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Figure skating at the Olympics has always been about the drama. On the ice, skaters need to pick the right song, bring the right energy, and perform flawlessly. Off the ice, there are heated rivalries, scandals, incredible comeback stories.
During the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Games, this has been more true than ever. US figure skater Ilia Malinin, the self-proclaimed Quad God, entered the Games ready to dominate with his seemingly impossible quadruple axel. He helped Team USA win gold in the team event, but bailed on some of his planned quad jumps and fell twice.
Two US women’s figure skaters—Alysa Liu and Amber Glenn—made incredible comebacks to compete in the Winter Olympics. Glenn floundered in her short program, missing her chance at the podium. Liu won gold.
Then there was the free dance competition. US pair Madison Chock and Evan Bates, a husband and wife team who have been skating together for some 15 years, went in eyeing a long-elusive gold. So, too, did Canada’s team of Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier, and France’s duo of Guillaume Cizeron and Laurence Fournier Beaudry. The latter team arrived amidst some controversy: Fournier Beaudry’s boyfriend and former partner was once suspended from skating following sexual misconduct allegations, which he denied, and Cizeron’s former partner has accused him of being controlling. In the end, it was the French team at the top of the podium.
Netflix’s new documentary Glitter & Gold: Ice Dancing captures all the dramatics leading up to this year’s Winter Olympics through the stories of those three ice dance teams. One of the most thoughtful commentators in that doc is retired figure skater Adam Rippon, who won bronze in the team event at Pyeongchang in 2018. During the Milano Cortina Games, he’s been active, watching skating and teaching Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg about the sport. As the Games wrapped up, WIRED spoke with Rippon about the future of figure skating and how the stakes got so high.
ANGELA WATERCUTTER: I watched Glitter & Gold before the Winter Olympics even started. Now it feels almost prophetic considering how the ice dance finals turned out.
ADAM RIPPON: Totally. As a viewer, I loved the documentary. I've known all of the skaters in it for a really long time, some better than others. And it still felt like I was getting to know them for the very first time because I've never trained with them. So I got to see a real intimate look at the way they deal with the ups and downs of training and competition and disappointment and success.
A big part of the documentary focuses on how hard Madison Chock and Evan Bates worked to be in a position to compete for gold at the Olympics and the tension that arises when French skaters Guillaume Cizeron and Laurence Fournier Beaudry show up and decide to compete together. In the doc you say their story may not be one “a lot of people are gonna root for at first” given the controversy around them. What do you make of their win?
When I was in the arena, it really felt like Madi and Evan would take the top spot. Regardless of all of the personal issues of the French team—and there's obviously a lot of emotional baggage that goes along with them—they're both fantastic skaters, if not the two best skaters in the ice dance competition. But I felt like in the free dance, we were watching two incredible skaters skate together.
With Madi and Evan, it felt like one couple skating together. It was just seamless. I just feel like the best free dance of the night of those top two was the cleaner one, which was Madi and Evan. And that was my feeling, and it was the feeling of a lot of people.
Obviously, I have a bias. I'm American. I've known them forever. It can be frustrating as a skater that regardless of how talented or amazing they are, that two people skate [together] for one year and they waltz right in and they win Olympic gold.
There was talk about appealing the ruling. I think ultimately the US team decided not to do it. Do you think they should have?
The free dance is the most subjective of all of the skating disciplines. It is its own beast. As a single skater, I know that—in an effort to strive toward fairness—it's really stripped away at skaters that can put together something unique, special, and different because the rules are geared toward only a few elements that really work to get to the highest levels.
It takes some of the magic out of it. If everybody's going out and trying to do the same thing, it all starts to look a little bit similar. When you look at the programs in isolation and you take each one element by element, there's an argument for both teams. I think there were a few visible errors from the French team and some of the grades of execution are a bit high. But like, what are we going to do, just have a computer do everything?
There was a lot of back-and-forth about the judges’ scores.
So that's where I don't really think it's worth filing a petition, because at the end of the day, Madi and Evan skated four perfect programs. They were pivotal and key members of the US team and their clinching of the gold medal. As an athlete, the medals are amazing. I won't lie. They're great to have. Love to have one. But they get put in a drawer. They get put in a box, you let a museum hold onto them. You lose track of where it even is, and what you really hold onto are the moments that you have there. Yes, the results can sometimes sting. Sometimes they can fucking suck. But at the end of the day, they have that moment. I don't see their silver medal as something to be upset about.
In 2004, the Olympics changed how skaters are judged. Now, it seems to be more about athletes trying to execute a specific set of moves and jumps, rather than put together a whole performance. During Amber Glenn’s short program she missed one jump and it pretty much cost her everything because she got zero points for it. What do you make of the way the scoring is done now?
I'm a skater. I know that doing a double jump in a short program is like a mortal sin, Amber knew it too. Even if the judging system were 6.0, she's missing a whole required element. There were 12 programs ahead of her that didn't miss that element. What saved her was that she did the triple axel.
Very true.
With the way this judging system works, the worst thing you can do in a short program is not complete the required elements. Aside from that, a popped jump or bailing out on rotation is a mortal sin because everything is based on points and there's such a difference between a single, a double, a triple, and a quad.
I mean, when we think of the men's event, that was really the final nail in the coffin for Ilia. It wasn't the falls. He probably could have fallen on all of those jumps if they were quads and ended up on the podium. The bailed rotation was the real issue.
Speaking of Ilia, I was going to ask about pressure. He’d been so confident going into the Games, calling himself the Quad God. But it did seem like the pressure got to him.
