He missed three Olympics, retired twice, broke his foot before Worlds, and came back with a partner nearly 14 years younger. His story is the most adult-skater thing that's ever happened at the Games.
Key takeaways
- Danny O'Shea was a 2018 Olympic alternate, retired in 2020 and again in 2022, and worked in real estate and as a coaching assistant before teaming up with Ellie Kam.
- Kam and O'Shea skated a personal-best free skate to help the U.S. win team event gold in Milan by a single point over Japan.
- He turned 35 at the Games on February 13, 2026, as the oldest U.S. Olympic pairs skater since 1932.
- In the individual pairs event they were seventh after the short program and finished ninth.
Danny O'Shea won Olympic gold in the team event in Milan on February 8, 2026, and turned 35 five days later, still at the Games. He is a real estate agent who also coaches young pairs skaters, and he grew up in Gurnee, Illinois. He has been chasing this moment since he was a kid watching the Olympics on TV, writing down which year he'd finally make it.
He wrote down 2010, and that didn't happen. He was the first alternate for 2018, close enough that he went to South Korea just in case, and watched another team skate in the only U.S. pairs spot. He split from his longtime partner, retired, came back, got concussed, retired again and started coaching. Then in 2022 he found himself lacing up again with a 17-year-old he had stepped in to help as a practice partner.
Three and a half years later, he and that partner, Ellie Kam, stood on the top step of the Olympic podium. If you are an adult figure skater who has ever been told you're too old, that you started too late, or that your window has closed, Danny O'Shea would like a word.
The kid from Gurnee who couldn't stop believing
O'Shea was born on February 13, 1991, in Pontiac, Michigan, to Don and Judi O'Shea, and grew up in Gurnee, a suburb about an hour north of Chicago. He started skating at age four, and he also played football, soccer and basketball, ran track and practiced karate. That kind of background is practically unheard of among elite figure skaters, who typically specialize early and exclusively.
He graduated from Saint Viator High School in Arlington Heights in 2009. He competed in men's singles before switching to pairs, where his athletic build and multi-sport background made him a natural lifter and thrower. Much later, in 2023, he earned a business degree with a focus in mechanical engineering from the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, fitting for a guy whose career has required constant rebuilding.
The Tarah Kayne years: so close, so many times
In April 2012, O'Shea teamed up with Tarah Kayne, and the partnership became one of the strongest in American pairs skating. Their rise was steady but brutal, marked by the kind of injuries that would make most people quit the sport entirely. Kayne had surgery for a labral tear in her right hip in July 2014. They came back to win the 2016 U.S. title by 14.85 points, the largest winning margin at nationals since 2010.
Then, in the short program at the 2017 U.S. Championships, Kayne hit her head on a throw triple flip, and the concussion forced them to withdraw. In February 2017 she had knee surgery with a cadaver tendon and couldn't walk for seven weeks. They came back again, took silver at the 2018 U.S. Championships, and then won Four Continents in Taipei with a personal-best free skate, the first U.S. pair to win that title in 12 years.
This is where the story gets painful. The U.S. had only one pairs spot for PyeongChang, it went to Alexa and Chris Knierim, and Kayne and O'Shea were named first alternates. O'Shea spent the Games in South Korea, close enough to feel the Olympic energy, waiting for a call that never came. "I went to the Pyeongchang Olympics as an alternate and sat on the outside of the aquarium looking in," he told NPR in 2026.
Kayne and O'Shea later trained under coach Dalilah Sappenfield in Colorado Springs and left her in September 2020. That December, after nearly nine years together, the partnership ended and Kayne retired. She later described emotional and psychological abuse she said she suffered under Sappenfield, and O'Shea publicly supported her. In May 2024 the U.S. Center for SafeSport permanently banned Sappenfield for physical and emotional misconduct, among other violations.
Retirement number one, then number two
At 29, O'Shea had no partner and no clear path forward, and he retired. He came back in 2021 with a new partner, Chelsea Liu, and they showed promise until an on-ice accident at the 2021 Warsaw Cup left both skaters concussed. They withdrew from the 2022 U.S. Championships, and the partnership ended.
At this point O'Shea was 30. He had been skating competitively for more than two decades, had seen two partnerships fall apart, dealt with a string of injuries (his own and his partners'), and still hadn't made an Olympic team. He stepped away from competitive skating, started a career in real estate, and worked as a coaching assistant for pairs coach Drew Meekins in Colorado Springs.
Most people would have called that a career, and a really good one: a U.S. title, a Four Continents gold and years of representing the country internationally. Nothing to be ashamed of, and time to move on. Danny O'Shea did not move on.
The Ellie Kam partnership
In mid-2022, a young pairs skater named Ellie Kam needed someone to practice with after her partnership with Ian Meyh ended. Kam was 17, born December 20, 2004, at Yokota Air Base in Japan to a Japanese mother and an American father. At her coach's suggestion, O'Shea started skating with her to keep her pairs skills sharp, not as a competitive partner, just as a practice fill-in.
Then something clicked. Despite a nearly 14-year age gap, the largest for any U.S. pair to compete at Worlds since at least 1990, they officially teamed up in September 2022. The results came fast: gold at their international debut, the 2022 Ice Challenge, then silver at the Golden Spin of Zagreb and bronze at the 2023 U.S. Championships. They finished 12th at the 2023 Worlds and won the U.S. title in 2024.
In fall 2024 they took silver at Skate America with 201.73 points, the first time O'Shea had broken 200 with any partner, and qualified for the Grand Prix Final, only the fourth U.S. pair to do so in 14 editions. In four trips to the U.S. Championships together, from 2023 to 2026, they have never been off the podium.
