Episode•February 12, 2026•10 min

What it costs to be an elite figure skater like the 'Quad God'

Behind every Ilia Malinin or Alysa Liu, there is an army of elite figure skating coaches and choreographers who have been with them from the beginning. On today’s show, how much does it cost to achieve Olympic glory and why is it so expensive? Related episodes: How college sports juiced Olympic development (https://www.npr.org/2026/02/05/nx-s1-5701399/how-college-sports-juiced-olympic-development) Why the Olympics cost so much (https://www.npr.org/2024/08/01/1197967951/paris-2024-olympics-hosting-costs) For sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org (http://plus.npr.org/). Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez (https://www.npr.org/people/1268825622/sierra-juarez). Music by Drop Electric (https://dropelectric.bandcamp.com/). Find us: TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@planetmoney), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/planetmoney/), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/planetmoney), Newsletter (https://www.npr.org/newsletter/money). To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below: See pcm.adswizz.com (https://pcm.adswizz.com) for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices (https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices) NPR Privacy Policy (https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy)

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Transcript

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Npr.

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This is the Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Waylon Wong here at the Indicator. We've been following the Winter Olympics and you know, I, like many other people, love figure skating. I love the ice dancing. I like the short program. I like the free skate. I like the twizzles. I like the lifts. So we have invited Oregon Public Broadcasting's Lillian Carbake on to help us understand what it actually costs to get to the Olympics as a figure skater.

0:40

Hi, Waylon. I'm so excited to be here. I am primarily an economics reporter, so it is such a delight to have two weeks every four years where I get to talk about knife shoes instead.

0:52

This is your moment to shine in a slightly different way than how you usually shine. So will we get to see you at the Olympics this week?

1:00

Absolutely not. I did skate competitively, but I didn't really realize how expensive it was going to get when I started.

1:07

And that leads us to today's indicator, which is $1 million. That's right. It can cost an average of $1 million to make the Olympics.

1:22

That's Timothy Gable's estimate. He. He won an Olympic Bronze medal in 2002.

1:26

Pretty, pretty daunting. It is a million dollar bet on like a maybe of a maybe of

1:32

a maybe after the break. How the costs grow as skaters climb the ranks. We talked to three US Olympic medalists on how top skaters, like most Olympic athletes, aren't breaking even. Okay, Lillian, walk me through this. A kid starts ice skating, where does the money really start to kick in?

1:53

Well, when I started, I did lessons through the single jumps pretty much. And then once you start jumping doubles and competing locally, I needed a private coach. And that's pretty standard for most skaters. It's also when the expenses start to explode.

2:08

Right. So last week we talked about how the US Is fairly unique because unlike other countries, it doesn't invest federal taxpayer money in youth athletics or Olympic development.

2:18

Yep, here in the US it's your family that picks up the bill. And this is how 2014 Olympic bronze medalist Ashley Wagner described figure skating here

2:27

in the U.S. ah, astronomically unaffordable. I was told by my parents that I could do literally any other sport other than equestrian because that's how expensive figure skating was.

2:39

Okay, so let's stay away from equestrian expenses. But sports are getting expensive for everyone. In ice skating, though, it's a whole different knife shoe game.

2:49

Yeah. I mean, part of that has to do with the knife shoes. The equipment is expensive. Once you start landing double jumps or doing lifts, you you need skates that can withstand that force.

3:00

Blades can run up to $1,000. And then the skates that these athletes are on, another thousand dollars, 1,500 bucks.

3:08

I'm hearing the cash register sounds, we're at about what, like $2,000. But $2,000 boots don't get you to a million dollars.

3:15

Yeah. So the real sink is ice time and coaching. And that's where you can start to see who can move up the levels and who can't. It's not a coincidence that the U.S. men's Olympic team includes several skaters whose parents were elite. Three Team USA skaters this year had parents who were Olympians.

3:34

So you could almost say that being an Olympic skater is hereditary.

3:38

Right? But not genetically, financially. That's because if your parents are Olympic level coaches, you're getting free top tier training from the time that you're very tiny. Take Ilya Malinin. He is the 21 year old gold medal favorite. He does the quadruple axel, something that experts used to think was physically impossible until he did it.

3:59

I saw him wearing his tank top that says quad God.

4:02

He has like a lot of shirts to say quad God. Here's the thing. He grew up in the rink while his parents coached. That much. Ice time is part of the reason he was landing quadruple jumps at 13 years old. Bronze medalist Timothy Gable said most skaters are paying for every minute they're on

4:20

the ice just to go and have a normal training day. You're looking at $90 a day for ice time, a minimum of five days a week.

