2026 has been the year of ice sports. I mean, it's a bit obvious, we started the year with Heated Rivalry at the peak of its popularity, but also the Milano Cortina Olympics brought us a new set of iconic athletes to obsess over.

Personally, my favourite celebrity from an ice sport is Gritty. It's proof that mascots are a totally worthy investment for sports teams, because I only just started watching NHL and I could choose any team to support and I chose the most mid team ever because their mascot makes me laugh.

In all fairness, what is the competition in the NHL? Every single athlete sucks. I can't think of a single sport where that amount of racism, misogyny, homophobia, and general bigotry is more normalised, and thanks to the toxicity of the fans, encouraged. Because of this my favourite player is Ilya Bryzgalov, because the main thing he's known for is being confused why people have to be mad when it's only a game.

I can't talk about ice sports or the Milano Cortina without bringing up just how big figure skating got with the help of Alysa Liu and Amber Glenn. I really admire the new crop of figure skaters who are showing that you don't need to sell your soul or ruin your body (and not to mention body image...) to be successful. And as Connor Storrie famously said on SNL, "as that ice skating girl with the striped hair taught us, you can still be a baddie, even if you’re a little quirked up."

That being said, my main hyperfixation within ice sports don't come from Milano Cortina, but instead from ice dance performances from other years. My favourite, like many people, is Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir's performance to Moulin Rouge.

Okay, I know that any single person who knows anything about ice dance can tell you that chemistry isn't important so long as the skills are intact. In fact, I think this is incredibly true given the absolute snub of Maia and Alex Shibutani, a sibling pair that were denied a silver medal due to (or at least speculated to be due to) the 'lack of chemistry'. If you watch their performance it's very obvious that their skills are just as good as any pair but since they don't look at each other like they're seconds away from putting their tongues in each other's mouths, they're not as good to watch apparently? Which isn't true at all, that is one of my favourite performances to watch.

However... are you seriously telling me that Virtue and Moir are married... to different people??? The digital grapevine has informed me that apparently they did date and it made them worse skaters so they decided to stay friends, which is some Romeo & Juliet ass shit. No wonder they performed to Moulin Rouge and had that level of angst. I can't verify the truth of that claim but it definitely feels very accurate.

However, they unfortunately do not hold a tooth to Aljona Savchenko and Bruno Massot's performance at Pyeongchang 2018, which they won gold for. It's hard to compare them to the other performances I like because pairs skating is a different discipline to ice dance, but it's still obvious that they are so unbelievably talented. A common thing I notice as I've become obsessed with figure skating is that there's only so many legal moves that a skater can perform and after a while it becomes repetitive when everyone can do them. But what they did in that performance, it is going to take many years before that level of performance becomes the standard. Hoooooooly shit.