Andrew Torgashev, the boy wonder now a scarred and seasoned 23, will step to center ice at the World Figure Skating Championships in Boston Saturday night for the free skate and a hard-earned moment that has seemed both a given and elusive at different stages of his star-crossed career.
Torgashev will skate to “Scheherazade.” It is a fitting piece of music, written in 1888 by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, another child prodigy, who envisioned the piece as a series of “fairytale wonders.”
Torgashev in the program skates through a series of obstacles to rescue a damsel in distress.
“I’m the one that keeps fighting for her when I’m skating my program,” he said. “I feel like I’m the one for fighting for her. It doesn’t feel like I’m fighting for somebody. It feels like I’m fighting for myself and my career and all of these things. …”
Torgashev stops as if in need of catching his breath before recounting a resume equal parts promise and heartbreak.
He was just 13 when he won the U.S. Junior Championship title in 2015 setting competition records for free skate and overall scores. The son of Soviet skating stars, he seemed destined to be an Olympian only to have his career run off the road by a series of major injuries. Torgashev’s career only got back on track after he realized in November 2019 he was old enough to take the wheel.
“I never wanted to be this kind of aspiring Olympic hopeful when I was 13, and then never have it pan out,” Torgashev said. “So that would have been a disappointment. I haven’t made the Olympic team yet, so it would still be, I don’t know it’s, it feels good now that even when I actually think back to when I was young, there was a lot more people involved in my skating, whether it’s my parents that pushed me every single day or other coaches that were helping out and giving their advice.
“Now it feels like I’m driving my bus, I have like, I’m the one in control, and it’s a great sense of responsibility. And when things turn out, well, it’s a great accomplishment. But every single day, going into training, I’m the one that has to push myself to be the best I can. There’s nobody that’s demanding that of myself other than me.”
Torgashev’s decision to relocate from Colorado Springs where he trained under his longtime coach Christy Krall to be coached by Rafael Arutyunyan, coach of Olympic champion Nathan Chen and five-time world champion Michelle Kwan, at the Great Park Ice in Irvine was both liberating and scary.
But the move has resulted in Torgashev’s best season to date. He picked up a bronze medal at the Grand Prix de France last fall and then finished fourth at the NHK Trophy in Japan, another ISU Grand Prix event, only a few days later. Torgashev was runner-up at the U.S. Championships in Wichita in January, up a spot his third-place finish at the 2023 U.S. Championships in San Jose, where he was one of the biggest surprises of the competition, the teenage sensation turned cautionary tale returning to the spotlight.
“I think San Jose was very like, I just had a low bar for myself and just wanted to enjoy the experience,” Torgashev said. “And Wichita, I felt much more complete going into it, even starting with the off-season, training leading into the season, it felt much more organized and purposeful.
“Throughout the fall international season felt very purposeful, and this nationals just felt like I was going there to do a job versus San Jose was I was just gonna try my best and hope for the best, really.”
It is with that sense of purpose that Torgashev is taking aim at a top 10 finish at Worlds and a spot on the U.S. Olympic team at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan.
“It’s validating to all the work that I’ve put in, you know, France, getting the medal in France, that was a great accomplishment, but that’s just the way the cards played out in that competition,” he said. “And going into Japan right after it, you know, I wasn’t expecting to even go to Japan. So to compete with some of the world’s best and place, you know, pretty competitive, but competitively amongst them, that was really reassuring, and it’s just building confidence in myself, building trust in myself and validating my training process.
“I’m a very realistic person, so I won’t try to falsely give myself confidence. If I have confidence in myself, it means that I’ve earned it for myself through all the injuries, through all of the rough skates and all through my junior career, some in my senior career as well. You know it’s, it’s tough to keep standing up when you’ve been knocked down like that. But it’s just, I think it’s sport in general, you find a way to push through, and you just have to find a way to get it done. If you really want to.”
And Torgashev has had a lot to overcome.
He started skating as a small boy at the Coral Springs, Florida, rink where his parents coached. His mother, Ilona Melnichenko was a world junior champion ice dancer. His father, Artem Torgashev, was a two-time world junior pairs skater.
He won the 2015 U.S. junior title despite being the youngest skater in the field and then went on to place 10th at the World Junior Championships. Only three months later he fractured his ankle attempting a quad toe loop, an injury that kept him out of the 2015-16 season.
Later he would fracture his toe. But the low point came when he injured his right foot shortly after deciding to relocate from Colorado Springs to Orange County.
“That was a doozy of an injury,” Torgashev said of an injury that sidelined him for two seasons.
“It was something that persisted with pain for about two years,” he said. “And also just those two years were from 18 to 20 years old. So I was trying to also figure out, you know, living out in California on my own, living as an adult for the first time. So there was just lots of things going on, as well as pain. And it took me a couple years to really figure it out.”
He was asked how close he was to quitting the sport during that period.
“Very close. You know, it’s, yeah, really close,” he said. “It was a low point.
“I would probably have been here for a year in Irvine with rough, you know, pain is still persisting. My skating isn’t getting better. I’m getting older. My body’s getting older. And, you know, I just have to be realistic, like, ‘What are my chances of actually finding success in this sport?’ And I think if I was ready to lay it down and go pursue school or business, something else that would have been more worth my time. But looking back to my parents, all the people that had supported me throughout the years, whether it’s officials, coaches, medical staff, everybody that had given me their 100% throughout my skating career, I couldn’t just lay it down without giving it my all, and I felt like it was too soon to say that I had gave it my all, and that’s really what it came down to. I just didn’t want to let everybody down that had ever helped me.”
He was also haunted by past expectations.
“In the back of my mind somewhere, I remember when I was 13, like there was a lot of talk that I could be really great,” Torgashev said. “And again, got injured when I was 14, and that sent me on a different journey, while watching, for example, like Nathan Chen and (Olympic medalist) Vincent Zhou, who were around the same age, and they were on a completely different track of success than I was on at the time. So that was definitely frustrating, because that’s where I wanted to be, and I just wasn’t there.”
Torgashev finally got “there” at the 2023 U.S. Championships, placing third and finishing with the top free skate score in his first major competition in 25 months.
“Surreal,” he said.
Staying at a world-class level comes with a world-class price tag. Torgashev estimates it will cost $80,000 this year to chase in Olympic dream.
“Finances are a huge part of this whole journey,” he said. “It’s honestly probably one of the biggest hurdles that I’m coming across right now, time and time again, and my parents do their best to help me. I coach. And you know, in right now, I’m not coaching as much because I have to give all of my energy to skating and high-level performance. But in the off-season, I can coach four hours and train three hours, and it just makes for really long days. I don’t know how other people really, like, provide for themselves in this sport, because finances are huge, and I would love to find some kind of sponsorship or something that helped me through the Olympic season. And you know, I guess I’m gaining some kind of media attention. I’m gaining some kind of consistency and goodwill in the skating world, so I would just love to be able to capitalize on that and have some kind of relationship with the business that can help me out with training into the Olympic season.”
For now, Torgashev will focus on landing a fairytale ending in Boston.
Korsakov’s work has a record of delivering just that on the ice.
South Korea’s Yuna Kim skated the piece in her record-shattering win at the 2009 World Championships and it provided the soundtrack to Evan Lysacek’s Olympic triumph a year later. Charlie White and Meryl Davis won the 2014 Olympic ice dancing gold medal to “Scheherazade.”
“Honestly, I had no idea,” Torgashev said after learning the music’s skating history. “But now that you say that, I need to maybe watch some of those programs.”