Figure Skater Career
Figure Skater Career
The Real Poop
Between $30,000 and $50,000 a year (source).
No, that's not the amount of money you'll make as a skater—that's what it costs to become an elite figure skater, give or take a few thousand.
That's about the same as the cost of a year's tuition at UC Berkeley. Or a condo in Biloxi. Or a Mercedes on eBay.
Sure, you can get endorsements and scholarships—if you make it to the Olympics. You know how many American skaters went to the last Olympics? Fifteen. That's including singles, pairs, and ice dancers. Good luck.
Olympic athletes can expect salaries in the hundreds of thousands through advertisement deals, but if you're not one of the elite, that salary comes crashing back to Earth in a real hurry. Skaters working for Disney on Ice or on cruise ships can expect to make about $500-$800 per week, and coaches will generally start at rates of about twenty bucks per twenty minutes of lesson time (source).
If you're considering a career as a figure skater, chances are you love it and have been skating since you could walk. No? Then realize that your odds of getting a job, even doing spirals on plastic ice on a cruise ship or spinning around as Background Princess #11 for Disney on Ice, are slim.
Really slim. Like, as slim as you need to be in order to fit in those teeny-tiny dresses or spandex suits.
And as for getting a job as a teacher, well, the field for skating coaches is both highly competitive and very small. You'll almost certainly need to have medaled in a national competition to get the respect of the parents who think their kid's going to be the next Olympic gold medalist.
But back to the skating. Assuming your figure skating dreams are still intact. You're looking at fourteen hours a week of ice time, two lessons a week with the choreographer, two lessons a week with the spin coach, two days of off-ice classes, three days of ballet, and video analysis of your jump positions.
Then there are expenses and travel time to the big competitions for you and your main coach, pictures, competition videographer fees, weekly sharpenings for skates that need to be replaced every six months—in other words, back to that $30,000-to-$50,000 a year number.
Also, figure skating is really, really, really tough. If you can't handle pain, take up curling. You'll be jumping and spinning with precise body movements at top speeds, and you'll be expected to land on the correct side of a sharp blade that's about as thick as a coat of Britney Spears' mascara. Without falling.
To top it off, figure skating skews young. Like, preschool young. Seventeen percent of U.S. Figure Skating's members are under six years old. That's right, while most kids are learning to walk, run, and play hopscotch, skater kids are being yelled at if they're not doing a Salchow correctly or getting low enough on their sit spins.
Thirty-four percent of U.S. Figure Skating members are between seven and twelve years old. If you can't land a perfect double axel by the time you're twelve, you might as well pack it in. Olympic skater Polina Edmunds landed her first at age ten.
If you're a boy, you get a little more leeway because there are only a handful of male figure skating hopefuls. Thirteen percent of USFSA members are between thirteen and eighteen years old, and only one percent of them are boys. Apparently sequins and spandex just don't appeal to a lot of male teenagers. Who'd have thought?
In fact, boys are so scarce in skating that many parents of skater girls will actually foot their expenses (the dude's) in a pairs situation in order for their daughter to skate. It's sort of like paying someone to date your daughter, plus the added pressure of wanting that someone to become an Olympic gold medalist.
Aside from the financial challenges and the difficulty factor, competitive skaters have a high rate of injury. Many work long and hard to achieve top rankings, only to be taken out by a torn Achilles or a groin injury. Those beautiful Biellmann spins cause life-long back problems, and a skater's hips can only take so many falls before they need to be replaced.
Figure skating is a seriously hard sport on the body, and it's equally hard on your social life. The life of a skater is full of absolutes. As in, you absolutely can't eat that chocolate fudge sundae, or that piece of pizza, or that French fry.
And you absolutely can't go out with your friends, or go on a date, or to the school dance, or the football game, or your best friend's birthday party, or your dog's Bar Mitzvah, because you have to get up at 4:00AM to skate.
In fact, if you really want to be an elite athlete, you'll probably need to be homeschooled to fit all the hours of training required to be competitive. True, a few top athletes manage to go to high school part-time. But when you're constantly worrying that being in school is damaging your future chances at Olympic fame, it's unlikely that school is going to win out.
Plus, there's all the time for travel and competitions in other states or other countries, so in the end, being homeschooled is often the best choice.
Yes, Rachael Flatt managed to go to Stanford and still compete in the Olympics. But did you see her long program? Hopefully her physics scores were higher than her skating marks.
If you're serious about this career, you'll need to be okay with being judged on literally everything—your skating, your looks, and even your attitude. While there's a part of skating that's black and white, there's also an artistic score that takes into account the whole of the performance.
It's about way more than just landing a bunch of incredibly hard jumps and spins. It should be expressive, like a ballet. If a skater has no emotional connection with the audience (and more importantly, with the judges), she (or he) won't get very far.
You'll also need to be okay with being alone most of the time. Skaters rarely have many friends, except for other skaters—and they have to compete against them eventually, which can lead to some nasty drama. Skating's an isolating sport that's not good for social butterflies and chatty people.
There's no talking in figure skating; it's a relatively silent sport. If you're a chatty Cathy who can't hold your tongue when you're on the ice, you might as well hang up your blades now. Or maybe take up synchro. Or curling.
Lastly, you need to understand basic physics. You may not know that you're working on physics when your coach tells you to tuck your arms in when you jump and to increase your speed before take-off, but you are. Skating is, after all, mostly just taking an object and hurling it into the air to do a bunch of spins—with you being that object. Get familiar with the laws of perpetual motion.
All that sounds pretty dizzying to us. Not as dizzying as those Biellmann spins, but close. If you're still ready to skate out onto that Olympic ice, read on to find out more about the skating life.