The quiet brutality behind figure skating’s grace
This feature story was written in Fall 2025 for JOUR-479: Storytelling for Action Sports’ final.
Inside a sport often dismissed as delicate, two longtime skaters reveal the culture of pressure, pain and perseverance hiding beneath its glittering facade.
From the outside, figure skating appears feather-light. On television, skaters glide through soft lighting and string arrangements, sequins catching the glow as their bodies turn into silhouettes of effortlessness. The sport occupies a cultural space beside ballet — refined, feminine, delicate.
But to former competitive skaters Syona Goel and Hailey Tien, now juniors at the University of Southern California, that perception borders on fiction.
“On the outside, it may look like more of a classy, delicate sport,” Tien said. “But internally, like when I put myself on the ice, it feels like the most aggressive thing ever.”
Between them, Goel and Tien skated for nearly 30 years. Their stories pull back the curtain on a sport that demands the strength, endurance and tolerance for pain more often associated with action sports — without ever shedding its graceful facade.
A sport that catches you early
Goel’s introduction to skating was almost casual.
“My mom grew up in Chicago where skating was pretty normalized. Everyone did it. So when I was younger, she put me into the sport just to test it out. Our whole family would skate, usually, and then I just grew to love it more than a lot of the other sports I tried,” she said. “I’m not very good with balls, or contact sports, so skating was the right place for me.”
She skated for 15 years before stepping away freshman year of college.
Tien’s origin story is even more accidental. “I went to a pre-K birthday party that was hosted at the local ice rink, and we were doing a group lesson as part of the party. … I just never stopped skating after that,” she said.
For both, the shift from recreational to competitive felt less like a decision and more like a current pulling them along.
“It’s a pretty natural process,” Goel said. Once she decided skating would be her main sport around elementary school, commitment escalated — private lessons, early mornings, training blocks that left little room for anything else. “It is such a rigorous sport; there’s not a lot of time for any other activities.”
Tien agreed. “Once you start taking private lessons, it’s competitive the day you decide on a coach to work with.”
In skating, “fun” and “competitive” are not separate categories: They are often the same door.
Pressure that doesn’t look like pressure
Inside the rink, most skaters grow up surrounded by peers who rise at similar speeds — and then, inevitably, begin pulling ahead or falling behind.
“By nature, you’re kind of pitted against your friends because you grow up [competing at] the same level and usually improve at the same rate,” Goel said. “So even with my own friends, we would have competitions, like, ‘Who can land the most jumps in this one session?’”
Her relationship with coaching was also more intense than it initially appeared.
“Coaches are definitely really strict,” Goel said. “[My coach] seemed nice the first few sessions, but she [started] enforcing, like, ‘You have to come right after school,’ three to five times a week.”
Her mother — a former skater — added another layer of expectation. “She was the one that pushed me — in a different sense — because she knew what was going on,” Goel said. “But she’s also my mom, so she kind of called the shots.”
Tien experienced a similar environment, even if her home life was more relaxed. “My mom … wasn’t pushing me that much,” she said. “But the community and other skaters [did] — the environment was such a competitive, tense arena.”
The pressure was often quiet, more of a culture than a command.
Injuries everyone knows not to talk about
If skating’s psychological intensity is subtle, its physical toll is unmistakable.
“In the Olympics, you’re only seeing five minutes of whatever six days a week, five hours a day training entails,” Goel said. “It almost takes more strength to look delicate … while also executing jumps that you know take such a toll on your body.”
Tien’s injuries accumulated slowly. “If you looked at my knees right now, you’d actually be completely horrified,” she said. Years of falls left Tien unable to walk after some practices. Eventually, doctors told her an extra bone in her foot had detached from overuse.
Surgery was suggested, but skating had its own demands.
“Taking a three, four month recovery break was just never in the picture,” Tien said.
Goel’s injury was sudden and severe.
On the fourth repetition of a double flip-double loop, an element that combines a jump and two rotations, Goel’s toe pick of her left foot dug into the ice before her right foot touched the ground — a misstep that resulted in disaster.
“I basically snapped the shin bone of my left leg in half,” she said.
Goel didn’t immediately understand what happened — skaters fall constantly, so the pain of falling was routine to her.
“My coach was honestly a little bit like, ‘Are you good to keep going for the rest of the practice?’” she said. “But I realized that this might be bigger than a sprained ankle.”
What she remembers most, though, was not the pain.
“My main thoughts … went to, ‘What are my other coaches going to think?’ … This will set me back three to four months while other people around me are improving.”
She returned four months later.
Reclaiming joy in a demanding culture
Both women experienced a reckoning around their early teens — the period where burnout peaks, and when the sport’s demands begin to feel more like obligations than joys.
Goel recalled her plateau. “There was a year when I thought, ‘This can’t be for me.’ Mentally, I was done,” Goel said.
