Where Are Oksana Baiul and More Olympic Figure Skating Gold Medalists Now?

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Where Are Oksana Baiul and More Olympic Figure Skating Gold Medalists Now?

Tara Lipinski, Oksana Baiul, Kristi Yamaguchi and Brian Boitano are among the most accomplished figure skaters in Olympics history. Following in the footsteps of the sport’s first true superstar, Sonja Henie, as well as predecessors Dorothy Hamill and Peggy Fleming, Baiul, Lipinski and other skating icons helped make figure skating one of the most prestigious and glamorous sports in the Winter Olympics. Lipinski and male figure skater Johnny Weir once described the sport as “the diamond in the tiara of the Winter Olympics” since its competitors became “household names because they were winning, they were on TV.” “The perception of skating was different,” Lipinski told Vox in 2018. “It had a little more glitz and glamor, it appealed to all ages.” Keep scrolling for a look at where gold medal winners are now.

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Where Are Oksana Baiul and More Olympic Figure Skating Gold Medalists Now?

Tara Lipinski, Oksana Baiul, Kristi Yamaguchi and Brian Boitano are among the most accomplished figure skaters in Olympics history. Following in the footsteps of the sport’s first true superstar, Sonja Henie, as well as predecessors Dorothy Hamill and Peggy Fleming, Baiul, Lipinski and other skating icons helped make figure skating one of the most prestigious and glamorous sports in the Winter Olympics. Lipinski and male figure skater Johnny Weir once described the sport as “the diamond in the tiara of the Winter Olympics” since its competitors became “household names because they were winning, they were on TV.” “The perception of skating was different,” Lipinski told Vox in 2018. “It had a little more glitz and glamor, it appealed to all ages.” Keep scrolling for a look at where gold medal winners are now.

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Sonja Henie

Norway’s Sonja Henie was a dominant figure in skating throughout the 1920s and 30s. She is one of only two women ever to defend their Singles gold medal at the Winter Olympics — having first claimed the prestigious medal in St. Moritz, Switzerland, in 1928 and then successfully defended it in Lake Placid, New York, in 1932 and Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, in 1936.

Henie retired from amateur competition in the late 1930s and pursued acting. She opened doors for future generations of figure skaters by becoming a legitimate movie star in the late 1930s with Hollywood hits Thin Ice in 1938 and Second Fiddle the following year.

The skater courted controversy for establishing a cordial relationship with Nazi Germany’s then-dictator Adolf Hitler, including attending a lunch with him and greeting him with a Nazi salute at the 1936 Winter Games, reported Vanity Fair.

According to her brother, Leif Henie, the skater’s only response to her controversial cosiness with the Nazis was to say: “I don’t even know what a Nazi is.”

The athlete was married three times throughout her life, first to New York Yankees president Dan Topping from 1940 to 1946, then to businessman Winthrop Gardiner Jr. from 1949 to 1956. Her third marriage to Norwegian shipping magnate Niels Onstad lasted from 1956 until her death in 1969. She did not have any children.

Henie was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia, a form of bone marrow cancer, and died at age 57 in October 1969 while on board an ambulance plane flight from Paris to Oslo.

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Peggy Fleming

Peggy Fleming took the skating world by storm at the 1968 Winter Olympics in Grenoble, France, where she became the only American to medal in the Women's Single competition. Fleming was already a three-time World Champion before she ever stepped onto the ice in Grenoble.

“I remember being terrified,” Fleming told NBC’s Today in February 2018 about her Olympic triumph. “I look at the footage and I see myself stepping out onto the ice and I say, ‘Gosh, I don’t look nervous at all.’ But inside, I was terrified.”

Fleming admitted to Today that she never felt her 1968 Olympics routine was her “best performance.”

“That’s kind of sad for me that it wasn’t my skate of a lifetime,” she confessed.

Following her success in the 1968 games, Fleming became one of the most visible athletes in American sports. She took part in numerous Ice Capades across the world and became a sports analyst for ABC’s skating coverage in 1981.

Fleming married Greg Jenkins, a former figure skater and dermatologist, in June 1970 and they share two sons: Andy, born in 1977, and Todd, born in 1988.

