Alexander: Spencer Howe’s journey from the skating rink to the Army to the Olympics ...Middle East

For Spencer Howe, the road to the Winter Olympics began in a chilly ice rink, which is normal.

That rink was in Burbank, a little less usual but not that unprecedented. And it developed because he wanted to take after his older sister.

That road has taken him to Italy, where the Milano Cortina Olympic Winter Games begin with Friday’s opening ceremony. Howe, now a U.S. Army private who is part of the military’s World Class Athlete Program, and partner Emily Chan will compete in pairs skating, after they rebounded from a fall in the short program of the national championships last month in St. Louis to finish third, their fourth medal in nationals competition, and make the Olympic team.

Sometimes the road winds in a direction you least expect.

“I did a bunch of other sports growing up,” Howe recalled in a recent video interview. “I was in Little League baseball, (kids) basketball. I did gymnastics. I even played hockey before I figure skated, ironically.

“My sister was a skater. She started skating when she was three or four years old and she’s about three years older than me. So as she got more serious and fell in love with the sport, I was always doing all these other sports and kind of growing up at the rinks, messing around with a lot of the other brothers of sisters who skated.”

And at some point, around the time he turned 10, he decided he wanted to try figure skating as well. But when he asked his mother she said no. Too expensive.

“I kept begging her and begging her,” the 29-year-old Burbank native said. “And finally I rummaged through my sister’s closet and I found a pair of her old white female skates. And I tied them up and I ran down the stairs and I was like, ‘Look, mom, these skates fit me. Can I go skate now?’ “

It must have had an impact. She relented, had the skates dyed black and enrolled Spencer in the “learn to skate” class.

“And from there the rest was history,” he said.

His “learn to skate” coach, Wendy Olson, mentored him as he moved up the ranks as a single skater. She still coaches skaters at what is now L.A. Kings Ice at Pickwick Gardens in Burbank.

“He started in, like, 2007,” she recalled this week. “(In) 2009 he made it to his first Nationals (in the junior division). He was second that year in Lake Placid. And I remember he was second intermediate and then he placed third in Nationals in 2012.

“Basically, once you can do (triple jumps) you’ve conquered one goal. And he seemed to be able to get the triples, not easy but pretty fast. Got his double axel pretty fast.”

He reached Junior Nationals every year but one, she said, which he missed because of a back injury. Later, he was dealing with shoulder issues – which ultimately required surgery – and he was off the ice for “about six months,” he said, extending into 2019. Around the time he was starting to skate again, Chan reached out to him about doing a tryout to determine if they might be compatible in pair skating.

“Honestly, because of the condition of my shoulder, I did not want to have a tryout,” he said. “I told my mom, and she thought it was a really good opportunity because we knew that Emily was a really good skater. And eventually I started getting calls from the federation saying that I should go try out. Once those other entities got involved, I realized, ‘All right, I’m gonna have to at least go for three days and try out with this girl.’”

That process usually is a few days or a week to start, and “if it’s a green light it most likely is extended to two weeks,” Chan said. “And then they (might) decide, ‘All right, it feels pretty good, let’s get together.’ And then from there it takes additional time to kind of mesh together and to feel each other’s kind of skating style out and being able to kind work together as one, because that’s the idea of pairs …  Instead of two individual people kind of just skating next to each other, it’s more of a unit.”

What caught her eye?

“I knew him as a single skater, actually, because we both competed at the same competition,” said Chan, 28, from Texas. “I always liked his extensions and how he emoted. … Our skating style and body line was very similar,  which is something that is special about us and that we continue to carry today.”

Both agreed that one of the most difficult transitions from singles to pairs is the realization that you have to be able to skate as one.

“You really become a multi-tasker when you’re a pair skater, because you’re always having to be aware of the other person that’s skating right next to you,” Howe said.

After the two decided they could make it as a team, Howe said, he relocated to Texas, where the two trained for a year before relocating again, to the Skating Club of Boston.

It was there that Howe became friends with skater Maxim Naumov, whose parents, former pairs world champions Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov, were coaches.

And Howe was there to comfort his friend last January, after reports of a collision between a passenger jet and a U.S. Army helicopter in Washington, D.C. The 67 passengers who were killed included Vadim Naumov’s parents, among many on the plane who were members of the skating community and were returning from the 2025 Nationals in Wichita, Kan.

After an extended period of grief, Naumov began skating again. He, too, will compete in these Olympics.

Howe will be representing his country in multiple ways. Away from the rink, he is Pvt. Spencer Howe, an auto transport operator serving in the Vermont National Guard – an active duty soldier, but one who is assigned “to compete and represent the army in my sport,” he said, as a member of the WCAP unit. He learned about the program while he was at the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Training Center in Colorado Springs in 2024 while recovering from his shoulder surgery.

“My roommate across from me was a track and field runner who was previously in the WCAP program,” he said. “I was pretty shocked. I was like, ‘Wait – you can serve your country and be in the Army and do your sport?’ My mind was blown. I remember just asking him a million questions … and after having a couple of conversations with him, for me I just knew, ‘Oh, wow, this is definitely something I would like to do.’”

He enlisted in 2025, and his current platoon sergeant is an Olympic biathlete. He said he has a remote duty station in Norwood, Mass., and is subject to reporting to Fort Carson, just outside Colorado Springs, where the WCAP unit is stationed. He will re-enlist when his active duty contract is up in 2029, with the intention of staying in the Army and becoming a chaplain.

In the meantime, he’ll be representing his country, and the Army, in a different venue. That background made a difference at Nationals, as it turned out, when Chan’s fall in the short program put the pair behind.

“I really just had my soldier attitude on, which was no matter what the circumstances, you have a job to do,” Howe said. “And that’s kind of what I was telling Emily throughout the competition as well.”

It worked.

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