Kaitlyn Weaver (and other skaters) share "coming out stories" - Pride Month 2021
Posted: Fri Jun 11, 2021 12:54 pm
From: https://www.cbc.ca/sports/olympics/wint ... -1.6061918
Kaitlyn Weaver hopes her coming out story finally breaks figure skating's female archetype
It's a sport laced with creativity, beauty and strength. Ice dance is poetry in motion, two skaters weaving gracefully across the ice surface together as one. Their precision and symmetry is something to marvel over.
But figure skating is also littered with judgment — an international panel of judges scouring over every little detail, then providing their score.
It was that suffocating weight of knowing she was being watched every second that kept Canadian ice dancer Kailtyn Weaver hiding what she calls her little secret.
But now, two years after leaving competitive figure skating, Weaver is tired of doing the dance and keeping up the facade just to be accepted in the sport she loves.
On Friday, the 32-year-old became one of the few Olympic female figure skater to publicly identify as queer.
"I've reached the point of not wanting to pretend anymore. It really weighed on my mental health to hide consistently a part of who I am," Weaver told CBC Sports in an exclusive interview. "I feel like it's the right time in my life to share that I identify as a queer woman.
