by butter and sweetened coffee. Olympic gold medalist Brian Boitano shared his similar struggles with his weight. “When I was hungry,” Boitano said, “I felt strong.”
They’re not alone. Dozens of world-class skaters — Johnny Weir, Gabrielle Daleman, Nancy Kerrigan, Tanith Belbin, Jennifer Kirk, and Akiko Suzuki— have openly spoken about their own struggles with eating disorders. Others, like 2018 Olympic champion Alina Zagitova, have revealed that they avoid food to keep their bodies thin. They are among the many skaters affected by the epidemic of body image in the sport.
These issues are often worsened by the comments and criticism of skaters’ coaches and mentors. In the past, coach Rafael Arutyunyan, whose students have included Rippon and 2018 world champion, Nathan Chen, called skaters “fat” to pressure them into losing weight. American skater Ashley Wagner revealed that some coaches would even “weigh-in” students weekly to monitor their bodies.
In a sport like figure skating that values speed and aesthetics, the desire for a thin body is — and will always be — inevitable. However, starvation and self-esteem issues can be combated. While U.S. Figure Skating does have policies in place that discourage coaches from making disparaging comments about skaters’ bodies and claims that weight is not an indicator for performance, there is still work to be done. The trend of high-profile skaters struggling with their diet and body image is a signal that the organization’s support system has not sufficiently met the needs of its skaters. Even skaters that do not compete on a national level struggle with eating disorders, and the organization as a whole has failed to provide guidance and help.
Until there is adequate awareness and support provided by coaches and the organization itself, eating disorders will remain as figure skating’s dirty little secret.
