When Ting Cui spoke of her senior debut at the 2019 U.S. Figure Skating Championships, the 22-year-old laughed wistfully: “2019 — literally the peak of my career.”

She was just 16. Her fifth-place finish earned her prestigious international assignments, including a trip to the 2019 World Junior Championships, where she shared a podium with Anna Shcherbakova and Alexandra “Sasha” Trusova, who went on to place 1-2 at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.

Cui had long dreamed of competing in those Olympics, partly because her mother is from the area. But in February 2022 Cui was nowhere near Beijing. Instead, she’d moved into a dorm in rural Vermont. Cui had packed her skates, but she wasn’t sure how much she’d use them as a freshman at Middlebury College. After her promising career was derailed by repeated injuries, Cui figured she might just visit the campus rink for fun.

Next week, though, Cui will return to the U.S. Championships for the third time in her senior career. She last competed at nationals in 2023, when she surprised herself by qualifying during her freshman year at Middlebury. Now she’s surprised herself again by qualifying for nationals, this time earning her spot by winning the 2025 Eastern Sectional singles final.

“Having been at really high levels of training, I knew the intensity that it took and I just didn’t feel like I physically could match that with the amount of time I had at college. So it was a little surprising for me too, I’m not going to lie,” Cui said, sitting at Croustille Café in Pikesville, where she grew up and where her parents have run a hibachi/sushi restaurant, Ginza, for 25 years.

“I want to see more longevity in this sport. I’m skating for me now, and I’m skating for my personal goals, but there’s also a little part of me that’s skating to show that you can still be.”

Ting Cui

Cui is one of 17 senior women who will compete in Wichita, Kansas, for the national title. She’s got an ambitious seven-triple-jump free skate planned. She’s training with Tatiana Malinina and Roman Skorniakov, parents of current world champion Ilia Malinin. It sounds like she hasn’t missed a beat, let alone a year at nationals. But Cui returns a very different competitor than she was during her 2019 senior debut. She’s explored the world outside of skating. She’s older, wiser. And this time she’s taking nothing for granted.

Cui took to the ice at age 7, when her parents, Lily and Larry Cui, enrolled her in a summer skating camp. She grew up training with Chris Conte at Ice World in Abington and competing on behalf of the Baltimore Figure Skating Club. When she was 15, Cui partially relocated to Colorado Springs, Colorado, to train with Tom Zakrajsek, who coached skaters at the 2010, 2018, and 2022 Olympic Games.

There, Cui lived on her own at the Olympic Training Center and flew back and forth to Baltimore to finish at Towson High School. It was during Cui’s two years in Colorado that her skating caught the national eye — and mine.

I watched Cui’s 2019 breakout performance at Little Caesars Arena in Detroit. My sister and I have a childhood friend who, at the time, lived just a mile from the arena, so we settled on a January visit to Detroit to attend nationals for the first time. We shuttled between cozy cocktail bars and the arena, where we watched 13-year-old phenom Alysa Liu. We watched Tara Lipinski hug Liu, congratulating the tiny girl who’d just broken her long-held record as the youngest U.S. women’s champion (Lipinski was 14 in 1997).

That women’s free skate was a stunning event. My sister, Tara, friend Peggy and I were especially enchanted by the young woman who placed fifth. The three of us grew up in ballet, and we liked skaters who clearly had done the same.

Cui, then 16, mesmerized in her free skate to “Giselle,” placing third after a disappointing 12th in the short program. I captured the moment on Instagram. The video board shows Cui with her hands clasped over her mouth in disbelief. In the foreground, a man applauds in silhouette against the ice. He was one of many people standing, cheering for the determined, graceful girl from Baltimore. It felt like I’d just glimpsed an athlete destined to become an essential part of U.S. figure skating.

Six weeks later, a photo of Cui sharing the junior world podium with the future Olympic gold and silver medal winners Shcherbakova and Trusova suggested the same. Did the United States finally have a skater who could keep up with the Russians? It’d been 17 years since an American woman had won Olympic gold (Sarah Hughes in 2002).

Russian women topped the Olympic podiums in 2014 and 2018, and by late 2018 Trusova had become the first female skater to land a quadruple jump in competition. At the time, Cui spoke of her ambition to complete quads and was training for the triple axel.

Just after junior worlds, while practicing her triple axel on a jumping harness, Cui landed on the top of her foot and suffered three torn ligaments, a fracture and bone bruising. It was her first significant skating injury.

“It was OK because I’d never done this before,” Cui said, noting that her attitude was to “take it as a new experience and a journey.”

Rehab took six months, and Cui showed up to Champs Camp — an annual training camp designed to help elite U.S. skaters showcase their programs before competing internationally — and performed well. She was set to debut on the senior Grand Prix circuit, where United States Figure Skating had assigned her to competitions in France and Japan. But, just before an early-season competition in Finland, Cui fell again, this time while practicing rotations off ice. She’d broken the same ankle.

“After that, my mental health took a massive dip because I had worked so hard recovering from the first one,” Cui said. “The thought of having to do all that over again in the best season of my career too and having to miss out on everything I had earned myself — that was really frustrating.”

Soon after, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Cui said it made things both better and worse.

“Better because I felt like, well, the whole world is on pause. Maybe I have the time to actually rehab,” she said. “But then worse because I, like everyone, was isolated.”

