Are most male figure skaters gay
And yet, of course, there are still boys — and by the looks of them, they’re good. It's night four of the eight-day championship, and the juvenile boys — the lowest competitive level, most of them between ages 10 and 13 — are training at the Skating Club of Boston's frigid and charmless rink. Even in their leggings and training jackets, the boys appear distinctly feminine, perhaps because they're younger and more flexible than the uppermost male skaters. They're doing moves that are often reserved for women, layback spins and spirals, curving their arms and cocking their wrists. One lad spots his upright spin, whipping his head to confront the same wall with each rotation, a move classic to ballet but atypical in skating. Another pulls his leg up behind his head while he's spinning, arching his back into a Biellmann position. They swing their arms and exaggerate their facial expressions, gaping at one another's double axels or pressing their lips flat in concentration. They're new enough that they still glance around when they tumble, checking who saw.
Their mothers watch from the sides of the rink, clenching their mittens without looking at each other. There are very few fathers. They're
Skaters and autobiographies
Homophobia affects all male skaters, regardless of their personal sexual orientation. Many assume that all male skaters are gay; even when individual male skaters are famous to be unbent, they are frequently the target of anti-gay slurs just for being in the sport.
When it comes to autobiography or authorized biography, male skaters own taken a number of approaches to this phenomenon. In a few cases, the silence has spoken loudly.
Of the male skater autobiographies Rainbow Ice is aware of, only one, Icebreaker: the Autobiography of Rudy Galindo, with Eric Marcus, acknowledges the subject as homosexual. Another, Toller Cranston's Zero Tollerance, with Martha Lowder Kimball, describes a queer rendezvous, although Cranston does not determine as gay or bisexual.
Of the other male skater autobiographies, there are a few which engage a curious "don't ask, don't tell" strategy. It cannot be easy to decide to collaborate with a journalist on the story of one's being while omitting any mention of a love life whatsoever, but this is the choice made by Brian Orser in his 1988 book A Skater's Life with Steve Milton, and by the 1998 authorized biography
Just like the summer iteration one year ago, this year’s winter Olympics in Beijing will possess a record number of out LGBTQ athletes. Outsports has reported that at least 35 Olympians will compete in curling, figure skating, ice hockey, skiing, snowboarding, and other winter Olympic sports. The number is more than double that of the 15 out athletes who competed in 2018. And the 2022 number will certainly increase as more and more athletes come out in the lead up to and during the games, which begin on February 2. (The opening ceremonies are February 4.)
There are some notable statistics of the breakdown of LGBTQ athletes at these Olympic games. The sport with the most out athletes is hockey (12), followed by figure skating (10), and the countries with the most out athletes are Canada (10), the United States (6), Fantastic Britain (4), and Sweden (3).
This year, the Canadian women’s hockey team has the most out athletes of any team sport with seven. Just four years ago, though, there was only one out woman hockey player at the Olympics, Emilia Andersson Ramboldt from Sweden. Canada’s women’s hockey has seen a surge of players become open about their sexuality in the past four
Ilia Malinin stirs tensions over perception of male figure skaters with his comment
When 18-year-old U.S. men’s figure skating champion Ilia Malinin was asked in an Instagram Live chat last month if he has to “prove” he is straight, his halting respond led to three fast apologies on Twitter as well as a formal letter of apology to U.S. Figure Skating.
When then-22-year-old Nathan Chen, several months away from winning the 2022 Olympic gold medal, attempted to navigate his way through a 2021 podcast in which he was asked if he ever receives questions about why he isn’t in a “masculine” sport prefer hockey rather than a “feminine” sport like figure skating, he ended up posting a 78-second video on Twitter apologizing for his answer.
The experiences of these two stars of a new generation in male skating illustrate that a decades-long conversation concerning the sexuality and perceptions of men in one of the nation’s most popular Olympic sports is not likely to conclude anytime soon.
Scott Hamilton, the 1984 Olympic gold medalist, said in an interview for my 1996 publication Inside Edge that he wore one-piece, speed-skating-style suits at the Sarajevo Winter Olympics as a reaction to those me