There was a time when you could lose me for hours to women’s figure skating.I mean hours.I came from the generation that knew when the competi
There was a time when you could lose me for hours to women’s figure skating.
I mean hours.
I came from the generation that knew when the competitions were coming on and made time for them. I watched the warmups. I watched the favorites and the long shots. I listened to the commentators explain edges, jumps, artistry and deductions as though there might be a test later. When the women took the ice, I was locked in.
And then there was Surya Bonaly.
If you were watching in those years, you may remember what it felt like to watch her before you remember every score. Surya was powerful. Athletic. Unmistakably herself. She was also a Black woman competing in a sport with deeply rooted ideas about what elegance was supposed to look like.
She kept getting the message that something about her skating needed changing.
She needed more artistry. More refinement. Better presentation.
So she worked on it.
In 1995, after winning her fifth consecutive European championship, Bonaly spoke about how much she had worked on presentation because judges had long considered it one of her weaknesses. That championship performance included a difficult triple Lutz-triple toe combination, additional triples and presentation marks reaching 5.9.
She heard them. She worked. She came back.
And still, some of us watching began to develop an uncomfortable feeling.
What exactly was this woman supposed to do?
Then Came That Podium
The moment I have never forgotten happened at the 1994 World Championships in Chiba, Japan.
Surya Bonaly had already won four consecutive European championships and had been World silver medalist the previous year. In Chiba, the championship came down to Bonaly and Japan’s Yuka Sato.
Bonaly’s technical marks were mostly 5.8s and 5.9s. Sato received exceptionally high artistic marks. Five judges placed Sato first. Four placed Bonaly first.
Five to four.
Surya lost the World Championship by the narrowest possible judging split.
She initially resisted stepping onto that podium. Eventually she did.
Then they put the silver medal around her neck. And Surya Bonaly took it off.
Oh, the audacity.Not hers.
The audacity of expecting her to pretend.
The contemporary press described what happened as a “temper tantrum.” I remember seeing something very different in her face.
I saw frustration.
I saw a woman who appeared to have reached the end of her willingness to perform gratitude for something she believed was unjust.
When reporters asked her about it, Bonaly said the decision was not right. She explained that when she relied upon her technical ability, she was told she lacked artistry. When she changed her skating, that did not seem to satisfy them either.
She finally said she did not know what she was supposed to do.
That stayed with me.
Because sometimes a woman reaches the terrible place where every road somebody told her to take has led her right back to their disapproval.
I Was Tired of Watching Her Be Told to Fix Herself
I know people can debate individual skating scores forever. Figure skating was a judged sport. Sato was an extraordinary skater. Nobody has to diminish another woman to tell the truth about what watching Surya felt like.
The larger record is complicated enough that I would never claim we can crawl inside the minds of nine judges and prove why each one awarded each mark. Even later accounts have acknowledged that it is impossible to separate perfectly questions about Bonaly’s skating, the scoring system, her unconventionality within the sport, and race.
I can tell you what happened to me as a fan.
I got tired. Weary.
I had watched Surya listen to the criticism. I watched her work. I watched her return. I watched this magnificent athlete keep encountering another reason she was not quite what skating wanted.
And eventually I lost my taste for the whole thing.
I have visited women’s figure skating from time to time over the years. I never came back the same way. Not for longer than an hour at most. The young girl who could sit glued to the television for hours was gone.
Surya taught me something about sports institutions long before I had words for it:
Fans are watching the athlete’s face too.
We see when somebody is swallowing disappointment.
We see when she is expected to smile.
We see when graciousness begins to look less like sportsmanship and more like another performance being demanded from the person who believes she has been wronged.
And I learned something else from Surya Bonaly.
You do not have to pretend there is honor where you cannot find a crumb of it.
A medal has meaning because the athlete believes the contest that produced it has meaning. If an athlete sincerely believes the process failed her, forcing a smile onto her face does not restore the dignity of the process.
