There are a lot of unexpected plot twists in the story of how Emilea Zingas and Vadym Kolesnik got here.

Not the least of those surprises simply is what “here” means to them this week.

The U.S. ice dancers are in Helsinki, Finland, where they will compete beginning Friday in the Finlandia Trophy event on the Grand Prix circuit, with a chance to make the Grand Prix Final and/or simply build their case for getting one the three U.S. ice dance spots at the 2026 Winter Olympics. 

Who would have imagined a convert from singles skating in 2022 and an ice dancer from a war-ravaged city in Ukraine could be a team in this position so quickly?

Especially in their skating discipline, where movement often remains glacial, notwithstanding the greater upward mobility created two decades ago by the changed judging and scoring system.

“Emilea is just a talented person,” Kolesnik said. “She understands skating better than a lot of other people. She works really hard. She has this natural performance ability. She's very athletic as well, because she used to do gymnastics when she was younger.”

Four seasons ago, their first skating together, Zingas and Kolesnik finished fourth at the U.S. Championships. Earlier this season, they took second at Cup of China, so finishing top two among a strong field in Helsinki would put them in the Final. Even finishing third may be enough. 

Whether or not they make the Final, though, theirs is a story worth hearing now – and, they insist, a competitive story just in its early chapters.

“It would be amazing to be on the Olympic team, but we want to remind everyone we are here to stay,” Zingas said.

Zingas, 23, daughter of two physicians from Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan, had tried to make the 2022 Olympics as a singles skater representing Cyprus, her father’s native land.  When she failed to earn a spot in the final qualifying event, the disappointment overwhelmed her.

At that point, her orthopedic surgeon father, Christopher, and dermatopathologist mother, Marsha, expected she would stop skating, enroll as planned as an undergrad at Boston University and go on to medical school. They initially were less than thrilled about her decision to keep going – and in a skating discipline with which they were unfamiliar.

“It was a challenging period, but I have to just give it to my parents,” Zingas said. “They have come around so much and are now 100% on board. My dad is up all hours of the night researching what we need to make our skating the best it can be.”

Kolesnik, 24, came in 2016 to the Detroit area from the now war-ravaged city of Kharkiv, Ukraine for a tryout with coach Igor Shpilband. After taking up Shpilband’s offer of a place in his training group, Kolesnik returned to Ukraine for his 15th birthday, but he and his mother, Svitlana, were refused re-entry to the United States because of a visa snafu.

He soon got a longer-term visa, but his mother did not for several more years. Since 2023, she has lived with her son in Detroit.

Until he turned 18 and got a place of his own, Kolesnik lived with the family of his former partner, Avonley Nguyen, with whom he competed for three seasons, winning national and world junior titles in 2020. Soon after, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Nguyen announced the end of their partnership.

He spent two years searching for a new partner until Shpilband went out of the box and suggested Zingas, whose musicality and performance skills had impressed the coach. They officially teamed up in March 2022 and now are a couple on and off the ice.

“I actually had no idea how difficult switching to ice dance would be,” Zingas said.

“Obviously, skating with somebody else is a huge change, something I had never done before. Every day the first year, I was learning 10 new things, compared to just getting small critiques or making small adjustments in singles.”

Coach and skating commentator Ben Agosto, 2006 Olympic silver medalist and four-time world medalist in ice dance, explained the process.

“When a high-level singles skater makes the transition to ice dance, the process is similar to learning a new language as an adult,” Agosto said. “There is so much muscle memory they have put thousands of hours into developing that needs to be rewired.”

He noted ice dancers wear more flexible and shorter boots than singles skaters, gaining a needed greater degree of ankle movement because the dancers don’t need the stiffness to support the foot for the impact of landing triple and quadruple jumps. Moving in the dance boots requires an adjustment period.

“Imagine learning to be an elite sprinter without having knees that bend, then one day your knees bend fully; the mechanics of how you will generate the force needed to run will change significantly,” Agosto said. “The body needs to learn to trust and use that new range of motion to create pressure into the ice in a new and foreign way.

“That doesn’t even begin to take into account the intricacies of being physically connected to another skater, skating extremely close together and learning to intuitively follow their micro cues at every moment to keep your movements and steps in unison so they don’t trip one another. 

“Emilea’s ability to adapt to those very basic challenges and then to excel at the most technically difficult elements and skills in such a short amount of time has been very exciting to watch.”

And then there was the matter of getting used to be slung around and upside down while doing contortions in lifts performed at high speed.

“Many of the lifts and skills that she and Vadym (as well as all the other top couples) execute can be really scary for many women, and they require a level of commitment to the physicality that can be hard for some skaters,” Agosto said.

“Fearlessness is an intrinsic quality Emilea possesses. However, the trust which supports it must be earned by Vadym  I think that he is not only an extremely gifted skater, he is an extremely gifted partner.” 

Kolesnik has a master’s degree in sports education and sports psychology from Kharkiv University. As he helped guide Zingas through the physical and mental challenges of the learning process to become an ice dancer, he also was trying to cope with what the unprovoked and ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine was doing to his homeland and family.

His brother, Igor, 32, is in the Ukrainian army. His father, Igor, who lost his appliance and lighting business to the war, remains in Kharkiv to care for his mother and mother-in-law.

“Every day, you don’t know what is going to happen,” Vadym said.

Given such a distraction, the early success with Zingas seems even more remarkable. It happened so fast she had some trouble coping, no matter that she had been determined to show what they were capable of and get good results as soon as possible.

“Being in a position that maybe not a lot of people expected me to be in, transitioning from singles, I felt kind of sometimes like an imposter.

“I put all of the weight of the world on my shoulders. I just wanted that result. I wanted it to be this number or this score or this placement. I wanted it so bad that I was kind of getting in my own way.”

Zingas, pursuing a neuroscience major and psychology minor at Wayne State University, got relief from her self-imposed pressure from sports psychologist Chris Palmer.

“Chris really helped us reframe that mindset and just think about why we skate and what we want out of it. And it's not just for the result,” she said.

“We're there (at the rink) every day, from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. We eat, sleep, breathe, skating, and it's not just for one number at one competition. It's because we love it and we want to make an impact on the ice, and we also want to enjoy ourselves.”

Their progress has been impeded at times by injuries. Vadym had surgery last March for a sports hernia. Emilea has endured painful ovarian teratomas, a type of cyst, which have responded to medication. They still managed fourth place at 2025 Nationals, with a final score of 204.17 (their personal best for a U.S. event) missing the podium by just 1.2 points.

“Last season, we were mentally so strong,” Zingas said. “We wanted to push 100% physically, but it just was impossible with the physical limits that we had.

“Now that those have kind of subsided, it’s like the water is open, and the view is clear, so we have nothing holding us back.”

The here can be now.

Philip Hersh, who has covered figure skating at every Winter Olympics since 1980, is a special contributor to NBCOlympics.com.