After over two years of waiting, Vincent Zhou ’25.5 finally got his gold medal.
“What a way to cap off this whole saga,” Zhou said in an interview with The Herald.
Earlier this year, the International Skating Union imposed a four-year sanction on Russian skater Kamila Valieva, who had competed in the 2022 Olympics Team Event, for anti-doping violations. Her disqualification resulted in the Russian Olympic Committee, who had placed first, dropping to third.
As previously reported by The Herald, the ISU subsequently declared Team U.S.A. and Team Japan as the rightful first- and second-place winners. But it wasn’t until the Paris Olympics — two and a half years after the initial games — that the athletes finally received their medals.
Zhou has since emerged as a vocal proponent of clean sport. In an open letter published last year, he criticized the lack of transparency surrounding medal reallocations and Valieva’s court proceedings.
“In the last two years, at many times, it’s felt like it’s just been me against the world,” Zhou said. “Is no one else willing to speak out… to stand up for the good of sports?”
The tumultuous aftermath follows his own bittersweet experience at the Olympics. Shortly before the men’s singles event, Zhou tested positive for COVID-19 and had to withdraw from competition.
It felt symbolic, then, when Team U.S.A. asked Zhou to lead the group onstage for the medal ceremony.
“I was like, whoa. This is really scary. What if I walk the wrong way?” Zhou joked. He had anticipated that someone else — one of the ice dancers or men’s singles gold medalist Nathan Chen — would be leading the procession instead.
But he “owned the role” nonetheless, walking out to a cheering crowd with the Eiffel Tower in the landscape. “It was very emotional for everyone,” Zhou said.
So now that Zhou has finally received the gold medal, what’s next?
Zhou is enthusiastic about skating shows, but has largely ruled out a competitive comeback. He is focusing on fulfilling requirements for his economics concentration this year, and hopes to make time for creative endeavors — like his poetry Instagram account — amid all the work.
He talks about his future with excitement, but can’t help if some trepidation seeps through.
“I’ve got less than one and a half years in school now, (and) then I’m going to be in the workforce. That’s crazy,” said Zhou. “People that I grew up skating with… they’re getting engaged, getting married, they’re having kids.”
Though he was grateful to reunite with his figure skating family in Paris, he noted the “mutual understanding that … we’re no longer the same people that we were two years ago.”
“I’m almost afraid nothing will ever capture the magic and the essence of our shared experience in the 2022 season,” Zhou said. “Life comes at you so fast … I don’t think people ever feel prepared for that sort of change.”
Figure skating has undergone a lot of change, too. Skaters like Ilia Malinin, who in 2022 debuted the first quadruple axel, have pushed the sport’s technical boundaries in radical ways. Zhou himself is part of this evolution, being the first person to land a quadruple lutz at the 2018 Olympics.
“My experience with the rigors of training extremely difficult jumps has been a constant push and pull,” Zhou said. “I want to train more because I want to get better, but at the amount I am training at, I already have chronic pains (and) injuries.”
In recent years, competitive skating has increasingly prioritized technical achievements — how many quadruples you can perform in a program, for example — over performance and interpretation. This philosophy was partly responsible for Valieva’s rapid rise and fall: Her skating school allegedly trains young girls to accomplish groundbreaking jumps at the expense of wellbeing, skating technique and, seemingly, clean sport.
“Figure skating is inherently a balance between the two,” said Zhou. He expressed worry for young skaters who overextend themselves, emphasizing that though technical progress is important to figure skating, artistry is equally vital.
At 12 years old, Zhou underwent a knee surgery that kept him out of competition for two seasons. “I’ve been playing catch up (ever since). Nothing was ever the same again,” he said.
“If I had to go back and tell my former self one thing, it would just be ‘take care of your knee,’” Zhou added. “You don’t need to sacrifice so much potential for an extra bit of practice.”
For Zhou, the changes need to start at an institutional level. “It’s common knowledge in skating that once you do quads, your (performance scores) magically start going up,” he said.
Zhou stressed the importance of matching actions to words: It’s one thing to speak about positive change, but it’s another to have judges, coaches and governing bodies actualize it.
Amid all the uncertainty, Zhou appears most sure of himself when discussing his long-term dream: founding and running a skating school.
He explains that he wants to open a skating school to “address all the pain points and issues” he’s struggled with throughout his career, including finding a good physical therapist to trust, identifying good and bad technique and navigating the financial struggles of not being able to afford skating. Zhou has also been open about his mental health struggles in the past, and hopes to wield his experiences as a tool for positive change.
“I want to be able to help (skaters) remove (barriers) and help them focus on … becoming the best athlete and student and scholar that they can,” he continued.
According to Zhou, figure skaters tend to retire earlier than other athletes. Though physical decline is a major component of this decision, it’s not the only one, he added.
“Once you hit a certain age where life starts to pick up more, your priorities start to shift,” Zhou explained. From a young age, figure skating requires an immense amount of time, energy, effort and money.
The end of this Olympic saga, it seems, also marks Zhou’s soft competitive retirement.
“I’m not ruling out a comeback, but I’d say it’s pretty unlikely,” he said.
It’s easy to look at Zhou’s career history and describe it as events that have happened to him: his knee surgery, his withdrawal from the Olympics and his postponed medal ceremony. But he’s turned his obstacles into accomplishments, and his failures into testaments.
Figure skating will continue to change in the next few years, with discussions about increasing senior category age limits to prevent athlete burnout and skaters like Ilia Malinin continuing to push technical boundaries. Like figure skating itself, Zhou plans to evolve, retool and accomplish new things in the coming years.
But from that stage in Paris, he can finally take with him the long-deserved prize of an accomplishment worth celebrating.
Megan is a Senior Staff Writer covering community and activism in Providence. Born and raised in Hong Kong, she spends her free time drinking coffee and wishing she was Meg Ryan in a Nora Ephron movie.