Surya took that medal off. I am glad she did.
She had more courage in that moment than the system had room for.
And Now I Am Watching the Girls
That old memory comes back to me today when I look at girls in sports.
I see photographs of girls on podiums. I see the conversations adults are having around female sporting categories. I hear all the language about identity, inclusion, ideology and feelings.
And somewhere underneath all that noise is a girl with a body.
That is who I am watching.
Girls deserve a space where they compete against bodies like theirs.
I know exactly what I mean when I say that. Female athletes are gloriously different from one another. Some are tall. Some are short. Some are built like lightning. Some are extraordinarily muscular. Some have unusual reach, tremendous endurance, astonishing flexibility or genetic gifts the rest of us could only dream about.
They are not identical bodies. They are female bodies. Or they ought to be. That is what was fought for on their behalf.
Female athletic variation competing against female athletic variation is part of the beauty of women’s and girls’ sport.
Sport has always cared about bodies. We regulate weight classes. We create age divisions. We regulate performance-enhancing drugs. We classify athletes in Paralympic competition. We created female categories because the body doing the competing is relevant to meaningful competition.
Ideologies are not competing bodies. Feelings are not competing bodies.
When the whistle blows, somebody’s body has to swim that pool. Somebody’s body has to run that track. Somebody’s body has to lift that weight, throw that shot, take that hit, make that jump or cross that finish line.
And girls deserve somewhere in this world where being female is sufficient qualification for belonging.
Some of Us Have Seen This Face Before
This is where Surya comes flipping and skating back into my memory.
I am not saying these are the same controversy. They are not. Surya competed against women and girls, and her battle concerned subjective judging within women’s figure skating. I am talking about something human that connects the two.
I remember the face of an athlete who seemed to be asking what else she could possibly do.
That is the face I never want adults to become comfortable seeing on girls.
We cannot keep asking the girl to adjust.
Train harder.
Get faster.
Become stronger.
Understand everybody else’s feelings.
Accept the decision.
Stand on the podium.
Smile for the photograph.
Be gracious.
Do not make anybody uncomfortable with your disappointment.
No.
Girls are allowed to recognize when something has cost them. Girls are allowed to have boundaries. Girls are allowed to say a competition did not feel fair to them. Girls do not owe adults a cheerful performance that makes an institution’s decisions easier to look at.
Surya gave me that lesson years ago.
She gave me another one at her final Olympics.
At Nagano in 1998, injured and out of medal contention, she did the thing everybody remembers. She performed her backflip, landing on one blade, despite the move being prohibited in competition at the time. She later explained that she wanted to do something for the crowd because she believed the judges would not be pleased whatever she did.
Decades later, the sport changed. Backflips and other acrobatic elements became legal again, and they were permitted at the 2026 Olympics.
Well, look at that. Sometimes the woman called difficult lives long enough to watch the rules move.
I still remember Surya taking off that silver medal. I remember her face. I remember how thoroughly fed up I became as a fan. And I remember learning, without anybody sitting me down to teach me, that excellence cannot guarantee fair treatment from people determined to measure you by something you cannot satisfy.
So when I look at girls in sports today, I refuse to look away from their faces.
They deserve competition.
They deserve challenge.
They deserve the glorious possibility of losing to another girl who was simply better that day.
They deserve the equally glorious possibility of becoming the girl nobody else can catch.
And they deserve a female sporting space in which their bodies are not treated as the inconvenient part of somebody else’s argument.
Some of us remember Surya.
Some of us remember wondering what else she was supposed to do.
I never want a generation of girls to grow up believing the answer is always one more thing they must surrender.
Sometimes there is nothing wrong with the girl.
Sometimes she has trained enough, accommodated enough, explained enough and smiled enough.
Sometimes the grown people running the competition need to answer the question.
And girls are allowed to stand there, look us straight in the face, and wait for the answer.