Ice skating had been a big part of Inna von Felten’s childhood in Russia.
Her father, Yuri, was a city speedskating champion in Moscow. And when Soviet sports officials visited her kindergarten to look for potential athletes, a key part of the country’s talent identification system, they thought the smallish Inna fit the physical parameters for a pairs figure skater. She would skate pairs from age 4 to 13, her competitive career ended by a knee injury.
Yet the initial motivation for Inna to have her only child, Sophie Joline, try figure skating came from elsewhere.
Inna and her Swiss husband, Daniel von Felten, were on a Christmas holiday trip to Paris when they saw a pop-up seasonal rink on the Champs-Elysees. The setting was so magical Inna imagined skating there one day with her daughter, and she found out young children were allowed on the adult part of the rink with a parent if they could skate unassisted.
“I had her try skating to make my wish come true,” Inna said.
What followed was a clear example of needing to be a little careful about what you wish for. The wish has morphed into a dream come true for her daughter, and it has turned the family’s life into a bi-continental adventure.
Sophie Joline, now age 16, would go far beyond just skating on that Paris ice at 3 1/2. Even though the sport merely was a fun diversion for her until about age 10, while she focused on school and tennis and piano lessons and a weekly Russian language class, she took to the ice with aplomb.
Ability on the ice eventually led her to drop tennis for skating and sent her to competitions at rinks in many other locales: Turkiye, Poland, Latvia, Netherlands, Germany, Hungary, China, Slovenia, Switzerland and more than a dozen cities in the United States, the country she has represented over the past three seasons.
Next will be St. Louis, Missouri, where Sophie Joline, last season’s national junior champion, competes at the 2026 U.S. Figure Skating Championships in the senior division for the first time.
While the women’s singles focus in St. Louis will be on the contenders for the three U.S. singles spots at February’s Winter Olympics in Italy, Sophie Joline hopes to catch a little of the spotlight without any pressure. She is below the minimum age for Olympic eligibility and still is developing the performance skills that could one day allow her to challenge the likes of the four current or past senior champions competing at these nationals: Amber Glenn (2025 and 2024 winner); reigning world champion Alysa Liu (2020 and 2019); Isabeau Levito (2023); and Bradie Tennell (2021 and 2018).
Her goal is to make the U.S. team for the Junior World Championships a second straight year.
“I’m already proud of myself for getting to the level to compete against high-level skaters,” said Sophie Joline, who moves up to the senior level internationally next season.
How she reached this point from her family’s home in Lucerne, Switzerland is a story in itself (more on that later), which Sophie Joline could tell in any of the several languages she speaks well: English, German, Swiss German and Russian.
She has the most formidable jump array of anyone in the U.S. women’s event, with three triple Axels and a quadruple salchow originally planned over her two programs. Sophie Joline likely will forgo the quad because a October shoulder injury cost her a month of training time needed to get it more consistent, her mother said via text.
“She can land it out of the program but has a hard time putting it in the program,” said Boyko Alexiev, one of her coaches. (In winning the national junior title last season, her free skate included two clean triple Axels and a slightly-flawed quad salchow.)
While her execution of those jumps can be inconsistent, costing her points, they have easily given her the world’s highest free skate base value in international competition this season, even though juniors have one fewer scoring element.
And that’s not enough for her.
“Sophie Joline is a very driven skater, very focused when she is on the ice,” said Aleksiev, part of her four-person coaching team at The Skating Club of Boston’s facility in Norwood, Massachusetts, where she has trained for the past three years. Aleksiev, who came to the United States from Bulgaria 30 years ago, was the coach with her at competitions this season.
“Sometimes it comes to the point where she wants to overload the program with even more difficulty,” Aleksiev said. “She wants to do (quad) flip and two (quad) sals, two triple Axels and so on (in the free).
“She will not step back on showing she can do all this technical stuff. She is developing presentation as well. Those (PCS) points are coming up.”
Her performance in St. Louis will depend in part on the condition of her left shoulder, injured in late October. She managed to compete (and win) at U.S. Figure Skating’s East Sectionals a couple weeks later, thereby qualifying for nationals, but the shoulder blade pain intensified after that, especially when she tried the layback spin.
It forced her to withdraw from the Tallinn (Estonia) Trophy in late November and fly instead to Switzerland to be with her father, Daniel. Her mother said neither doctors and physical therapists in the United States nor those they saw in Switzerland could pinpoint the reason for the pain, but it has subsided to the point where she fully can train again.
