3-Year-Old Enters Ice Rink — As Nursery Rhyme Starts, Onlookers Are Fixated On Her Feet

Feb 24, 2021

What were you doing when you were 3 years old? If you are like most kids, you probably spent your days as a toddler watching cartoons and sucking on your thumb! However, one talented little preschool student is proving that this isn’t always the case and that even toddlers can do amazing things.

This little girl has shown her talent to the world thanks to a viral video clip of her performance at an ice skating competition, which her parents uploaded to YouTube back in 2009. While the performance is set to the cheerful and childish song “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” the show itself is far from being child-like!

Dressed in a fancy blue dress and heavy white skates, the little girl has her long, dark blond hair curled up so that she looks like Shirley Temple. She takes to the ice with all the confidence in the world, almost as if she doesn’t know that falling is an option.

While we know that she must be somewhat frightened, she doesn’t show it at all as she starts out across the solid ice. She slides across the ice with ease, waving at those in the audience before she starts her routine. The little girl is beaming as she holds out her arms, giving flourishes as she moves her legs back and forth across the ice. Several times, it looks like she is going to do the splits, but she quickly pulls her feet back together. While this wasn’t an Olympic performance, it’s pretty awesome to see a little girl show such amazing determination and talent.

And who knows, this girl could be on her way to a gold medal by now!

For viewers who enjoy the below routine, the same YouTube channel uploaded another video of this precocious ice skating talent around a year later. What’s most amazing about the 2010 performance at the Richmond Ice Skating Competition is just how much this girl has improved over a year. At just 4 years old, this girl glides across the ice on one foot like a pro. And the video is, of course, adorable. Clad in a pink dress with sparkly accents, this young ice skater is sure to have impressed the judges with her elegance. Unfortunately, we can only wonder where she is today more than a decade after this stellar performance. Is she still skating? Is she looking toward the Olympics? 

The girl in these videos would be 15 years old today, the same age that German ice skater Maxi Herber was when she won a gold medal in pair skating with Ernst Baier at the 1936 Winter Olympics held in Bavaria, Germany. Like the ice skating toddler in these videos, Herber was a skating genius from an early age, and she remains the youngest figure skater to become an Olympic Champion.

Another prominent example of a figure skating prodigy is American Tara Lipinski, who is the youngest individual figure skater in Olympic history to win a gold medal. At just 15 years old, the 4-foot-10-inch athlete stood atop the podium with a gold medal, towering over much older and more experienced contestants at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan.

“For the rest of my life, I’ll always have ‘pinch me’ moments thinking about it,” Lipinski told Cosmopolitan back in 2018. “I still say to myself, ‘How did this happen?!’”

And like the toddler in the video below, Lipinski started skating at 3 years old thanks to her mother who enrolled the small child in lessons. But instead of ice skating, Lipinski began with roller skates, dashing across a local rink in Sewell, New Jersey, and quickly falling in love with the high-pressure atmosphere at skating competitions, according to Cosmopolitan. After three years of roller skating, Lipinski finally gave the ice rink a try, taking up lessons at the University of Delaware.

“One day, I just sort of stopped going to the roller rink," she told the magazine. "For my family, both financially and logistically at the time, it didn’t make sense to do two sports, as skating is very expensive.”

It turns out that this decision was the right one, as Lipinski was dedicated to — even obsessed with — the sport. When she and her family moved to Texas for her father’s work, Lipinski continued to train, getting up at 3 a.m. to skate at the Houston Galleria mall before school. And once she’d finished classes, she’d return for another two hours. But the skating rink at the mall wasn’t exactly ideal. During the holidays, for example, the mall would place a massive Christmas tree in the middle of the rink, which meant that Lipinski wouldn’t be able to practice her entire routine.

Eventually, Lipinski was so serious about ice skating that she and her mother moved back to Delaware for the sport, leaving the young athlete’s father in Texas.

“That was a very difficult decision not only for my parents, but for me too, not being able to see my dad. I’d talk to him every single night on the phone,” Lipinski said in her interview with Cosmopolitan. “ I felt so blessed to have two people that really gave up every single thing for my dream and I never felt pressured ... I knew that even if I came in last, they’d always be proud of me.”

But Lipinski rarely, if ever, came in last. At the age of 13, the figure skater placed third at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships in 1996, which allowed Lipinski to compete at the World Championships. Lipinski quickly became the youngest U.S. women’s national figure skating champion at 14, qualifying for the Olympics in 1998 in Japan a year later. Lipinski came in second at the free skate event in Japan, which was a devastating blow for the 15-year-old athlete. But she had one more shot — her long program. In a spectacular routine that included a triple-loop triple-loop, Lipinski earned gold.

“It was a surreal moment, because, you know, you train for so many hours and put all this blood, sweat, and tears into it ... and then, all of a sudden, in one moment, you do the program of your life and everything you wanted comes into fruition,” she told Cosmopolitan.

The young figure skater in the video below seems to be following in Lipinski’s footsteps, competing at just three years old. Could she be an Olympic champion? Only time will tell, but it seems safe to say that this athlete is likely destined for greatness.

What do you think about this young girl's figure skating routine? Where do you think she is today? Let us know — and be sure to pass this impressive performance onto friends, family members and friends.