Between March 25 and March 30, the 2025 World Figure Skating Championships were held in TD Garden for the first time since 2016.
The International Skating Union World Figure Skating Championships is an annual event that is held in various arenas throughout the world. Meant to showcase the best athletes from each country, the event hosts 200 athletes from 50 countries in four disciplines: men’s individual, women’s individual, pairs and ice dance. The championships served as one of the key qualifying events for the 2026 Winter Olympics that are to be held in Milan-Cortina. With many new teams and individuals earning their Olympic qualification, the world championships marked the emergence of a new wave of Olympic figure skating stars.
At the end of the competitions, Team USA displayed their dominance, coming away with three out of the four available gold medals: Ilia Malinin captured the men’s single title, Alysa Liu won gold for the women’s singles, Madison Chock and Evan Bateswere awarded the ice dance title, and Riku Miura and Ryuichi Kihara of Japan won the fourth gold medal in pair skate.
16-year-old skaters Ella Babka and Lindsay Fullerton at the Skating Club of Boston spectated the event and offered their insight on the competition. Babka comments, “One of my favorite moments was probably Alysa Liu winning the women’s event. I think it was so interesting that she actually retired for two years before coming back on her own terms.”
Alysa Liu is a 19 year-old who hails from California. After winning bronze at the world championship when she was 16, she announced her retirement, stating that she was satisfied with her career and ready to move on to a different part of her life — her enrollment at the University of California in Los Angeles. She shocked the figure skating world when she arrived back on the ice in 2024 with a new perspective of the sport. Liu changed history forever with this monumental victory, as no American woman in the past 19 years has won the event.
Ilia Malinin, the 20-year-old defending champion for the men’s single event, nicknamed the “Quad God,” skated an impressive program. His performance included six quadruple jumps and a unique quadruple axel. Malinin’s score of 318.56 put him over 30 points ahead of silver medalist Mikhail Shaidorov of Kazakhstan and ensured his status as the leading contender for the upcoming Winter Olympics.
The impressive duo of Madison Chock and Evan Bates came away with their third consecutive win in ice dance. They have been skating together since 2011, competing and scoring highly at many levels, including U.S. championships, world championships and the Olympics. At this particular competition, judges noted that they had good technique as well as artistic expression. Their longtime experience together as skating partners creates good chemistry, which added to their routines.
The last event, pair skating, was also an incredible showcase of talent and the only win by non-Americans. Riku Miura and Ryuichi Kihara were victorious, following an impressive streak where they won gold at the same competition in 2023 and silver last year. They have also recently won another Four Continents Championship in Seoul, South Korea earlier this season. They began skating together in 2018 and have recently risen to fame. Their future in the industry was threatened when Kihara faced some serious health problems last year, but this did not stop them on their path to victory at TD Garden.
As someone who is not fully immersed in the sport, Paul Currier (I) says, “It was cool to have the championships in Boston and expand the influence of Boston sports.”
Boston hosting this event both expands the influence of Boston’s sports while giving locals an incentive to follow the sport.
Regarding the location of the event, Fullerton shares a more personal sentiment: “I really enjoyed having it in Boston, because otherwise I would not have been able to watch [it] in-person. The TD Garden being so close to my house also was really fun because world champions were practicing in the rink that I grew up skating [in].”
On January 26, a terrible plane crash devastated the skating world, killing two youth skaters from the Skating Club of Boston, Jinna Han and Spencer Lane, as well as the revered Olympic coaches Evgenia Shiskova and Vadim Naumov.
In the days following the crash, both Boston and global skating communities struggled to overcome the initial shock of the tragedy. Babka describes the ways the skating community came together to help mourn and celebrate the losses: “There’s still flowers and pictures all around the club that remind us of these skaters’ legacies and how they continue to stay in our hearts and minds as we skate.”
The skating community’s continued celebration and remembrance of the lost skaters demonstrates the power of sport to transcend competition and create lasting bonds and family-like connections.