I think that with the current judging system, the way that everything is scored is that you can be rewarded for falling on a bunch of things and still end up winning. Before, it didn't matter what you were trying. What you did had to be clean. You had to skate a perfect program. If it was easier, it didn't matter. You had to stay on your feet and you needed to create a magical moment for the audience so that they could step away and go, “Oh my God, that was perfect.”
Right.
With this system, we've lost that. Because we see people pushing the envelope to the point where really messy programs sometimes end up on top. Yuma Kagiyama won silver. He’s an amazing skater, one of the best I’ve ever seen. But the program was technically messy because he was trying to catch up to what Ilia might do. If the rules were different, he would have done a different layout that he knew he could do cleanly.
Yes.
Ilia tries things that are so much harder that even if he made major mistakes—and he made at least three major mistakes in that program—it's really not out of the question that he could have still ended up on the podium. But should someone with a program with two major mistakes be the champion? It's not magical, and it's not the fault of the skaters. They're playing the game. They're doing what they need to do to win and that's just how it works.
I would prefer perfect programs that leave me like on the edge of my seat. I don't like programs that have mistakes in them. Again, this is not the skater's fault. They’ve just overcomplicated what the skaters need to do to get the points. I fucking hate it.
Does it add to the pressure?
The Olympics have always, historically, forever from today till tomorrow, been a pressure cooker. There is no way to take the pressure out of them. They only happen every four years, so we know our whole body of work comes down to just a few minutes on the ice. There is a lot of pressure. It's really scary. It is not easy. But that's the beauty of it.
We put a lot of pressure on the athletes, we really do. Do I think we should put less? No way. We live for those moments.
Ilia, too.
Ilia was doing a ton of stuff before the competition even started. He's hanging out with Snoop Dogg and he's doing this and he's doing that. He's always been one of those skaters who can do things that might seem distracting and then still deliver. But what he didn't take into account is the whole hullabaloo of the Olympic juggernaut, the pressure cooker that you live in.
He still had these performances that helped his team come away with a gold medal. He still won the short program. I think that the long program was a lesson that he unfortunately probably needed to learn. Maybe in four years at the next Olympics he will be more than great. I one hundred percent believe he will look back at that performance and go, “That was one of the best things that ever happened to me.”
It feels like there’s been a shift this year in Olympic athletes addressing the political realities in their home countries, specifically in the US. Amber Glenn spoke about LGBTQ+ rights. Skier Hunter Hess said, “Just ’cause I’m wearing the flag doesn’t mean I represent everything that’s going on in the US” when he was asked about President Trump’s immigration crackdown. Have you sensed that shift?
In theory, the Olympics is supposed to be this apolitical event, where everything gets put to the side and we can just come together as a country and we can cheer on our country mates, and we can see the success stories of people from other countries. It's supposed to be an event that politics are not involved in. But I think that as an American right now, it's impossible to believe that politics aren't intertwined into everything that we do.
Being an out queer athlete is political in and of itself. A queer athlete can go into the Olympics, and all of a sudden, that's a political statement. People are going to have something to say. When these athletes go home and they can be discriminated against or when we talk about ICE and athletes from these communities see them being ripped apart, it feels like we're in a time where it would almost be insane if nobody was saying anything about it.
True.
It's the Olympics. This is the biggest moment of your sporting career, you have every right to go, “Hey, I'm here to focus on what my job is and move on and move forward.” To the athletes who decided that it was important to them to speak out and say something, I think that that's what being an American is all about.
These athletes here have reminded a lot of people that Americans are good people. Americans are kind people. And Americans stand up for the little guy and they stand up for their communities and they speak out because those are rights that Americans are given.
You watch the news and see what the current administration is saying and doing and it's really awful. It's fucked-up shit. I don't even think that what these people are saying is political. They're talking about things that are happening in their own communities.
And some of them have faced backlash for speaking out. Amber Glenn said she got “a scary amount of hate/threats.” Vice President JD Vance and President Trump have responded to some of the athletes who’ve made comments. They seem to be putting themselves out there, and the echo chamber seems even louder than it was a few years ago.
One hundred percent. This is 100 times louder than it was during the first Trump administration. It sometimes feels scary to say something, because it feels like there might be repercussions. They're targeting people, and they're sending people away without due process. So it's even more important to speak out now. It's also scarier.
I don’t want to take too much of your time, but I do want to end on perhaps a lighter note. Have you been watching Heated Rivalry?
I have all the time in the world to talk about Heated Rivalry.
Then by all means, go ahead.
I wasn't watching it when everybody was really into it at first. Finally, it was like maybe the second or third week it was out and I was like, “OK, now I have to watch it.” People really built up how smutty it was. I was like, “I've definitely seen this on a different Netflix show before.”
Right?
There was a lot of sex in the first few episodes. By the time we got to maybe the fourth or fifth episode, I understood why there was so much sex, because like you had to just know all the heat-of-the-moment stuff. Because that fifth episode was one of the best episodes of TV I've ever seen.
Yeah, it was really good.
With the kiss on the ice, and then as soon as I thought the episode was amazing, Ilya calls Shane and says, “I’m going to …”
“I’m coming to the cottage”!
That was when I was like, “Oh my God.” It's just amazing. The performances were great. I think that’s why it transcended. I loved it.
And now we have a new group of fans getting into hockey.
Stuff like that is amazing for sports as long as the sport embraces kinds of shows, and it feels like they really want to. Sports really should be for everybody.
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