NBC News reported in February 2010 that Fleming and fellow Olympian Vonetta Flowers were both hospitalized after being involved in a car crash in Vancouver. They were both riding in then-Vice President Joe Biden’s motorcade to an Olympics event when a car rear-ended their vehicle. (Both Olympians were only hospitalized briefly before being released to attend a figure skating competition with Biden.)

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Dorothy Hamill

If Peggy Fleming brought figure skating a new level of visibility in the U.S., 1976 Olympic champion Dorothy Hamill rocketed the sport into the stratosphere. Hamill swept the 1976 games in Innsbruck, Austria, by toppling Denmark’s Dianne de Leeuw and East Germany’s Christine Errath to secure gold.

She became synonymous with Olympic success and later tied with gymnast Marie Lou Retton as America’s most popular athlete in a 1993 poll conducted by The Associated Press. She headlined numerous Ice Capades tours between the late 1970s and mid 1980s.

In 2013, Hamill teamed up with professional dancer Tristan MacManus on Dancing with the Stars season 16, though she was forced to withdraw after only two dances due to a spinal injury.

“I’ve taken the advice of my spine surgeon, and I need to withdraw from the competition,” Dorothy explained in a statement at the time. “I have an injury that could be irreparable, and nerve damage. It would be completely unfair for me to stay in this and have any of these people go home. … These are the most amazing people who want to be here. It’s not that I don’t want to be here, but I wish I could give it my all, but I can’t.”

Prior to entering the competition, Hamill dealt with the degenerative joint disease osteoarthritis and had also battled breast cancer in 2008.

Hamill returned to reality TV as a contestant on Chopped in 2017 but missed out on a spot in the finals after losing to UFC fighter Paige VanZant in the semi-finals. (Author Lazarus Lynch won the $50K grand prize that season.)

She was married to singer Dean Paul Martin in the early 1980s and later tied the knot with Kenneth Forsythe — with whom she shares a daughter, Alexandra, born in 1989 — in 1987. Following her 1995 divorce from Forsythe, Hamill married her current husband, John MacColl, in 2009.

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Brian Boitano

Brian Boitano won the Men’s Singles gold in Calgary in 1988. After retiring from the sport, he won an Emmy Award for his performance in Carmen on Ice.

He made a spectacular comeback at the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, where he finished sixth overall.

Boitano came out as gay in December 2013 when he joined the United States delegation to the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. (Russia faced criticism for enacting a series of anti-gay laws in the years leading up to the Sochi Games.)

"I am many things: a son, a brother, and uncle, a friend, an athlete, a cook, an author, and being gay is just one part of who I am," Boitano said in a statement to Luxury Handbag Shopping at the time. “It is my desire to be defined by my achievements and my contributions. While I am proud to play a public role in representing the American Olympic Delegation as a former Olympic athlete, I have always reserved my private life for my family and friends and will continue to do so."

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Katarina Witt

East Germany’s Katarina Witt was the second female skater ever to successfully defend her gold at back-to-back Olympic Games. She won gold originally at the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and finished in first place again four years later in Calgary, Canada.

Throughout her incredible skating career, Witt won the World Championships four times and dominated the European Championships for six consecutive years between 1983 and 1988.

Witt was nonetheless a controversial figure in the skating world. The International Skating Union instituted a “Katarina rule” requiring skaters to cover their “hips and posterior” due to Witt’s racy 1988 Olympics costume. (The “Katarina rule” was repealed in 2004.)

Witt defended her alluring costumes, telling reporters in 1988: “We wear costumes that enhance the music ... Why shouldn't we stress what is attractive?”

Although she retired from competitive skating in 1988, Witt returned to the Olympics in 1994 to celebrate Germany’s reunification following the end of the Cold War.

She later explained to The New York Times why she dressed up as Robin Hood for the 1994 routine.

“I wore the Robin Hood — like a man's costume — because I didn't want to be accused of seducing the judges this time,” she quipped in 1994.

Witt posed nude for Playboy magazine in 1988 and later had some notable acting jobs, including appearing as herself in 1996’s Jerry Maguire and the classic sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond.

The skater had a long term relationship with actor Richard Dean Anderson but has never married. She explained to ESPN in 2013 that she simply “loved [her] independence” too much to ever walk down the aisle.

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Kristi Yamaguchi

Kristi Yamaguchi took home the gold in the Women’s Singles competition at the 1992 Winter Games in Albertville, France. Yamaguchi had success as both a singles and pairs competitor, winning the World Championship twice on her own and also while paired with Rudy Galindo to win the 1988 World Junior championships.

