Kaori Sakamoto Wanted the One Title She Didn't Have. She Left Milan With Something Better.

The smile the whole arena knows

There is a Kaori Sakamoto smile that figure skating fans know well. It's huge, infectious, and slightly surprised, like she can't quite believe what just happened even though she's been one of the best in the world for years. When she finishes a program and that smile appears, the whole arena warms up.

In Milan, at her third and final Olympic Games, the 25-year-old Japanese skater chased the one title she didn't have and came closer than ever. She won individual silver with 224.90 points, just 1.89 behind Alysa Liu's gold, and a team event silver, leaving the 2026 Olympics with four career Olympic medals. The individual gold eluded her, and she was honest about how that felt.

"I thought I might be able to finish with a smile, but instead I'm ending it with this sense of frustration," she told AFP after the individual event. "The frustration of not being able to win it is really hitting me right now."

She also said something that showed how far she'd come: "I felt like the bronze medal last time was a miracle, and I'm wearing a better medal around my neck yet I'm frustrated, which probably says a lot about all the work I put in the last four years." It says everything.

The girl from Kobe

Sakamoto was born on April 9, 2000, in Kobe, Japan. She started skating on November 18, 2003 (she and her family remember the exact date) and trained with coaches Sonoko Nakano, Mitsuko Graham, and Sei Kawahara for her whole career. She graduated from Kobe Gakuin University in September 2023, and her hobbies are swimming and jigsaw puzzles.

Her rise through the Japanese junior ranks was steady. She earned medals on the Junior Grand Prix circuit, won World Junior bronze in 2017, and made the Japanese national team as a teenager. Her international breakthrough came in 2018, when she won the Four Continents Championships and made her first Olympic team at 17. At the PyeongChang Olympics she finished sixth: good, but not yet dominant. That would change.

Three straight world titles

Sakamoto's climb to the top of women's figure skating is one of the great stories of the sport's recent history. After the 2022 Beijing Olympics, where she won individual bronze, she won the 2022 World Championships in Montpellier, becoming the first Japanese woman to win Worlds since Mao Asada in 2014. Then she won again in 2023, and again in 2024.

That made three consecutive world titles, something no woman had done since Peggy Fleming won in 1966, 1967, and 1968, and no Japanese skater had done in any discipline. What makes Sakamoto special isn't just consistency; it's the quality of her skating. She's known for extraordinary speed across the ice, the height and flow of her jumps, and the sheer power of her step sequences.

Where some skaters are artists and others are technicians, Sakamoto is both, with the full-body commitment of a dancer and the fearless attack of an athlete. She earns top levels on spins and step sequences with an ease that disguises how hard they are, and she has the best reactions in the sport: the gasps, the fist pumps, the wide-eyed disbelief at a big score. She feels everything on the ice, and the audience feels it with her.

An emotional final season

Sakamoto's final season was a ride. At the Grand Prix Final in December in Nagoya, on home ice, she was fifth after the short program after doubling her opening triple Lutz, and she was visibly devastated. She bounced back to win the free skate and take bronze overall with 218.80 points, but the tears that followed were less about the result than about the pressure she was putting on herself.

At the Japanese Championships she won her sixth national title, and her fifth in a row, the first Japanese woman to manage that streak since Midori Ito. It sent her to a third consecutive Olympics, and she wept again, because it was her final competition in Japan as a competitive skater. Twenty-two years after that day in November 2003, the end was in sight.

She described the shift in mindset she brought to Milan after the team event short program. "The idea of getting the perfect 10 points had been something that made me put pressure on myself internally," she said. "But today, I skated with the mindset of simply doing what I needed to do properly, so instead of it becoming overwhelming pressure, it turned into a good, healthy level of tension."

Milan: dominant in the team event

If there were any doubts about Sakamoto's form heading into the individual event, she erased them in the team event, where she was the best woman on the ice in both programs. In the short program on February 6, skating to "Time to Say Goodbye," she earned 78.88 points with a nearly flawless performance and placed first, ahead of Liu. In the free skate, to an Edith Piaf medley, she was even better, winning the segment with 148.62 points.

Japan still lost the team gold to the United States by a single point, 69 to 68, decided in part by Ilia Malinin's free skate in the men's segment. Sakamoto earned her second straight team silver, having done everything she could.

"To be honest, I'm really very relieved," she said. "I was nervous like I always am, but it wasn't to a point where my legs were shaking." It was the calm she'd been chasing all season, and she carried it into the individual event as the favorite.

