U.S. Men 2025-26 Discussion - Quad God and the Mere Mortals

[Sylvia]

I've heard the Junior Worlds singles skaters (Jacob Sanchez, Lucius Kazanecki, Sophie Joline von Felten & Angela Shao) will be in Bergamo and will get to watch the team event - should be very exciting for them!

 

[Vagabond]

Maxim Naumov to Skate at 2026 Olympics After Parents’ Death in D.C. Plane Crash

After his parents died in the midair collision over Washington, D.C., a year ago, Maxim Naumov struggled to put on his skates. Now he will compete for the United States at the Milan-Cortina Games.

www.nytimes.com

Watching the young skaters made him realize that in the chill of the rink, atop the smooth ice, was where he felt the closest to his parents, and where he felt most calm and loved. He still can’t walk through any hallway of the skating club without being hugged by at least one person.

Side note: Spencer Howe, with whom Naumov stayed for several months, plans to become an Army chaplain. There is no indication in the article as to when that will hapoen.

 

[Sylvia]

Thanks for the NYT article gift link, @Vagabond!

Here's what the journalist, Juliet Macur, posted on Jan. 11 after Max made the team: https://x.com/JulietMacur/status/2010436599310586256

Max Naumov just made the U.S. Olympic figure skating team for Milan 2026. Both of his parents died in a plane crash in DC nearly a year ago. They were his coaches and his biggest fans. He will be one of the biggest stories of the Winter Games.

ETA that I posted a podcast interview with Spencer in the U.S. Pairs thread in which he talked about his Army basic training last year, what his job of auto transporter operator entailed and he mentioned he "would like to get a Masters in Divinity and hopefully become a chaplain, if I were to stay in the Army": https://www.fsuniverse.net/forum/th...-beijing-st-louis.112909/page-24#post-6875710

BTW, Max has arrived in Milan (with Spencer, Emily, Ellie & Danny).

 

[DreamSkates]

I've heard the Junior Worlds singles skaters (Jacob Sanchez, Lucius Kazanecki, Sophie Joline von Felten & Angela Shao) will be in Bergamo and will get to watch the team event - should be very exciting for them!

Did Michelle Kwan ever go as an alternate or maybe that was Worlds.

 

[attyfan]

Did Michelle Kwan ever go as an alternate or maybe that was Worlds.

IIRC, she did in 1994 ... I think there was a special deadline to allow Michelle to skate if Tonya got arrested.

 

[Sylvia]

"Olympian Pizza Chef!"

@teamraf_circle on Instagram: "#gpi #teamraf"

127 likes, 3 comments - teamraf_circle on January 27, 2026: "#gpi #teamraf".

www.instagram.com

ETA - posted in the comments section: "TorgaChef That's amusing"

ETA 2 - apparently this will be an upcoming CBS LA channel news segment:

Great Park Ice on Instagram: "Elite on the ice. Dangerous in the kitchen 🍕🔥 Team USA & Great Park Ice figure skater Andrew “The Pizza King” Torgashev and CBS LA’s Jill Painter Lopez put their cooking skills to the test as Andrew gears up for the Oly

493 likes, 13 comments - greatparkice on January 29, 2026: "Elite on the ice. Dangerous in the kitchen 🍕🔥 Team USA & Great Park Ice figure skater Andrew “The Pizza King” Torgashev and CBS LA’s Jill Painter Lopez put their cooking skills to the test as Andrew gears up for the Olympic Winter...

www.instagram.com

 

[AYS]

The USFS sent Michelle to Norway during the Olympics, but she was not in Lillehammer or with the team, she was training elsewhere, "just in case". omg this was over 30 years ago.

 

[Sylvia]

Orange County Register's Scott Reid has written a detailed article on Andrew Torgashev (Jan. 29):

Andrew Torgashev conquers doubts, injuries on the way to Milan

After years of setbacks the Orange County based skater is finally headed to the Olympic Games.

www.ocregister.com

Excerpts:

“So I did tell myself, I said that, ‘Well, Olympian is just a label,’” recalled Torgashev, who was in fifth place after the short program, less than four points out of third. “But the Olympics, they’re about the Olympic spirit, right? And I know I have that Olympic spirit because I’ve sacrificed a lot, and I have tenacity. I have grit, work ethic, resilience, and I’m at the top of my sport, whether it’s top two or top five or top 20 in the world, I’m there. So I guess regardless, if I can be called an Olympian, I know that I have achieved what it means to be an Olympic athlete, regardless of the title.”
It is a title that Torgashev, 24, had seemed destined for even before he won the 2015 U.S. junior title at 13, the youngest skater in the field, setting competition records for free skate and overall scores. A title he would chase from Florida to Colorado Springs to his current training base in Orange County, through coaching changes, through a series of major injuries that threatened to end his career in his teens, through two years of talking himself in and then out of quitting skating on almost a daily basis.

“So I don’t know for me, like winning at 13 the (U.S.) Junior title, just having my own expectations and other people’s expectations. I think give a 13-year-old a little bit of pressure and recognition and who knows what’s going to happen? I don’t know. It’s just like a really weird place to be. I think it definitely, like, inflated my ego a lot. It took many years, I think not until I was like 20 or 21 before I just like humbled myself and got to work really. I think throughout my whole Junior career, it was just mostly expectations and not good work and not good quality to what I was doing. I think it was just all expectations. So I think once I matured, everything changed.”

