Since he was a small boy his whole life had been headed to this moment, only this moment, no other direction, a pre-determined path that ignored the law of averages and the cruelty of his sport that lurked beneath its beauty and grace.
The son of a Soviet ice princess, he was destiny’s child, as if his birth certificate actually read Andrew Torgashev, future Olympian.
“His entire conscious life,” his grandfather said, “has been connected with this sport.”
Torgashev, 24, had paid a steep price to follow his path. He had the X-rays and the bills to prove it.
Yet now after spending a week sleepless in St. Louis, just hours before the U.S. Figure Skating Championships men’s free skate would determine Team USA’s three members for the next month’s Milano Cortina Olympic Games, his life defined by four short minutes across a sheet of ice both slippery and unforgiving, four minutes that could remove the “future” between the comma and Olympian, Torgashev asked what if there wasn’t a pay-off?
What if the path hadn’t carried him to the Olympics but left him at a dead end?
If he wasn’t an Olympian, then who was he?
“What if I don’t make the team?” Torgashev asked Brandon Frazier, one of his coaches, while warming up backstage. “Like, what if it doesn’t all work out like the way we were planning it to?”
Torgashev would render the question moot, overcoming his doubts and fears, taking flight on his opening jump and then continuing to soar through the best free skate of his career, placing second overall behind two-time World champion Ilia Malinin, unburdened in those final nervous hours by the realization that his life, his worth would not be defined by labels or others, but by his journey.
“So I did tell myself, I said that, ‘Well, Olympian is just a label,’” recalled Torgashev, who was in fifth place after the short program, less than four points out of third. “But the Olympics, they’re about the Olympic spirit, right? And I know I have that Olympic spirit because I’ve sacrificed a lot, and I have tenacity. I have grit, work ethic, resilience, and I’m at the top of my sport, whether it’s top two or top five or top 20 in the world, I’m there. So I guess regardless, if I can be called an Olympian, I know that I have achieved what it means to be an Olympic athlete, regardless of the title.”
It is a title that Torgashev, 24, had seemed destined for even before he won the 2015 U.S. junior title at 13, the youngest skater in the field, setting competition records for free skate and overall scores. A title he would chase from Florida to Colorado Springs to his current training base in Orange County, through coaching changes, through a series of major injuries that threatened to end his career in his teens, through two years of talking himself in and then out of quitting skating on almost a daily basis.
“Everybody’s kind of got their own journey in this sport, for example, like Nathan and Vincent, they were really good at a young age too, and they made the Olympics much younger than I did,” Torgashev said, referring to 2022 Olympic champion Nathan Chen and Vincent Zhou, a gold medalist in the 2022 Games team competition. “I think they had two Olympics by the time they were my age, so their journeys panned out differently.
“It made me look at someone like an Alysa Liu, who was national champion at 13, the way she dealt with that,” Torgashev continued. Liu in 2019 at 13 became the youngest ever U.S. women’s champion, defending her title a year later only to retire at 16 after finishing sixth in the 2022 Olympics in Beijing. She returned to the sport in 2024, winning the World title last spring.
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“So I don’t know for me, like winning at 13 the (U.S.) Junior title, just having my own expectations and other people’s expectations. I think give a 13-year-old a little bit of pressure and recognition and who knows what’s going to happen? I don’t know. It’s just like a really weird place to be. I think it definitely, like, inflated my ego a lot. It took many years, I think not until I was like 20 or 21 before I just like humbled myself and got to work really. I think throughout my whole Junior career, it was just mostly expectations and not good work and not good quality to what I was doing. I think it was just all expectations. So I think once I matured, everything changed.”
Torgashev started skating when he was 5 at the Coral Springs, Florida, rink where his parents coached. Both parents competed internationally for the Soviet Union. His mother, Ilona Melnichenko, a Ukrainian, was a world junior champion ice dancer. His Russian father, Artem Torgashev, was a two-time world junior pairs skater.