A broken foot, a concussion and the road to Milan
Of course, this being a Danny O'Shea story, the road to the Olympics couldn't be smooth. On March 22, 2025, days before the World Championships in Boston, he broke his foot in off-ice training. Most people would have pulled out, but O'Shea competed after intensive treatment that included a numbing injection, because the Worlds results would decide how many Olympic pairs spots the U.S. got.
Kam and O'Shea finished seventh, and with Alisa Efimova and Misha Mitrofanov sixth, the U.S. earned three pairs spots for Milan, the first time since 1994 it could send three pairs. O'Shea had surgery afterward. Then it was Kam's turn: that summer she hit her head on the ice in a fall and sustained a severe concussion that sidelined her for about a month, in the middle of preparing for the most important season of both their lives.
They opened their season with fifth place at the Challenger Series Trialeti Trophy in Tbilisi, Georgia, not exactly a statement of Olympic readiness. But they kept building. In January 2026 they took silver at the U.S. Championships behind Efimova and Mitrofanov and were named to the Olympic team.
Milan: the skate of a lifetime
The team event began on February 6. Kam and O'Shea's short program didn't go perfectly, because Kam fell, but they stayed calm. "She didn't need me to pick her up. She got up and went after the next thing," O'Shea told NPR. He is a veteran, and that's what veterans do.
Two days later, in the free skate, they delivered. Skating to "Sweet Dreams" by Eurythmics and "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" by Tears for Fears, Kam and O'Shea scored 135.36, a personal best and the best free skate of their partnership. They finished fourth of five, ahead of Canada, for seven points, while Japan's Riku Miura and Ryuichi Kihara won the segment with 155.55.
Every point mattered. The U.S. won the team event by a single point over Japan, with teammates including Alysa Liu and Amber Glenn. "It's one of those really cool moments where you work your entire life trying to achieve something and then the moment finally happens," O'Shea said. Kam slept with her gold medal under her pillow: "It's cushioned, it's not going to go anywhere."
On February 13, five days after the team final, O'Shea turned 35 in Milan. He was the oldest U.S. Olympic pairs skater since 1932, and Team USA billed him as the oldest figure skater from any country to make an Olympic debut since 1948. At the same Games, Canada's Deanna Stellato-Dudek debuted at 42, so the adult-skater club was well represented. Our 2026 Olympics roundup covers the rest of the Games.
The individual pairs event
Kam and O'Shea weren't done. In the individual pairs short program on February 15 they skated to k.d. lang's "Hallelujah" and placed seventh with 71.87. The free skate the next night was harder: mistakes held them to 122.71, 12th in the segment, and they finished ninth overall. Our guide to every Olympic figure skating event explains how pairs and the team event work.
None of that takes the gold away. "I wrote out all the years the Olympics would be," O'Shea told NPR. "Oh, it happens every four years, and in 2010, I'll be 18 or whatever. That's the one I'm going to go to." It took four Olympic cycles, and as he put it, "I kept believing, and we made it happen."
He's 35. He works in real estate. He coaches kids. And he's an Olympic gold medalist. If his story has you eyeing your own skates, our guide to coming back to figure skating as an adult and our guide to starting figure skating as an adult are good places to begin.
The Danny O'Shea timeline
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1991 | Born February 13 in Pontiac, Michigan; grows up in Gurnee, Illinois. |
| 1995 | Starts skating at age four, alongside football, soccer, basketball, track and karate. |
| 2009 | Graduates from Saint Viator High School in Arlington Heights. |
| 2012 | Teams up with Tarah Kayne in April. |
| 2016 | Kayne and O'Shea win the U.S. title by 14.85 points. |
| 2018 | U.S. silver and Four Continents gold, the first for a U.S. pair in 12 years. Named first alternates for PyeongChang and sent to South Korea as backups. |
| 2020 | Partnership with Kayne ends in December after nearly nine years. O'Shea retires from competitive skating. |
| 2021-22 | Comes back with Chelsea Liu. An accident at the Warsaw Cup leaves both concussed, they withdraw from the 2022 U.S. Championships, and O'Shea retires again. |
| 2022 | Starts practicing with 17-year-old Ellie Kam. They team up in September and win the Ice Challenge, their first international event together. |
| 2024 | Kam and O'Shea win the U.S. title, break 200 points for the first time at Skate America and qualify for the Grand Prix Final. |
| 2025 | O'Shea breaks his foot days before Worlds, competes anyway, finishes seventh with Kam and helps the U.S. earn three Olympic pairs spots. Surgery follows. |
| 2026 | U.S. silver in January. Olympic team event gold on February 8, his 35th birthday on February 13, and ninth in the individual pairs event. |
Sources
This story draws on contemporary reporting and official results. Quotes are attributed to the outlet that first published them.
- NPR, For U.S. pairs skater Danny O'Shea, these Olympics are 30 years in the making (February 2026).
- U.S. Figure Skating, Rinkside: a whirlwind partnership for Kam and O'Shea leads to a World Championships spot in their first season (March 2023).
- U.S. Figure Skating, Tarah Kayne and Danny O'Shea end partnership (December 2020).
- CBS News Colorado, Colorado figure skater helps earn USA historic Olympic spot competing on broken foot (2025).
- Denver Gazette, Colorado to Italy: Colorado Springs figure skaters Ellie Kam, Danny O'Shea close Games with 9th-place pairs finish (February 2026).
- Reporting by the Associated Press, NBC Olympics, ESPN, Golden Skate, the Daily Herald and UCCS; ISU and U.S. Figure Skating results.
