Ice tunes: Olympic figure skater Kaitlin Hawayek steps into the DJ booth at World Championships
The 2022 Olympic ice dancer has stepped away from competing for the time being as she and partner Jean-Luc Baker recover from a series of injuries. Then organisers asked her to help at Worlds.
Figure Skating
This year marks Olympic ice dancer Kaitlin Hawayek’s fifth appearance at the World Figure Skating Championships.
But this one comes with a spin – literally: She’s serving as the event’s DJ.
“It’s a meshing of both my worlds into one,” Hawayek tells Olympics.com, having picked up deejaying as a hobby in 2015. “Since I had the skating history and I knew what people like to listen to before they're competing and how to get the crowd going... I just took the opportunity and ran with it. It's super exciting.”
Hawayek and Jean-Luc Baker, who made their Olympic debut at Beijing 2022 (placing 11th), are at an inflection point in their careers: They’ve sat out this season as Baker recovers from a concussion, one of several setbacks they’ve faced in the last few years.
“The present moment is a moment of reflection and a moment of pause for us,” says Hawayek. “We've had a lot of ups and downs in our careers, and the highs have been phenomenal, but the lows definitely took a toll on us... and specifically our physical health.
She continued: “We just got to a point where we felt like we owed our bodies a chance to take a pause, where for so many years we've been trained to just push through things and make things happen under pressure, and we've become very good at that.”
So instead of twizzles on the ice with Jean-Luc, Kaitlin dons headphones behind a turntable. Her DJ name? K-Haw.
“I love bringing nostalgia into my sets,” she says of her style. “I want to pull on people's heartstrings a bit, [bring up] a specific moment in their memory that the song resonates with. At an event like this, where there's so many people from different backgrounds and different age demographics, I play to that audience more than if I'm deejaying at a club or a speakeasy.”
Hawayek and Baker 'exploring passions' away from ice
Hawayek/Baker haven’t competed since the first half of the 2022-23 season, when they finished the Grand Prix Series with a fifth-place effort at the elite GP Final. Ahead of the U.S. Championships that year they withdrew citing their mental health, doing so several weeks later, opting out of the 2023 World Championships.
It was the summer before the Olympic season, in July of 2021, that Hawayek suffered a horrible concussion herself, needing stiches after an accident in practice.
It was so bad for months after that Hawayek says: “I wasn't able to read for more than like five or ten minutes.”
But as the duo forged through the Olympic season and part of the next, they were continuing to put their bodies at risk. And the rest of their lives on hold.
“We're still skating together; we're doing a couple shows in the spring,” says Hawayek, explaining that Baker has been travelling to coach, too. “[We’re thinking] about what we've liked about our career, what we would do differently. And from there, I think we'll have a better idea of how we see our role within competitive skating developing in the next two seasons. We’re not closing the door to anything, just giving ourselves the time today to explore our passions.”
One of those passions for Hawayek is a hobby that has turned into a high-profile side-gig. She started doing outdoor events as Montreal was emerging from the pandemic, then got asked to do Formula 1 when it arrived in the city.
She even opened for Diplo.
“It kind of snowballed from there,” Hawayek says about her deejaying, as she added new equipment to her set about learning how to use every bell and whistle.
“It’s an art and it's a great form of creative expression, which is definitely something that I look for in all aspects of my life,” she says. “I've also mixed several of our programs that we've competed to, [including] the rhythm dance that we did at the Olympics; I actually mixed that myself. So it’s very cool in hindsight to be able to say I had a big part in what we performed to.”
Hawayek on pivoting body image convo to 'place of empowerment'
During the Grand Prix in 2022, after Hawayek and Baker won silver at Skate America, Hawayek shared with the public that she had been criticised by a fan for her weight, an interaction which Kaitlin described as “toxic.”
She took the opportunity to speak out about body image and expectations for skaters, especially female, sharing that she had dealt with the impacts of an eating disorder for years of her skating career.
“There was a lot of a lot of shame that went into the experience that I had,” she shares. “And eventually I've gotten to a place in my life where I realized that instead of feeling shame towards what I went through, I'd rather turn that into a place of empowerment. And like I mentioned, I care about the influence that we can have on a younger generation a lot. And I think that just starting a conversation is a great way to start. It sparked a lot of conversation.”
That conversation has carried over into both U.S. Figure Skating and the USOPC at the high performance level, which Hawayek says can be most impactful, especially for the upcoming generation of skaters.
“It's one thing to talk about it and it's another thing to do something about it,” she says. “And we've had conversations and they've started some really good initiatives in terms of education and awareness for coaches for athletes, for parents and officials.
“[It’s] about where we need to go in the future to protect younger athletes, especially those younger athletes that don't have their voice yet and are feeling particularly influenced by the superiors in their life.”
Will Hawayek and Baker return to skating?
Four years ago, the World Championships were set to arrive in Montreal only for the event to be cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The city has been Hawayek and Baker’s training site since 2018, so when Worlds was set to return in 2024, Hawayek knew she wanted to play a role in it – in some way.
“On one side of things, I would have loved to have had the opportunity to compete on home ice,” she says honestly. “But I'm also very excited with the new opportunity. I've been telling myself over the last few years, just say ‘yes’ to opportunities because you don't know who you can meet, the opportunities that they can present in the future.”
What deejaying has also unlocked for Hawayek is a further, deeper understanding of musicality and the layers within music. It’s an oft-discussed part of figure skating – music choice – but few skaters (with some exceptions) delve deeper into the musical side.
Hawayek would eventually like to produce her own music, with dreams of someday working on the marketing side of the record industry.
But for now, she’s in the DJ booth this week as some of her closest friends compete for the same thing she has chased for much of her adult life.
“Knowing that a lot of the people that I'll be deejaying for our friends of a decade plus, it's very cool to tap into their energy and know that [if] I play a song that they like, it brings them a sense of calm or a sense of excitement before they compete. That's a very cool feeling.”
It’s also a very cool feeling for Hawayek to experience a life off the ice, no matter which way her own beat sounds next.
“There's nothing that can replace the creative passion that comes from skating, which is definitely something that I've taken note of over the last few months,” she says. “I want to continue to find that outlet throughout my life in new ways [and] in the same ways. But just that's such a lifeline to who I am as a person: The creativity that's infused with skating, I've realized how important that is to me.”