“I was just like super competitive as a child,” Torgashev said. “And I love to be active. I remember playing soccer when I was a kid and I was just kind of small as everybody was getting bigger. It didn’t stop me from going and trying to get the goal from a corner kick. Everybody was jumping, and they were like three heads on top of me, but I was still trying to jump and get there. So I was definitely very competitive and just like to be active. Just put my energy into skating, but it wasn’t always easy.
“People will say like, I’m talented or such, but there’s a funny story where I was 8 years old and I had all cheated double jumps to under-rotated. My mom and dad were coaches. They went to the regionals with a bunch of their students, and they left me for a week with the babysitter. And I was so upset that they left me, I just said that I want to go. My mom said, ‘Well, if you’ll get all your jumps clean, then you can go next year.’ And just the fact that she said that, I just went and got all the jumps clean, and so put a goal in front of me and I will try to find any way to achieve it.”
But initially, Torgashev had ulterior motives for spending so much time at the rink. From age 2 to 12, Torgashev’s babysitter and later math tutor was a family friend, Ida, a strict older woman and former math teacher, who had also moved to the U.S. after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
“My parents worked all day. They’re just at the rink, from 5:30 in the morning to 5:30 at night, pretty much daily. My mom’s a very loving woman, but I would also say stern, which is very hard, I would say, especially like in discipline as a child,” Torgashev said. “So if she was gonna trust a babysitter, it was gonna be Ida, who was like, just, like, cut and dry, just an old school Soviet school teacher. So those were the options. It was either to be disciplined and educated by Ida, or spend as much time at the rink as possible to avoid Ida.”
One of the other skaters at the Coral Springs rink was Frazier, nine years older than Torgashev.
“He was just Junior U.S. champion at a very young age, doing things the senior students were doing,” said Frazier, who would go on with Alexa Knierim to win the 2022 World pairs gold medal.
Frazier was also struck by the family dynamic on the ice.
“Very supportive, very good relationship,” Frazier said. “They did a great job with them with balance of skating and school and I just remembered watching all of them, and said, that’s a good team, right there, and he’s going to do a lot of good things.”
After winning the 2015 U.S. junior title in record-shattering fashion, Torgashev went on to place 10th at the World Junior Championships. Only three months later, he fractured his ankle attempting a quad toe loop, an injury that kept him out of the 2015-16 season. He was 25th in the short program at the 2017 World Junior Championships and didn’t advance to the free skate.
Moving to Colorado Springs
Around this time, his parents’ marriage was unraveling. In June 2018, just weeks after his 17th birthday, Torgashev moved to Colorado Springs to train with Christy Krall, a 1964 Olympian.
Torgashev was asked if the move was hard.
“No,” he said. “It was not a great place for me to be in Florida. They were getting divorced, and the training environment in Florida was just not it for me and my development. I think my parents taught me a lot in terms of being a disciplined athlete, but I wouldn’t listen to them when there was, like, lots of conflicts there. And, you know, the family was kind of breaking apart, and I was just looking for a way out of that situation. And Christy Krall had been working with me since I was 9, just coming down, once or twice a year, and that was just the logical option to go to her Olympic training site, environment.”
The move also made sense to Melnichenko.
“One time I made my decision that I don’t want to be a coach. I want to be mom,” she said. “In certain time, you have to make decisions. Do you want to be coach of athlete, or you want to be mom of your son? And I make the decision that I don’t want to be a coach. I want to be, I want to have a son. That was when he went to Colorado Springs.”
But Torgashev continued to struggle with injuries and inconsistency.
He was off the ice for eight weeks in the fall of 2017 with a fractured toe. Torgashev was third after the short program at the 2020 World Juniors in Thailand and convinced he would win, only to fall four times in the free skate, dropping to eight place. Within a few months, he was on the move again.