4:31

And Ashley says that doesn't even include coaching.

4:34

Our lesson would be about 120 bucks. And then you have probably two or three hours of lessons a day. It gets expensive really quickly.

4:44

And also as skaters get better, many have to move to train with high level coaches. And that sometimes means moving states or even across the world. Timothy Gable and his mom moved states when he was 11 years old.

4:57

Your family or whomever has to spend a boatload of money just to get you kind of in the mix.

5:04

And all of this is before meaningful financial help from U.S. figure skating.

5:08

Yeah. So U.S. figure skating is the sport's national governing body. And its funding doesn't usually kick in until you're competing internationally at the junior level in your teens.

5:19

Until then, it's entirely on the family. They have to pay for travel to competitions, by the way. That includes coaches, flights and rooms. And then on top of that, they have to cover a chaperone's expenses just

5:31

to qualify for nationals. Let Alone, an international, the travel expenses in a given season can be 10,000 out of pocket, if not more. Now, once our. Once our athletes do qualify for. For the majority of internationals, US Figure skating is paying for that.

5:48

So US Figure skating will assign funding to these skaters based on their world ranking. The junior skaters get less, but our top ranked US figure skaters get about $20,000 per season.

5:58

According to Ashley, that money goes so fast, a program to get choreographed can cost 10,000 to $15,000. So you can have your entire funding almost dried up from just one program. And that's supposed to last you the. The entire season?

6:14

Okay, it is time to talk choreography.

6:17

Yeah. This is a judge sport. So the choreography and the costumes can genuinely make or break a skater's ability to move up the ranks. Like, judges aren't just looking at whether or not you land jumps. They're evaluating musicality, interpretation, how convincingly a skater sells a program.

6:35

That means choreography and costuming is not extra. They are competitive tools. And let's not forget all that tool. The sparkly costumes. They matter a lot, and they cost a lot once you make it to the higher levels.

6:48

Oh, anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000.

6:55

Yeah. And that's just for a single competition dress. And skaters need at least two costumes per season.

7:01

Then you double that number in pairs and ice dance.

7:05

Okay. Pairs and ice dance is where the economics start to get really strange. That's because there's this massive gender imbalance in the Sport. There's roughly one boy for every 200 girls.

7:16

In economics, we call that a supply side problem.

7:19

It is a supply side problem. And that low supply means girls and their families often end up subsidizing boys. It's extremely common for the families of female figure skaters to pay not just for training, but for their male partners. Living expenses, housing, coaching and ice time, and sometimes citizenship expenses. Because skaters often change countries once skaters

7:40

reach international competitions, they earn prize money, but it's nowhere near enough to offset all those costs.

7:46

Yeah. So at the very top of the sport, the Grand Prix final champion wins $25,000.

7:51

Okay, now that did sound like a lot of money until I heard about how much choreography and costumes cost.

7:57

And let's not forget, many coaches actually take 15% of an athlete's prize money. But the prize money is just one piece. Let's talk about sponsorship. This is why the Olympics is so important financially to figure skater. The game gives a niche sport a global audience. And with that comes big money.

8:16

Yes, I have seen all these commercials with figure skaters in them this Olympics, especially for medications, so many pharmaceuticals.

8:23

I know. How American is that, right? But Ashley says it's very tempting to take that money when it's available. When the Olympic spotlight is on them,

8:32

the money that they offer you is obscene. And when you're in a spot that is obscenely expensive, it makes it very hard to turn away from that. Does it feel ethical? Not in the slightest. But it's very obvious why it exists in this sport and why athletes take those sponsorships.

8:50

Pair skater Danny o' Shea might take advantage of those sponsorships now that he's at the Olympics, especially because he just helped the USA win gold in the team event with his partner, Ellie Kam. But he said most Olympic figure skaters are not doing this for the financial reward. The reward is internal. And in how we're able to share what we love, a sport that we love, an art that we love, with so many people, and maybe inspire others to go after their dreams as well.

9:22

Well, Lillian, you had those dreams maybe once upon a time, right before you turned to more practical pursuits.

9:29

Yes. Now I skate in a mall, and it costs $4 an hour, so. But I won't be in the Olympics anytime soon.

9:36

But you can get yourself a Wetzel Spritzel after you practice.

9:39

It's true. It's Auntie Anne's, actually. Okay.

What it costs to be an elite figure skater like the 'Quad God'

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