The individual event: silver, and frustration

Sakamoto entered the individual event as the favorite after topping both women's segments in the team event, but the field was fierce. Liu was the reigning World Champion, Amber Glenn was a three-time U.S. champion with a triple axel, Japan's 17-year-old Ami Nakai had beaten Sakamoto twice during the season, and Adeliia Petrosian was a wildcard competing as an Individual Neutral Athlete.

In the short program on February 17, Sakamoto skated "Time to Say Goodbye" beautifully and scored 77.23 for second place, behind Nakai, who stunned the field with 78.71 and a triple axel. Liu was third with 76.59, so the margins at the top were razor-thin going into the free skate.

In the free skate on February 19, Sakamoto performed her Edith Piaf medley with all the commitment and emotion the skating world expects from her. She started well with a double axel and a triple flip, but dropped the second jump of a triple combination, a costly error. She scored 147.67 for a total of 224.90.

Liu, who skated just before her, had already scored 150.20 for a total of 226.79, which was enough for gold, and Nakai, the last skater of the night, held on for bronze with 219.16. After a season of near misses and comebacks, the women's podium came down to less than two points.

Silver was the best individual Olympic result of her career and an upgrade from her Beijing bronze, but it wasn't the title she wanted. No Japanese woman has won individual Olympic gold since Shizuka Arakawa in Turin in 2006, and Sakamoto came the closest, 1.89 points from the top of the podium.

She didn't pretend the silver was enough or hide behind platitudes, and that candor only deepened the skating world's respect. Sakamoto said her coach had told her she could "nurture a future gold medallist," a torch-passing moment that pointed to the next chapter of her life in skating.

The legacy, and one last title

After Milan, Sakamoto was non-committal about Worlds ("Honestly, I'm not sure"), but she went to Prague in March 2026 and made it count. Skating her Edith Piaf free skate one last time, ending on "Non, je ne regrette rien," she landed seven triple jumps and set personal bests of 158.97 and 238.28 to win her fourth world title, ahead of teammate Mone Chiba and Belgium's Nina Pinzarrone. Then she retired, on her own terms and on top of the podium.

Her career is one of the greatest in the sport's history: four Olympic medals, four world titles (three in a row), six national titles, the 2023 Grand Prix Final title, and three Olympic Games. She plans to coach, influenced by her lifelong coaches and her two older sisters, who are both teachers, and the next Japanese skater to win Olympic gold may well have been shaped by her example: her power, her artistry, her longevity, and her joy.

The whole skating world was rooting for her in Milan. In a way, she gave everyone what they needed: not the perfect Olympic ending, but an honest one, and then a golden goodbye a month later.

Kaori Sakamoto: quick facts

The Adults Skate Too take

Sakamoto is far from old by any normal standard. But in women's figure skating, a sport long dominated by teenagers and plagued by controversies about age, burnout, and the cost of early specialization, she's a veteran, and for years she was the best in the world.

What makes her special for adult skaters isn't just her longevity; it's her joy. She skated for 22 years and still gasped at her scores, still pumped her fist after a clean program. She still loved it.

She didn't get the Olympic gold, she said so, and she didn't pretend it was fine. But she also recognized what four years of relentless work had built: a career that went from bronze to silver, from hopeful to dominant, from good to one of the greatest. That's not a consolation prize; that's a legacy.

In a sport that eats its young, Sakamoto is proof that you can be 25, at your third Olympics, and still feel the rush you felt as a kid in Kobe stepping onto the ice. That's the goal, really. Not the medals. The feeling.

And if a three-time World Champion can stand at the boards before her final Olympic free skate and feel nervous, then channel it into one of the performances of her life, you can absolutely handle your next learn-to-skate class. The nerves don't go away; you just learn to skate through them. Sakamoto did it for 22 years. You can do it for one more session.

Sources

Results and quotes come from the site's Rink Report coverage of Milano Cortina 2026, checked against news reports and official results. Details from the 2025-26 Grand Prix Final come from that coverage.

• Milano Cortina 2026 official results: women's singles and team event.
• Agence France-Presse, "Japanese star Sakamoto 'frustrated' at missing Olympic skating gold," February 20, 2026.
• ISU, "Kaori Sakamoto bids golden farewell with fourth ISU World title in Prague," March 2026.
• Golden Skate, "Six times supreme: Kaori Sakamoto owns Japanese Nationals again," December 2025.