“That’s another hard, hard move,” he said. “Yeah, that one, I would say, was more difficult, because I felt like I got everything I could out of Colorado Springs and out of Christy. She really taught me a lot about training plans and just being like a good, honest competitor. Taught me a lot about discipline. So I felt like I got as much as I could from her, from technique and all of that stuff. And it kind of didn’t work out when I needed it to. There was the junior world free skate, where I could have won the event. I was in third and I just had a horrible free skate when it really mattered to me, and trying to understand for the life of me why?
“But there was just gaps in my technique. I would try to go for the jumps and it was almost like a roulette spin. Sometimes it would be really good and it would hit or it wouldn’t. And that was kind of like we were trying to work on technique, but at the end of the day, it was either hit or miss.”
Training with Arutyanyan in Irvine
Within a few months, he was on the move again, this time relocating in November 2020 at the recommendation of Mitch Moyer, U.S. Figure Skating’s senior director for high performance, to Orange County to train with Rafael Arutyunyan at the Great Park Ice in Irvine.
Arutyunyan had long been considered one of the sport’s top technical coaches, coaching Michelle Kwan to the last two of her nine U.S. titles, as well as Japan’s Mao Asada, a three-time World champion and a string of Olympic and World medalists. At the time of Torgashev’s move, Arutyunyan was coaching Nathan Chen, having already guided him to the first two of his three World titles.
The Georgian-born Arutyunyan had also known by Torgashev’s parents for a decade, working as a young assistant in the 1980s for Tatiana Tarasova, the most successful coach in figure skating history, at the same Young Pioneers Stadium sports complex in Moscow where Melnichenko and Artem Torgashev trained.
“He’s the best technician in the world,” Torgashev said. “He is like a professor at graduate school. He knows what he’s doing. He’s got a method, and he’s very confident in what he says. So this is not his first day. He’s been coaching for 50 years. He’s seen a lot, and he knows how to get things from athletes. I don’t completely understand this method sometimes. But he knows how to get things from athletes, whether it’s to get them to react or get them to find a higher gear, to continue to push, or to build some resilience or to figure something out on their own, like he just knows how and when to push you.”
But Arutyunyan’s work with Torgashev was put on hold almost before it started. Shortly after deciding to relocate from Colorado Springs to Orange County, Torgashev injured his right foot, an injury that required ankle surgery and sidelined him for the 2020–21 and 2021–22 seasons and sent him into an emotional downward spiral where he thought about quitting daily.
“This was between summer of 2020, and summer of 2022,” he said. “It was like a two-year thought.
“I had moments (at the 2020 World Juniors) where it could have been great and I wasn’t, so in 2020 when I thought I could win the whole event, and I completely melted down, and it made no sense to me, considering what I was capable of. I think I had easier jumps than I can even do now, and I was smaller and lighter and it just didn’t work. So after that, after COVID, after getting on the ice and like tweaking my foot and then going to Raf and reworking my technique here, I was just kind of like, what am I doing? Just I got to a point here where every time I stepped on the ice, like my foot would just hurt, and I couldn’t skate, really. And then, as we were reworking technique, when things were feeling better, I could barely even do basic triples. And I just figured, what’s the point of all of this? Like I can just be a guy and go to school and start a career and a life? And so I was super serious about walking away. I just kind of didn’t see the point of all of this anymore.
“The only thing that stopped me from walking away, it’s a big decision, so lots of thought goes into it. The only thought that stopped me from closing the book on this was just thinking about the endless list of people that have believed in me and that have helped me and supported me, my parents that have taught me and invested in me, even my grandparents that just supported and helped. Even if I wasn’t going to do it for myself, I owed it to all of these people to completely see it through and completely seeing it through means achieving this year.”
Andrew Torgashev poses for a portrait after being named to the 2026 United States Figure Skating Olympic team at Enterprise Center on January 11, 2026 in St Louis, Missouri. (Photo by Jamie Squire/Getty Images)Torgashev didn’t see skating for others as an added burden. Instead, it gave him a sense of purpose, which only took on a greater importance when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
Skating for his grandparents
Torgashev has always been especially close to his maternal grandparents, Vladimir, 85, and Nina Melnichenko, 80, who lived with the family in Florida part-time when he was growing up. The Melnichenko later returned to their native Ukraine and live in Odesa on the Black Sea, the country’s largest and most important port. Torgashev has used his skating to raise awareness and funds for Ukraine.
