By Lois Elfman

The 2025 Prevagen U.S. Figure Skating Championships get underway on Monday, January 20th, in Wichita, Kansas, and the competition will be fierce. With the next Olympic Winter Games only a little more than a year away, skaters are looking to position themselves for success. Several skaters with ties to Northern Virginia will be in the mix, with training mates Ilia Malinin and Sarah Everhardt playing key roles in their respective events.

For this article, we are going to look at the four events in the senior division—men, women, pairs and ice dance. To help us with insight into the strengths and weaknesses of various competitors, we’ve enlisted a two-time Olympian who is now a coach, Meagan Duhamel. After early success as a singles skater, Duhamel switched to pairs, winning a record seven Canadian pairs titles with former partner Eric Radford. They also won two World titles and three Olympic medals.

Obviously, the event that will shine the brightest spotlight on Northern Virginia is the senior men’s event, which includes two-time U.S. Champion Ilia Malinin, who grew up in Vienna and trains in Reston. At the 2024 World Figure Skating Championships, Malinin skated a historic free skate that included six quadruple jumps and established a new world record score. Last fall, he won four international competitions, including the ISU Grand Prix Final.

“His skating really draws you in,” said Duhamel. “You can sense the performance for the audience and the energy he’s giving off. The quads seemingly come out of nowhere. There are a lot of transitions directly into the elements. To me, he has the big wow factor. I love the enhanced commitment to performance that he’s brought to his skating this year.”

The U.S. has three men’s spots for the 2025 World Championships, and the competition is pretty open for second and third place. Two-time Olympian Jason Brown finished the 2023-24 season with a fifth place finish at Worlds, but his competitive results this season have been disappointing, failing to make the podium at either of his Grand Prix events.

“Anybody who’s watched skating this year has seen Jason’s struggle,” said Duhamel. “He can get away without the quads, but he needs the triple Axel and he needs those other triples clean and maximized. Hopefully, the technical work has been done and he’ll forever be a crowd favorite.”

While familiar names like Camden Pulkinen, Maxim Naumov and Andrew Torgashev will be in the mix, many eyes will be on rising talent Jacob Sanchez. He dominated the Junior Grand Prix last fall, winning three competitions, including the Final. This will be his senior national debut and Duhamel is ready to see him dazzle.

“I love him,” she said. “It will be fun to see who steps up for that number two spot at Nationals because I see it wide open.”

The frontrunner for senior women is reigning champion Amber Glenn. She won four competitions last fall, including the ISU Grand Prix Final.

“She’s developed a consistency, at least in the short program, that we haven’t seen from her before,” said Duhamel. “She’s making the triple Axel look so easy. She’s really engaged in her performances, and—especially with Worlds in Boston this season—she’s been building her momentum and it’s been really exciting. For sure she’s going to be the girl to beat, but this is the first time she’ll ever have to defend a title, and that’s a different ballgame. We’ll see how she manages that.”

There are several women competing for podium spots. One of the contenders should be the 2023 U.S. Champion and reigning World silver medalist Isabeau Levito. But after a third-place finish at Skate America, she withdrew from her other Grand Prix and has been under the radar since then.

Other senior women to consider are two-time champion Bradie Tennell, Josephine Lee, Starr Andrews, Lindsay Thorngren, two-time champion Alysa Liu, back in competition after a two-year hiatus, and Malinin’s training mate Sarah Everhardt, who is also coached in Reston by Malinin’s parents, Tatiana Malinina and Roman Skorniakov. 

“It’s going to come down to the jump rotations for so many of them, getting those jumps called cleanly rotated,” said Duhamel. “If I were to pick a World team for the U.S., I’d put Sarah on it. She’s consistent and reliable, and I think under pressure at Nationals she will keep a strong head and deliver. She doesn’t have the wow factor, the difficult choreography, transitions and performance capability, but she’s consistent and she usually rotates her jumps.”

In pairs, the defending champions Ellie Kam and Danny O’Shea have shown considerable improvement, winning medals at their two Grand Prix events and earning a spot in the Final. Duhamel’s husband, Bruno Marcotte, has been part of their coaching team, and she’s seen their hard work firsthand.

“This year, they’ve kind of separated themselves from the pack by landing throws, developing more consistency, and they maximize their opportunities,” said Duhamel. 

There are only two spots on the World team for pairs, and several teams will try to earn it. Among those are Emily Chan and Spencer Howe, who have struggled since their fifth-place finish at the 2023 World Championships. Another strong team is Alisa Efimova and Misha Mitrofanov. 

Ice dance has been the most consistent discipline for the United States for the past 20 years, earning at least one spot on the World Championships medal podium 16 times since 2005. Madison Chock and Evan Bates come to these U.S. Championships the two-time and defending World Champions and five-time and defending U.S. Champions. 

The likely silver medalists will be Christina Carreira and Anthony Ponomarenko, who have really stepped up their game the past two years. In the fall, they won medals at four international competitions and showed increased confidence each time they take the ice.

As the U.S. has three berths, there will be a ferocious battle for the bronze medal and third spot on the World team. At least three teams—Emily Bratti and Ian Somerville, Caroline Green and Michael Parsons and Emilea Zingas and Vadym Kolesnik—have a shot at the bronze. 

Although the new team of Vanessa Pham and Anton Spiridonov are not in that position as yet, they are hoping to make an impression that puts them on the path toward medal contention. Spiridonov spent several years of his youth living in Northern Virginia and returned to the area for training as an adult. Although he and Pham now train in Montreal, he still feels a connection to the area. His parents, who now live in Florida, were coaches in NoVa and his mother trained him in ice dance at the start of his competitive days.

“I’ve always had my own personality; I don’t find it difficult to find my own path and direction in my style of skating,” said Spiridonov. “I find it easy to be myself on the ice…especially in this new training environment. [Coaches] Marie-France Dubreuil and Patrice Lauzon see the best in you and they allow that to come out.”

Spiridonov draws inspiration from Chock and Bates, who train with the same coaches, and feels motivated to cultivate a style with Pham and put out strong performances. He’s looking forward to showing how they’ve gelled as a team over the last seven months.

“We’ve progressed a lot,” Spiridonov said. “There is a lot of work to be done to start the process of really becoming a team and meshing together. I think we’ve done that well over the course of the last few months. I want this to be a stepping stone into a greater future.”