LOS ANGELES — Alexa Knierim had skated with her husband Chris as a pair for so long that no other touch felt like his. Theirs was a marriage of love and figure skating, a union that brought them three U.S. pairs titles and a bronze medal in the team event at the 2018 Olympics.
When bouts with depression led Chris to retire from competition in 2020, they decided she should continue — which meant she’d have to allow someone else to lift and twist and toss her in the air. The thought made her hesitate.
“Any time on the ice I would help another male pair skater and hold their hand it always felt weird, like it wasn’t the right fit. Like I was skating with somebody else, and it wasn’t Chris,” she said. “It was distracting.”
