Isabeau Levito back from injury at figure skating worlds, recalling a perfect moment

NBC Sports

25-03-2025

Isabeau Levito still draws a beaming smile when asked about the 2024 World Championships, even though more recent months have been some of the most difficult of her figure skating career.
Levito, who between the ages of 13 and 15 won U.S. junior, world junior and U.S. senior titles, took silver at last March's senior worlds in Montreal, three weeks after her 17th birthday.
She matched the best U.S. women's finish at worlds since 2006 (when Kimmie Meissner won).
Levito stepped on the Bell Centre ice for that free skate 'overwhelmed and stressed.' When she finished her clutch four-minute program, she had an eye-popping look of astonishment.
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That all belied the confidence she developed in the prior two months, since falling three times in her 2024 U.S. Championships free skate (she ended up third in defense of her 2023 national title).
'I really locked into my training like a machine,' she said last week. 'I just drilled into it, and then by the time I got to worlds, everything was like breathing to me. My programs were just like tracing the back of my hand.'
Levito placed the silver medal on a shoulder-level shelf on her New Jersey bedroom wall. 'You could just see it all the time,' she said. 'It was always looking at you.'
This week's World Championships in Boston will mark the first time she'll skate injury-free in a top-level competition since last year's worlds.
'I'm not going into this worlds thinking I have to podium. I have to be like last year. I have to do better,' Levito said. 'I barely have been able to skate this season, barely been able to compete this season. So I'm just glad that I'm competing again and that I'm in shape again.'
She began feeling right foot pain in practices leading up to last October's Skate America, the first event of the fall Grand Prix Series.
She skated through it to place third, then underwent an MRI and learned it was a bone injury. A stress reaction. She withdrew from her second Grand Prix event in November.
In all, Levito spent most of three months off the ice and some of it in a boot. She would take three weeks off, try to come back and have to stop again. The cycle repeated.
She filled the time with pre-calculus, psychology, economics and chemistry, working on her senior year of online schoolwork.
It was the longest she had ever been sidelined by injury, 'and the hardest to come back from,' she said.
Levito withdrew one week before January's U.S. Championships. Then the week of nationals, she was able to do a single Lutz without pain.
A U.S. Figure Skating committee put her on the three-woman team for worlds, pending she show readiness closer to the competition.
So Levito flew to Milan — her mother's hometown and where her grandmother still lives — and competed in the 2026 Olympic test event from Feb. 19-20.
Levito estimated she skated 'at 50%" there. She had done just one free skate run-through in practice before performing it in front of an audience and judges in Italy.
Still, Levito got the job done with her runner-up finish, showing enough progress with her triple jumps to secure her spot in Boston.
'Especially my free program, I was very fatigued from the get-go,' she said. 'Some of my friends from Bergamo that were in the stands were like, 'Girl, you were fighting from start to finish. We saw you fighting.'
'If I didn't know myself so well, I would have been nervous, like, oh my god, am I going to land the triples in the second half? Because it's the free program, and I haven't run it many times. But knowing myself, I would never let that happen. Never let myself go down in competition like that because I'm tired.'
Levito started feeling like herself again two weeks ago. Last Tuesday, she said her coaches would probably assess her readiness at 85%.
'She's looking OK. She's looking good right now,' Yulia Kuznetsova, her coach since age 4, said last Thursday. 'I don't want to make any predictions or any promises because Isabeau did miss three months of skating.'
Levito's silver medal from 2024 is no longer on the shelf. She — and the medal — moved to a new room in her house.
'Sometimes I try to think of what I was thinking before that (2024 Worlds) free program,' she said. 'I have no idea. I just felt like I wasn't even thinking the whole program. But before I knew it, it was done, and I had done it so well, and it was just completely because of the training.
'It just felt so right, and it was just such a high moment in my life. It was so perfect.'