Odesa has endured 800 air raid alarms a year. Last month as temperatures hovered below 20 degrees (fahrenheit), nearly a million residents were without power.
Torgashev was asked how his grandparents are doing.
“Surviving,” he said. “No electricity, they do their laundry at like, 4 in the morning, when the energy is working or when prices are cheaper.
“They have sirens all the time, no heat, so they’re in winter coats and blankets a lot. My grandparents, they’ve been through so much, so so much, the whole Soviet Union era. They’ve just been through so much, and they have to continue going through it. So just to be able to distract them with success for a moment, just it means the world to me that I’m able to do that for them.”
His success means perhaps even more to his grandparents.
“The biggest positive is our beloved grandson, Andrew,” Vladimir Melnichenko, the former head of the Ukrainian skating federation, wrote in an email to the Southern California News Group. “The war is a tragedy for the people of Ukraine, and Andrew is worried about us, just as we are in the heart of the war zone. But we are holding on and believe in victory. “
Their grandson’s distractions included a surprise third-place finish at the 2023 U.S. Championships, earning him a spot on the World Championships squad, and finishing second to Malinin at the 2025 U.S. Championships.
But he would also continue to struggle with nerves in big moments. At the World Championships last spring, he posted a personal best score in the short program to sit in eighth place going into the free skate. Instead of moving up in the standings, Torgashev’s free skate was a complete disaster, marked by two falls and a series of poor landings, dropping him to 22nd overall.
“Tough one,” he said. “It was tough, one traumatic event, I would say, you know, just, I think I was overcome by the moment. Just got tight. I didn’t allow my skating to flow, I was so tight and out of body for some reason. But I will say the training leading up to that was more like, I was more exhausted from the season already, just like, overheated, I would say, almost like a car. When you’re pushing it too fast for too long, it’ll just not perform as well.”
“It’s a lot, he’s a very emotional kid,” Ilona Melnichenko said. “You know some kids are different, he’s very emotional. He’s very he has good heart. He will never hurt his friends. He’s good kid. I can’t say anything. He’s good kid. He’s good friend. And I think he just, he’d just been through a lot.”
In the weeks leading up to the U.S. Championships, an emotional Torgashev left Arutyunyan exasperated.
“For a month before nationals, he kind of just ignored me,” Torgashev said. “I don’t know why, and if I was like, messing things up and getting frustrated on the ice, he even, wouldn’t help, like, kicked me off the ice once because I was, I mean, I was just like, having a horrible attitude, to be honest. So it was the right call, but he just made me figure it out myself. He made me take accountability for the technique that he had already taught me. Pretty much like to stop playing a victim and take ownership of my training and my technique, trust it what he’s taught me already.
“That was a recent example.
“I was frustrated, the same way, like a tennis player will break a racket. I’m not purposely trying to fall or pop on this jump, and for the life of me, I can’t figure out what I’m doing. And of course, as the Olympic trials get closer, I get more pressure and more overwhelmed. Just get more reactive.”
Becoming an Olympian
So he arrived in St. Louis for the U.S. Championships unable to sleep, physically and emotionally exhausted, finally sharing with Frazier in the light of day the fears that tormented him in his darkest moments.
“Yeah, I had trouble sleeping all week, trying to visualize the program, visualize the moment, you know, kind of a big moment, really a make or break performance,” Torgashev said, recalling his feelings and his conversation with Frazier before the U.S. Championships free skate. “Like either I accomplish my dreams or I don’t and I wait another four years for another try. So yeah, an important moment.
“How do I deal with that free skate and that whole competition, then I started to get nervous, like, what if? What if it’s not all sunshine and rainbows at the end of this? Because there’s a very real possibility that it doesn’t happen. I mean, so many people have this dream, and so little people actually lived it. So I started to think, what if I’m, what if it just remains a dream for me, and not a reality, right?