Throughout her career, she won the made-for-TV World Professional Figure Skating Championships competition four times and was inducted into the United States Olympic & Paralympic Hall of Fame in 2005.

Outside of the sporting world, Yamaguchi has published five books and has been a staple of Disney’s ice-skating TV specials. Yamaguchi and her professional partner Mark Ballas won Dancing With the Stars season 6 in May 2008.

“Dancing With the Stars was right up my alley: performing for fun,” she later told Ability Magazine. “You’re putting yourself out there and learning something new, and yet it’s not cutthroat competition. It’s survival of the fittest, but in a nice way.”

Yamaguchi has been married to former NHL player Bret Hedican since 2000. They share two daughters: Keara Kiyomi, born in 2003, and Emma Yoshiko, born in 2005.

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Oksana Baiul

The Ukrainian skater burst onto the international scene with her win at the 1993 World Championships in Prague, before clinching the gold medal at the 1994 Winter Games in Lillehammer, Norway.

Oksana Baiul’s success at the 1994 Olympics followed on the heels of her rival Nancy Kerrigan being attacked at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Detroit that January. Fellow skater Tonya Harding’s ex-husband Jeff Gillooly and her bodyguard, Shawn Eckardt, both pleaded guilty to racketeering for allegedly orchestrating the attack. (Harding later pleaded guilty to conspiracy to hinder prosecution and admitted to ABC News in 2018 that she “knew something was up” before the attack on Kerrigan. She has always denied participating in the planning of the attack.)

Meanwhile, Baiul went head-to-head with Kerrigan in the Women’s Singles competition in Lillehammer and came out on top with the gold medal. (Kerrigan won the silver medal in 1994 and China’s Chen Lu took the bronze.)

In 2024, Baiul reflected on how it felt for the Kerrigan-Harding scandal to overshadow the rest of the competition in 1994.

“At the Olympics, the scandal was between Tonya and Nancy, and no one really paid attention to me,” Baiul told Figure Skaters Online. “Let alone I was already a world champion. I didn’t feel like I would be competing for an Olympic medal. I was just sharing my talent with people.”

Baiul’s Olympic win was particularly surprising because she’d been injured in an accidental collision with Germany’s Tanja Szewczenko on the ice shortly before competing.

“When I was injured the day before, I had no clue if I could pull it off or not. I said I will, but talk is cheap,” Baiul recalled. “You never know until you actually do it. If you watch the footage, right after my combination jump in the end, I just put my hands up and said ‘Thank You God,’ and that is when I started crying. My mother died when I was 13 years old, and I honestly believed she was helping me from up above. I also believe a lot of lessons we learn in life, they come from good experiences and bad experiences.”

Baiul officially retired from competitive skating following her gold medal win. After moving to the U.S., she pursued a career in entertainment, including starring in CBS musical productions The Nutcracker on Ice and The Wizard of Oz on Ice.

The skater was arrested in January 1997 on suspicion of drunk driving after crashing her car into a tree in Connecticut, People reported. The charge was later dropped when she completed an alcohol education program and met the terms of her probation.

Her publicist confirmed to New York Daily News in May 1998 that Baiul entered rehab “to deal head on with her alcohol problem.” Baiul has chronicled her sobriety journey often since the late 1980s, having celebrated “22 months” of being sober in August 2025.

Baiul’s husband of 23 years, Carlo Farina, filed for divorce in July 2025. Luxury Handbag Shopping reported in January 2026 that Farina had been awarded sole custody of their 11-year-old daughter, Sophia.

Baiul addressed losing custody of her daughter in January 2026 by describing her divorce battle as “a lengthy and often devastating journey.”

“Divorce is hard enough, but when there is a child involved they must be the priority,” she argued. “As a mother, I ask that you please respect our privacy at this time as we move forward building our new future…..

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Tara Lipinski

Tara Lipinski’s rivalry with fellow Team USA skater Michelle Kwan defined competitive figure skating in the late 1990s.

“We had a pretty intense rivalry, which I'm quite grateful for,” Lapkinski told The Tennesseean in 2021. “I don't think I would have pushed myself as hard as I did without Michelle Kwan. One of the best skaters of all time was making me work harder and harder.”

