Big Essay: Boston Is Where You're From or Where You're Going
On the 2025 World Figure Skating Championships...
The 2025 World Figure Skating Championships in Boston are a big event. A people-come-from-all-over-the-world event, and it feels especially important in the lead-up to an Olympic year. This is the last World Championships to be held before the Milano-Cortina Olympics, which will be held in early 2026.
The stakes feel high – because in early 2026, even you, reader, and a lot of people you know, will be watching and talking about figure skating, too. This World Championships is the event that helps build that moment.
Boston is the right city, because Boston loves its sports. But also, Boston loves its winter sports, and is home to one of the most storied, clout-heavy figure skating clubs in the United States, and the world. The Skating Club of Boston births champions. (Nancy Kerrigan – that’s all I need to say.) And this is where we are. One of the most important figure skating cities in the world, at the single most important figure skating event of the year.
It’s spring and in Boston that means rain or what my friend B______ calls nothing-weather, low clouds, a bit cold or a bit not. Rain is always in the forecast and often never arrives. And we are in one of the two modes you’re always in at these events: you are sitting in an arena seat with your eyes on the ice, or you are outside the arena looking for lunch. We are on one of those lunch missions.
It bears mentioning that I have met Nancy Kerrigan at this event, inside the arena. She is not quite so small as you might think in a sport of uniformly small people. She has enormous blue eyes. I blather nothing of value at the poor woman while S________ snaps a photo of us. I look giddy in it, nervous. This is the strange fulfillment of a childhood wish in this – even though I met Nancy once before, when I was a kid. I was a little girl clutching a ballpoint pen and a show program. That was in Boston, too – sort-of Nancy’s hometown and sort-of mine. Not the actual truth for either of us, but where we both tell people we’re from. This meeting is different. Nostalgia slants everything closer to the heart. Age adds dimension. So it’s the fulfillment of a second wish, I guess.
After that, I have no realistic hopes of meeting other skaters and no practical way of topping that experience. (She is possibly the most famous living figure skater. Ok, the second most.) But I have vague ideas of who might be fun to see. Paul Wylie, my other childhood favorite. Nathan Chen, reigning Olympic gold medalist and king of the quads who also has great hair. And Shoma Uno, a champion among champions – one of the most decorated Japanese figure skaters of all time.
He’s recently retired but I saw him skate in Osaka at NHK Trophy in 2023, a competition he did not win – he took silver – but I always forget that he didn’t win. It was that kind of skating performance – the arena silent, rapt. When he took the ice, you could hear nothing but the rasp of his blades. It wasn’t about the jumps – he did some, he landed some – but about this depth and purity of motion on the ice, his gestures sweeping and grand but so controlled. It is among the greatest figure skating performances I have ever seen, and yes, I was in the room when Alysa Liu won gold at this Boston World Championships. When she nearly lifted the roof off the arena – twice.
Shoma works for NHK TV now as a mixed-zone interviewer and pundit, so I figured he’d be in Boston. He is.
I joke with my boyfriend T______, who is from Fukuoka (the truth for him, actually), about the possibility of actually meeting Shoma. I text screenshots from Boston of Google Translate and ask him to proofread them.
“Is this OK or is this just bad Google Japanese?” I ask, concerned. I don’t want to sound ignorant or impolite.
We settle on this.
“Well,” says T______. “Call him Shoma-san. That’s polite.”
That’s the easy part.
I always struggle to pronounce はじめまして – Nice to meet you – especially if I have to say it quickly. My tongue is unused to the rhythm and the necessary speed of it, and I trip over the syllables almost every time. I am embarrassed by this. To me, it feels like the equivalent of struggling to say Bonjour. This is among the most basic things to say in Japanese. It is right up there with “Hello,” and “Thank you,” and learning it feels important. Not really so I can say hello to Shoma Uno, champion figure skater, but so that I can be a person that T______ is proud of.
But then I do meet Shoma Uno. Kind of.
We see him outside the arena, while we are in lunch-searching mode. I notice the suits first, on a group of young people walking in the opposite direction. All black. Crisply formal. They feel like a delegation. And Shoma is among them, standing there waiting for the light to turn green so they can cross Causeway Street. He is not far from me, and it’s clear that no one around us – a substantial between-events crowd – has noticed.
“Shoma-san,” I say. His head perks up, and he looks at me. For some reason, this surprises me.
And then I do something that surprises me even more. I stop, and I bow to him.
I don’t know why I think to do this. It is not a long bow or an ostentatious once, more head than back. I only recall that it seems right, and that there are too many people around for any other kind of conversation. Maybe it’s because I know already, somewhere in my nervous head, that there can of course be no conversation. We do not speak each other’s language. All I can say – in the rare moment when I can pronounce the syllables – is nice to meet you. And that’s all. We have nothing else.
This does not feel right for a skater who has given the sport, the world, a performance like Shoma Uno gave in 2023 in Osaka. The bow, I think, is a kind of thank you. It is the only one I can think of that we might both understand.
Then, he bows back.
I am dumbstruck, even though, for him, this gesture is so ordinary that he does it almost as a reflex. It is like I have playacted a bit, How to Be Polite in Japan, in the middle of a crowded sidewalk in Boston, in early spring under nothing-weather. It’s like the world, for an instant, becomes very small, twists inside out.
Other people in the crowd see him, and a group forms, because in figure skating circles, he is very famous. A World Championships is the largest figure skating circle. He has to go, he tells them. He apologizes. He crosses the street, and is gone. He is probably, like us, going to lunch.