Isabeau Levito: 5 things to know about figure skating's reigning world junior champion
The American teenager was age ineligible for Beijing 2022, but has taken the new Olympic quadrennium by storm. Get to know the New Jersey native.
Figure Skating
“She’s like a professionally wrapped package from a department store. With a perfect bow.”
That’s how 1998 Olympic champion Tara Lipinski described the figure skating of then-14-year-old Isabeau Levito as the teen finished her standout free skate at the 2022 U.S. Championships, where she would finish in third place.
The podium prize for the New Jersey native should have been enough to send her to the Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022, but there was one problem: She was too young.
Enter Levito, now 15, in the post-Olympic season and not only is she age eligible for the senior ranks, but she’s made a splash in her senior international debut this year, winning back-to-back Grand Prix silver medals to qualify for the exclusive Grand Prix Final, where she is the youngest women’s singles skater in the field by some four years.
What else is there to know about the reigning world junior champion? Here’s five fast facts on Levito ahead of this weekend’s Final (8-10 December) in Turin, Italy_._
1 – Isabeau Levito: What’s in a name?
Born in Philadelphia but having grown up in south New Jersey, Levito is the daughter of Chiara Garberi, who arrived in the U.S. from Italy in 1997. Garberi grew up in Italy not far from the site of the Milano Corina 2026 Winter Games.
Levito speaks three languages: English, Italian and a bit of Russian.
Isabeau was named for Michelle Pfieffer’s character in the 1985 film Ladyhawke. She began skating at age three and quickly started private lessons with Yulia Kuznetsova, who remains her coach today.
She trains at the Igloo Ice Rink in Mt. Laurel, New Jersey, the same facility where Olympic ice dancers Penny Coomes and Nicholas Buckland now coach. Along with Kuznetsova as a coach, Levito also sometimes works with Evgeny Platov, the two-time Olympic champion (1994 and 98) in ice dance.
2 – A world champion already
While Levito was too young to go to the Olympics in 2022, she also missed out on the majority a pivotal year as a junior, with the 2020 Junior Grand Prix Series cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
She made up for that in the 2021-22 season, however, winning the aforementioned bronze at U.S. nationals in the senior level while capturing two medals on the Junior Grand Prix. Her victory at the World Junior Chamipionships was by just 0.54 points over the Republic of Korea’s Shin Jia.
The victory gave the U.S. its first junior champion in women’s singles since Rachael Flatt in 2008, and also marked 14 years since the Americans had swept the singles at junior worlds with a win by Ilia Malinin on the men’s side. (Adam Rippon won alongside Flatt in 2008.)
3 – Piano, knitting and dance
Levito stays busy off the ice, too. She’s a pianist while also taking dance classes, and in the early days of the pandemic shutdown in 2020 she learned to knit from a friend. Though, she told U.S. Figure Skating, the sport remains her biggest passion: “[I can’t] picture myself really doing any other activity” than figure skating, she said in 2020.
She’s also an animal lover and has a cat named Lana, which (surprise!) has its very own Instagram account.
4 – When heroes become mentors... and peers!
As Levito has climbed to the top of the junior scene and is now a standout senior, she’s gone from admiring the likes of Evgenia Medvedeva and Sakamoto Kaori to finishing just behind the Japanese world champ at her Grand Prix debut at Skate America.
In addition to competing alongside Sakamoto, Levito has met Olympic medallists like Carolina Kostner (pictured above), Jason Brown, Stephane Lambiel and others. Lipinski’s NBC TV commentary partner Johnny Weir, a two-time Olympian, deemed her the American woman to watch in the upcoming quadrennium in a recent broadcast.
Said Weir of Levito: “She skates as light as a hummingbird... it’s almost as if she’s whispering when she performs. Her jumps are so strong, but she’s so young and a bright face for American women’s figure skating. It’s been a moment since we’ve seen an American woman who can challenge the rest of the world – and I think she can do it.”
For skating fans, Levito’s presence, packaging and balletic qualities remind them of another American standout: Torino 2006 silver medallist Sasha Cohen.
“She skates as light as a hummingbird... it’s almost as if she’s whispering when she performs." - Johnny Weir on Isabeau Levito
5 – ‘Special shoes’ now Levito’s work uniform
When Garberi first took her daughter to a public rink on a weekend to survey the scene in 2009, Levito was not yet three years old, but already she wanted to skate.
“I told her, you need special shoes for that," Garberi told NBC sports last year in regards to figure skates. "She saw a pair of rental skates next to the ice sheet and said, are those mine?"
Within a year Kuznestova, her eventual coach, had noticed Levito enough to pull her out of group lessons and begin one-on-one sessions.
By 2018, at age 10, Levito was the U.S. Juvenile champion, and three years later won the national title at the junior level before graduating to domestic seniors in 2022.
What will her next accomplishments be? That’s what fans are sitting up to take notice of this weekend in Turin – and beyond.