Adam Rippon Says Figure Skaters Can Spend Up to $120K a Year on All That's Required to Compete
Competing on the world stage isn’t cheap for figure skaters.
In a new interview with USA Today, former Olympian Adam Rippon got candid about the yearly cost of being a figure skater, revealing that it’s all quite costly.
Going through a checklist, Rippon admitted first that “the ice time can be about $1,000 a month.”
“The coaching can be anywhere between $1,000 and $3,000 a month, give or take a few $10,000,” Rippon, 29, continued. “A skating coach on the elite level can be anywhere between $80 and $140 an hour. It’s like the cost of a massage, every day. Only instead of getting a massage, you get yelled at.”
Rippon — who won a bronze Olympic medal with Team USA in 2018 — said, “Then you have programs. To work with a choreographer, the cheapest program I ever had done was $3,500. On the most expensive side of that, you can get a program done and it costs $10,000.”
The former athlete explained that figure skaters have two programs in a year.
Then comes the costumes: “Every costume is about $2,000 because they’re all custom-made,” he told USA Today.
“Skates, if you get to an elite level, you can get sponsored through them,” he explained. “Which a sponsorship basically just means free boots. But if you were to buy them outright, the boot is $500, and the blade is $500 or $600. So you’re looking at an $1,100 shoe.”
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The grand total? Between and [$70,000] and $120,000 a year for a skater.
And, noted Rippon, “Unless you’re in that top six in the world, you aren’t breaking even … then you need to do competitions [for prize money].”
Rippon just released a new memoir Beautiful on the Outside, and opened up to PEOPLE Now about the process, explaining, “It was harder than I thought.”
“You know, because I’ve like, written an e-mail and a text message that felt like a book. … I’m really grateful I went through the whole process, because not being a competitive athlete anymore, I feel like a lot of people don’t talk about that transition.”