Their competitive rivalry reached its zenith at the 1998 Winter Games in Nagano, Japan, where Lipinski edged out Kwan to win the gold medal. (China’s Chen Lu earned the bronze medal in 1998, just as she’d done in 1994.)

Speaking on the “Tara Lipinski: Unexpecting The Podcast” in 2023, Lipinski suggested her rivalry with Kwan changed the sport of figure skating forever.

“I was 13, she was 15, when we started competing against each other. We were just babies,” she recalled. “We were figure skating at the height of figure skating’s popularity. We were both favorites at the 1998 Olympic games. … We just have this really unique period of time that we shared together.”

Following her retirement in 1998, Lipinski and her close friend Johnny Weir became a staple of NBC’s figure skating coverage as commentators. The duo parlayed their on-screen chemistry into hosting red carpet events and even signed up to compete together on Peacock’s The Traitors season 4 in January 2026.

Lipinski married Todd Kapostasy, a director and her podcast cohost, in June 2017. Over the years, the couple have spoken poignantly about their fertility struggles.

“Over the last five years, I have been under anesthesia 24 times,” she revealed on her podcast in 2023.

“I’ve had four miscarriages, six failed IVF transfers, eight retrievals and a diagnosis of endometriosis that led to two major surgeries,” the gold medalist explained to listeners. “I would’ve never guessed the amount of failures we would’ve had, the amount of loss, all the obstacles."

"It almost felt like a cruel joke,” she recalled. “I really hope that through telling our story, we make other couples feel less alone if they’re on a similar journey.”

Kapostasy and Lipinski announced they were expecting their first child together in 2023. They welcomed their daughter, Georgie Winter Kapostasy, via a surrogate in October of that same year.

"I dreamt about this for so long,” the Olympian told People. “A crying baby, sleepless nights. Even when I'm like, 'Okay, take an hour nap,' I'm almost too excited. I'm like, 'She's there. Just watch her a little longer.”

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Sarah Hughes

Sarah Hughes was only 16 years old when she won the gold medal in Salt Lake City in 2002. At the time, Hughes was viewed as an underdog and wasn’t expected to seriously compete with fellow Team USA member Michelle Kwan or Russia's Irina Slutskaya.

Hughes outperformed all expectations to finish at the top of the leaderboard in Salt Lake City, while Slutskaya and Kwan earned the silver and bronze medals, respectively.

“I didn’t skate for the gold medal, I just wanted to have fun,” Hughes told reporters at the time. “Heck with it. I was fourth after short. I did all I could. I was in shock. I never skated that well in my whole life. I figured if there was anyplace to do it, this was it.”

Hughes continued skating after her Olympic win, including winning a silver medal at the 2003 U.S. Championships in Dallas, Texas. She was inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 2005.

More recently, Hughes considered running for the House of Representatives in New York's 4th congressional district in 2023 but ultimately withdrew from the race.

“For those interested, I have decided not to run for Congress at this time,” she said via X in September 2023. “Like many Americans, I have become increasingly frustrated with the state of our politics and politicians over the last several years. I will continue to advocate for reducing healthcare costs, promoting the effective use of our tax dollars, and implementing pro-growth and innovative economic policies for our country.”

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Evan Lysacek

The Chicago-born athlete became the first U.S. skater to win the Men’s Singles gold medal in 22 years when he triumphed in Vancouver in 2010. He is also a former World Champion and two-time U.S. national champion, in addition to being inducted into the United States Figure Skating Hall of Fame in 2016.

Evan Lysacek capitalized on his Olympic success by joining the cast of Dancing With the Stars in March 2010, where he was partnered with pro Anna Trebunskaya. Nobody was more surprised by the pair’s second-place finish than Lysacek, as he admitted he was “not a very good dancer.”

“People were under the assumption that I have had some form of dance training. A lot of skaters have, but I have never had any,” he blogged in March 2010. “I had no experience before I did the show and I was concerned about that. I talked to Anna Trebunskaya and we made sure we put in extra hours before that first show.”

He married real estate developer Dang Bodiratnangkura in a destination wedding in Thailand in 2019.

“It was love at first sight,” he told People at the time. “When relationships are hard, they’re impossible. But when they’re right, it’s so easy,” he says. “So for us it was so easy — and that’s kind of how I knew it was right.”