“And then it starts to get scary, because then you’re starting to think like, how am I going to live with myself? How am I going to skate another four years and try it again? I know Adam Rippon, he made the Olympics when he was 28, in spectacular fashion also. So he did it. And there’s some people that can do that, but not everybody. I don’t know how much longer I can skate and keep my life on pause. I don’t know.”
In Frazier, Torgashev found someone who had been down a similar path.
“It’s a journey, right?” Frazier said. “Like every person, no matter what career, discipline or athlete, has their own journey. They have their moments where it’s like make or break it, he’s experienced it and yeah, the beautiful part about our sport is your whole journey can be summed up in four minutes.
“His free program in that moment was a perfect black and white example that he had some great highs, great lows, injuries. He knew the potential he had. He had an expectation. He tried competing with that expectation throughout the last several years. Sometimes it works, sometimes it did not. At the end of the day, working with him this season, I just said, ‘The only way you’ll be able to accept not making a U.S. Olympic team is just trying everything in your power that you can do, and then, if you don’t, the cards that are dealt to you are dealt to you, but you have full control to play them, and you can sleep at night for the rest of your life and be just as proud as if you were to make an Olympic team.’ And he really just kind of bought into that ideology for the last several months. And yeah, it is scary. It’s, it’s, I did tell him too, I was like before the free program unfortunately, every athlete has to face a little bit of fear. You kind of see what you’re made of. And Andrew’s a very tough kid. He actually inspires me a lot myself to be better. And there’s moments where he does things that a lot of other people aren’t capable of doing. And I really had no doubt this season, last season too. I just was like, you have what it takes. I’ve seen him train when you’re (exhausted). Most athletes will go home and say, ‘I’m tired, I’m this, I’m that.’ He has a lot of ambition. And yeah, so I knew he has the quality and the skill of an Olympian, but in our sport, you do have to put it down in those exact critical moments. And when you do it, it is a beautiful thing.”
And it was. Torgashev nailed a quad toe jump just seconds into the program and then moments later landed a quad toe, double toe combination, and then he was off into the “skate of the season,” on his way to Milano Cortina.
“Yeah, it feels like the way we got there, yeah, everything just came together,” he said. “It was just feeling like I had a job to do and I was going to get it done.”
Andrew Torgashev competes during the men’s free skate competition at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, Saturday, Jan. 10, 2026, in St. Louis. (AP Photo/Chris Carlson)At the end of the program, the weight of the moment, the weight of a life spent bearing Olympic expectations, brought him to his knees. A moment where whether he would spend the rest of his life as Andrew Torgashev, Olympian, didn’t matter.
“I just put my heart out there,” he said.
Later, as Torgashev took a victory lap after the medal ceremony with Malinin and third-place finisher Maxim Naumov, he spotted Melnichenko on the sideboards and stopped. She handed him her cell phone. She was Facetiming her parents.
“We did it,” Torgashev shouted to his grandparents. “We did it!”
And so the journey continues to Milano Cortina, for Torgashev, for his family, for 16 days the Olympic flame distracting them from the smoldering ruins of Odesa.
“Defeat motivates, strengthens, increases efficiency, and leads to the desired result,” Vladimir Melnichenko said. “Andrew went through this path.”
He skates forward with a new freedom, no longer trying to keep up with a life of expectations but chasing a spirit.
“I’m trying to visualize what it would be like being there, but I have no idea,” he said. “I think it’s going to be awesome, to be honest. I just can’t wait to skate around and see the Olympic rings everywhere. I think once I see that, then it’ll really sink in that I’m an Olympian and competing at the Olympic Games right now. It’s like, it just feels like a good achievement, and like, I guess I earned myself a title to put on my resume, but it hasn’t really sunk in yet. I think once I get there and I step on that Olympic ice, it’s just that’s when it will sink in. It’s a dream come true, right?”
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