Cui was home with her parents, who she said were also feeling the “brunt of the injury” because behind all of her own hard work was “their investment and sacrifice.” Cui pressured herself to rehab faster, but each time she tried to come back too soon she rolled or sprained her ankle again.

During that time, Cui said, some underlying, disorder-like behaviors turned into a full-blown eating disorder.

“I went through different eating disorders and different phases,” she said. She was operating with the mindset that her “body looking aesthetically pleasing [was] good for the sport” and that “the lighter I am, the better jumper I am.” But not eating was delaying her recovery from injury, Cui said.

Even as the world stood still, and major international competitions halted, the thrum of time ate at Cui. In a sport in which the youngest champions are heralded, the passage of time can be torture.

“There’s such an emphasis on being young and making it — I can’t tell you how much anxiety I had over this. I remember being like 13, or 12, and crying over a girl who was also 12, or maybe 13, and being like, ‘She is so much better than me,’ ” Cui said.

Cui grew up hearing people talk about age 18 as an “expiration date.” When she reflected on the years following her 2019 debut, she rattled off a list, “Injury, mental health, depressed, anxious, eating disorder, college.”

Thankfully, conversations with an old skating friend cut through Cui’s isolation and helped her realize she was not alone in having disordered eating post-injury. “Being able to talk to her for the first time about it in such an open way — that kind of started the mental recovery,” Cui said.

After leaving Colorado, Cui trained with Roland Burghart at the Patriot Ice Center in Newark, Delaware. “She is one of the best [students] I have ever worked with,” Burghart said. “Her work ethic is phenomenal.”

Burghart helped Cui focus on the mental aspects of training. “I tried to get her really hooked on meditation and different breathing exercises to keep herself calm,” he said.

In February 2022, Cui entered college.

“College started, and I’m rethinking my life, and had a bit of a crisis, just wondering where I was at with everything and whether or not I wanted to continue skating at all,” she said. “But then I decided to continue skating, period, so I started college, and I just was skating around for fun at the rink, and I was like, ‘Hey, I still kind of really love it.’ So then qualifying [for nationals] that year was really significant to just show myself, ‘Oh, I can still kind of do this.’ ”

Middlebury has a seasonal rink on campus that operates October through March. There, Cui and a friend co-founded Middlebury’s collegiate skating team, which she’s instrumental in running due to her competitive experience.

In January 2024, Cui enrolled in American University’s Washington Semester Program. As a political science major, Cui knew she had to try out life in D.C. to see if she might one day want to live there. And moving there brought a definitive answer to the unsettled question of Cui’s coaching team. After several years away, Cui felt ready to return to an intensive training center.

During her Washington semester, Cui shared the ice in Reston, Virginia, with Malinin, the kid who lived up to his self-styled “Quadg0d” by landing the first quadruple axel in competition. Last summer, Cui asked Malinina and Skorniakov to serve as her head coaches. They’re a coaching pair who the skating world is newly intrigued by due to their wunderkind son.

But for Cui they were familiar faces. She and Malinin had grown up competing at South Atlantic Regionals, so Malinina and Skorniakov “watched me grow up in a sense,” Cui said.

Cui repeatedly sang their praises. “I found myself super excited because I felt I was still learning about the sport, like jump technique, which felt kind of rare, especially being in a sport so long. I thought I had really experienced all of it, you know. I didn’t know what more could be said about a lutz.”

Training in Virginia? College in rural Vermont? Cui is making it work, even if it means sharing ice time with Middlebury hockey players and meeting virtually with her coaches when she’s at school.

“Most of the time [on the ice at Middlebury] I’m alone, which is super isolating,” she said. “But then other times I’ll literally be sharing the ice with hockey players who are trying to get extra practice in.”

This month, leading up to nationals, Cui stayed with a family friend near Reston, where she’s training with Malinin and two other skaters who are headed to nationals. Last Sunday, during one of her weekends home in Baltimore, Cui skated in the Baltimore Figure Skating Club’s nationals send-off, a dress rehearsal for the home crowd.

Besides training for nationals, Cui is spending her winter term interning with Run on Climate, a Vermont-based organization with which she’s working to develop climate policy at the local level (with a particular focus on electric vehicle charging infrastructure).

During her Washington semester, Cui explored her interest in journalism, interning with Weiner Public News as a policy analyst and writer. She’s currently the sports editor for The Middlebury Campus, her school paper. She feels her interests might be homing in on law, which she got a taste of interning with Baltimore-based immigration firm Berlin & Associates.

As Cui returns to the U.S. championships as a 22-year-old — four years past the expiration date that once seemed to loom — she said she’s proud to bring something to the sport that younger skaters aren’t used to seeing: college students skating competitively.

And, while Cui once felt like a “grandma” competing as a college student, she’s been reconsidering the word. The reigning champion, Amber Glenn, is 25.

“I want to see more longevity in this sport. I’m skating for me now, and I’m skating for my personal goals, but there’s also a little part of me that’s skating to show that you can still be,” Cui said.

Patrice Hutton’s writing on figure skating has appeared in SKATING Magazine, BmoreArt and the Hartford Courant. Hutton earned her BA and MA from the Johns Hopkins University, and founded and directs Writers in Baltimore Schools, a creative writing program for Baltimore City youth. Her publications can be found at patricehutton.com.