Her turning point came when she joined a theater-on-ice team, a rare space of connection through a team-based discipline where skaters perform together. It was as close to liberation as skating allowed.
“You feel support instead of competition. It really made a switch for me,” she said. “It was COVID era, a lonely time. But with that team, I found a lot of happiness with them.”
Tien stepped away from competition entirely. After testing out of all levels by eighth grade, she came to a crossroads between homeschooling and continuing her training, or continuing her day-to-day life — so she left private coaching altogether, shifting to skating purely for herself.
“No coach, no pressure. My mom didn’t even want me to go [to the rink] because it cost money,” she laughed. “But I wanted to. The rink felt like a second home.”
She worked part-time at the rink as a skate guard, floating around disco nights instead of drilling double loops. She could finally separate her identity from her output.
Without coaches or competition schedules dictating her time, the rink took on a different meaning.
“It was recreational again,” she said. “It was mine.”
The myth of the ‘soft’ sport
Figure skating’s public image is shaped by the very physics it requires athletes to hide: the force of each jump is equivalent to landing from a height of four to six feet. Skaters absorb this shock on a thin blade and a typically compromised knee, often dozens of times per practice. Falls occur at speeds that rival beginner snowboarders. But unlike snow sports, there is no powder to cushion the impact. The ice is as rigid as concrete.
And yet, the performances are designed to erase evidence of suffering. There is no grit aesthetic — no chalk on palms, no bruises visible beneath gloves, no equipment scuffed from collision. As scholar Ellyn Kestnbaum writes in her book “Culture on Ice: Figure Skating & Cultural Meaning,” “The sport demands the masking of physical effort as part of its aesthetic.
Goel put it bluntly: “It takes strength to look delicate.”
Tien agreed. “You’re throwing yourself in the air; you’re sweating; you’re falling on ice. But people see it as a ‘classy’ sport.”
The gendered nature of the sport’s perception hasn’t gone unnoticed. While women dominate the cultural imagery, recent years have seen male skaters pushing limits — quads, quad-axels, unprecedented rotations — expanding the technical landscape and complicating the sport’s image, though not entirely dismantling it.
“It’s still seen as feminine,” Goel said. “But the physicality is real, no matter who’s doing it.”
What the public doesn’t see
What no broadcast shows, and what skaters are taught never to betray, is the psychological choreography behind every performance: the doubts; the rivalries; the pressure to stay thin, stay perfect, stay improving; the fear of falling behind in both talent and in reputation.
Skaters spend years performing for judges who watch with forensic attention: toe pick placement, jump height, arm lines, velocity maintained through curves. Mistakes are often invisible to the audience but glaring to the trained eye. A single flawed element can derail months of preparation.
The sport teaches discipline, but it also teaches vigilance — which is why moments of pure, unadulterated joy are worth documenting. When asked what advice they’d give their younger selves, Goel said simply:
“Take a deep breath. There’s so much anxiety in the training process.”
Tien added: “Cherish the moment. Now, I can’t even do half the jumps I used to. Back then, it felt like second nature.”
Their answers are not sentimental, but grounded in the knowledge that skating careers are short, that bodies bend only for so long, and that the sport’s greatest gift — the sensation of flying — is as fleeting as it is addictive.
The culture beneath the ice
In classrooms and casual conversation, skating is rarely grouped with action sports like skateboarding, snowboarding or surfing. But in practice, the parallels are striking: All involve learning by falling; all demand technical mastery layered over constant risk; and all cultivate cultures that are simultaneously supportive and unforgiving.
The difference lies in visibility. Skateboarders fall publicly; skaters fall in practice, away from the cameras. Surfers confront nature; skaters confront a judge’s score card. Snowboarders are allowed to look powerful; skaters are expected to look pretty.
But Goel and Tien argue that the mental fortitude required in skating rivals anything the action-sports world celebrates.
“You’re falling dozens of times a day,” Goel said. “You learn how to fall young because your center of gravity is low. There is no grace in the training. The grace is the performance.”
Finding the balance between beauty, brutality
What emerges from their stories is not a denunciation of the sport — both women still feel tethered to the ice, even years after leaving formal training — but a plea to recognize its full reality.
Skating’s elegance is not a lie; it’s an achievement. But reducing it to grace alone obscures the grit it requires.
The jump combinations that Goel drilled until her bones broke. The off-ice conditioning Tien endured until her extra bone detached. The psychological battlefield of ranking, leveling, competing, improving. The community dynamics that oscillate between friendship and pressure. In a culture that loves spectacle more than process, skating becomes a parable of what we prefer not to see.
But for skaters themselves, the tension is the point: They master a sport that asks them to be contradictory — powerful yet soft, forceful yet forgiving, precise yet expressive and brutal yet beautiful.
And when the music starts, when the lights dim and blades carve clean arcs across the ice, everything else — the falls, the fractures, the hours — disappears into the shimmer.
The world sees grace.
Skaters know the cost.