Around this time, his parents’ marriage was unraveling. In June 2018, just weeks after his 17th birthday, Torgashev moved to Colorado Springs to train with Christy Krall, a 1964 Olympian.
Torgashev was asked if the move was hard.
“No,” he said. “It was not a great place for me to be in Florida. They were getting divorced, and the training environment in Florida was just not it for me and my development. I think my parents taught me a lot in terms of being a disciplined athlete, but I wouldn’t listen to them when there was, like, lots of conflicts there. And, you know, the family was kind of breaking apart, and I was just looking for a way out of that situation. And Christy Krall had been working with me since I was 9, just coming down, once or twice a year, and that was just the logical option to go to her Olympic training site, environment.”

At the time of Torgashev’s move [Nov. 2020], Arutyunyan was coaching Nathan Chen, having already guided him to the first two of his three World titles.
The Georgian-born Arutyunyan had also known by Torgashev’s parents for a decade, working as a young assistant in the 1980s for Tatiana Tarasova, the most successful coach in figure skating history, at the same Young Pioneers Stadium sports complex in Moscow where Melnichenko and Artem Torgashev trained.
“He’s the best technician in the world,” Torgashev said. “He is like a professor at graduate school. He knows what he’s doing. He’s got a method, and he’s very confident in what he says. So this is not his first day. He’s been coaching for 50 years. He’s seen a lot, and he knows how to get things from athletes. I don’t completely understand this method sometimes. But he knows how to get things from athletes, whether it’s to get them to react or get them to find a higher gear, to continue to push, or to build some resilience or to figure something out on their own, like he just knows how and when to push you.”

Torgashev didn’t see skating for others as an added burden. Instead, it gave him a sense of purpose, which only took on a greater importance when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
Skating for his grandparents
Torgashev has always been especially close to his maternal grandparents, Vladimir, 85, and Nina Melnichenko, 80, who lived with the family in Florida part-time when he was growing up. The Melnichenko later returned to their native Ukraine and live in Odesa on the Black Sea, the country’s largest and most important port. Torgashev has used his skating to raise awareness and funds for Ukraine.
Odesa has endured 800 air raid alarms a year. Last month as temperatures hovered below 20 degrees (fahrenheit), nearly a million residents were without power.
Torgashev was asked how his grandparents are doing.
“Surviving,” he said. “No electricity, they do their laundry at like, 4 in the morning, when the energy is working or when prices are cheaper.
“They have sirens all the time, no heat, so they’re in winter coats and blankets a lot. My grandparents, they’ve been through so much, so so much, the whole Soviet Union era. They’ve just been through so much, and they have to continue going through it. So just to be able to distract them with success for a moment, just it means the world to me that I’m able to do that for them.”
His success means perhaps even more to his grandparents.
“The biggest positive is our beloved grandson, Andrew,” Vladimir Melnichenko, the former head of the Ukrainian skating federation, wrote in an email to the Southern California News Group. “The war is a tragedy for the people of Ukraine, and Andrew is worried about us, just as we are in the heart of the war zone. But we are holding on and believe in victory. “

In the weeks leading up to the U.S. Championships, an emotional Torgashev left Arutyunyan exasperated.
“For a month before nationals, he kind of just ignored me,” Torgashev said. “I don’t know why, and if I was like, messing things up and getting frustrated on the ice, he even, wouldn’t help, like, kicked me off the ice once because I was, I mean, I was just like, having a horrible attitude, to be honest. So it was the right call, but he just made me figure it out myself. He made me take accountability for the technique that he had already taught me. Pretty much like to stop playing a victim and take ownership of my training and my technique, trust it what he’s taught me already.
“That was a recent example.
“I was frustrated, the same way, like a tennis player will break a racket. I’m not purposely trying to fall or pop on this jump, and for the life of me, I can’t figure out what I’m doing. And of course, as the Olympic trials get closer, I get more pressure and more overwhelmed. Just get more reactive.”
So he arrived in St. Louis for the U.S. Championships unable to sleep, physically and emotionally exhausted, finally sharing with Frazier in the light of day the fears that tormented him in his darkest moments.

“How do I deal with that free skate and that whole competition, then I started to get nervous, like, what if? What if it’s not all sunshine and rainbows at the end of this? Because there’s a very real possibility that it doesn’t happen. I mean, so many people have this dream, and so little people actually lived it. So I started to think, what if I’m, what if it just remains a dream for me, and not a reality, right?
“And then it starts to get scary, because then you’re starting to think like, how am I going to live with myself? How am I going to skate another four years and try it again? I know Adam Rippon, he made the Olympics when he was 28, in spectacular fashion also. So he did it. And there’s some people that can do that, but not everybody. I don’t know how much longer I can skate and keep my life on pause. I don’t know.”

At the end of the program, the weight of the moment, the weight of a life spent bearing Olympic expectations, brought him to his knees. A moment where whether he would spend the rest of his life as Andrew Torgashev, Olympian, didn’t matter.
“I just put my heart out there,” he said.
Later, as Torgashev took a victory lap after the medal ceremony with Malinin and third-place finisher Maxim Naumov, he spotted Melnichenko on the sideboards and stopped. She handed him her cell phone. She was Facetiming her parents.
“We did it,” Torgashev shouted to his grandparents. “We did it!”
And so the journey continues to Milano Cortina, for Torgashev, for his family, for 16 days the Olympic flame distracting them from the smoldering ruins of Odesa.
“Defeat motivates, strengthens, increases efficiency, and leads to the desired result,” Vladimir Melnichenko said. “Andrew went through this path.”

 

[YukiNieve]

Has this been posted? (Sorry if it has.)

Shizuka Arakawa had a relatively long interview with Ilia Malinin, about 30 minutes.

His answers are mostly known, but how he observes other skaters, such as Yuma's progress, is interesting. It's another good example of how much he loves watching others skate.

Shizuka asks her questions in Japanese, but Ilia answers in English, so it's easy to understand the conversation.

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