Spins have been a reliable point-getter for Sophie Joline. According to data on skatingscores.com, 29 of her 35 spins in international competition have been graded the maximum level (four), while the other six received level three.
“Spins are easy points to get but also to lose,” Sophie Joline said. “I have been training them a lot more since I came to the U.S.. You see the top (overall) scores, and they mostly have level fours.”
Spinning excellence has been a trademark skill for Swiss women over the past several decades, with skaters like Denise Biellmann, Lucinda Ruh and Natalie Krieg its prime examples.
At age 11, Sophie Joline had shown enough skating prowess that she was invited to a spinning competition against Biellmann, then 59, on a German television variety show, “Little Against Big.” Rather than attempting the layback spin variation named for Biellmann, which is taxing on backs young and old, they did the upright scratch spin, with the winner determined by how many revolutions she could make in three tries.
Sophie Joline had the highest score, 58 revolutions, on her first try. Biellmann, who managed just 38 in round one, got progressively stronger, cutting the gap to 52-49 in round three.
Biellmann, fourth at the 1980 Olympics and world champion in 1981, is the most accomplished Swiss woman’s figure skater in history. None of her woman compatriots has made the Olympic top 10 since 2006. Alexia Paganini, the Swiss Olympic entry in 2018 and 2022 (she finished 21st each time), was born and raised in the United States.
Had Sophie Joline continued to represent Switzerland, the path to the Olympics or the world championships might have been easier for her than it will be against the depth of talent in the United States. The flip side of that is she may never have reached her current skill level in Switzerland.
“I feel like I wouldn't be able to improve as much staying in Switzerland than going to the U.S.,” Sophie Joline said.
Through Russian friends and Instagram, Inna von Felten contacted Rafael Arutunian, the Soviet-trained coach who had moved to the U.S. in 2000 and was in the process of guiding Nathan Chen to the 2022 Olympic gold medal.
Sophie Joline would go to California to work with Arutunian off and on from the middle of 2021 through the end of 2022. She said Chen also occasionally helped her with the triple Axel.
When the relationship with Arutunian ended, Inna again took to Instagram to contact Russian emigres Olga Ganicheva and her husband, Aleksey Letov, the high-performance directors at The Skating Club of Boston. That led Sophie Joline and her mother to move to the Boston area in December 2022.
Soon after, the skater changed her competitive allegiance to the USA. She is in the process of getting a U.S. green card, the first step to U.S. citizenship.
Her father remains in Switzerland, where he is a purchasing manager for an engineering company. The family sees each other in person at competitions in Europe and during vacations.
“Since we are in almost daily contact by phone and I travel to the USA three to four times a year, being away from my family is manageable,” he said via email.
U.S. Figure Skating has facilitated their reunions by getting him a chaperone credential at competitions, so he has the ability to be with his daughter and wife of 25 years everywhere at the rink. He attended Sophie Joline’s Junior Grand Prix events this season, seeing her claim the bronze medal in both Turkiye and Poland.
Her skating this season has taken on an extra dimension. Sophie Joline has dedicated her short program to the 28 members of the skating community who died in a plane crash on the way back from a development camp after last year’s U.S. Championships in Wichita, Kansas.
Six of those killed had ties to The Skating Club of Boston. Two were coaches; two were skaters: Jinna Han, 13, and Spencer Lane, 16; and two were their mothers. Sophie Joline counted Han and Lane among her close friends.
The short program music begins with the joyful sounds of children laughing and chattering before moiving to the rich instrumentals of "I Will Never Abandon You" by Efisio Cross and the hauntingly ethereal "Cassiopeia" by Jonathon Deering, Power-Haus and Ros Stephen.
It is impossible to underestimate the emotional impact of those first moments in the music, which Sophie Joline hears not only in competition but in practice nearly every day.
Alexiev found tears falling from his eyes when he heard it at the Junior Grand Prix in Turkiye, where Sophie Joline won the short program with a personal-best score.
“It’s hard,” Sophie Joline said. “Every day when I hear the music, I think of them and try always to skate for them - in practice, too.”
Such a perspective helped temper her disappointment at not qualifying for the Junior Grand Prix Final – she missed just by the points lost to one of her flawed jumps in Poland. Sophie Joline was able to step back and see her progress.
“A couple of years ago, when I was competing for Switzerland, 2022 I was like 20-something (23rd and 25th) in the Junior Grand Prix, ‘’ she said. “I thought getting, like top 10, 'Wow!' And now getting to this level, it's amazing.’’
Philip Hersh, who has covered figure skating at every Winter Olympics since 1980, is a special contributor to NBCOlympics.com.