How Elladj Baldé is creating new pathways for Black figure skaters - Sportsnet.ca

I want to say the first few times I skated I really enjoyed it because I felt free. I was just outdoors with my mom, playing. She was teaching me a couple spins, things like that, and I felt very comfortable on the ice very fast. So I enjoyed the freedom and the playfulness of skating, but very quickly, six months into learning how to skate, I was already competing, and so it got serious very quickly.

My father being African, for him it was all about school and education. Not that he didn’t care that I was skating, but that wasn’t as important as school. My dad, in order to get out of Guinea, he did it with his education. He was able to go to the Soviet Union to further his education, a university degree was kind of his way out of the village and his way out of Africa. So education was always number one for my dad.

For a very long time I changed everything about myself to try and fit the mold because the people who were successful in skating were white Canadians or white Europeans. And so for me in my head, if I wanted to be successful, I needed to be more like that. Success came at the detriment of me being myself, and the crazy thing is that I was rewarded for these things. Whenever I was skating in those ways, I was winning competitions.

And that took years. It took me up until I was 24, 25, 26 to actually start really feeling like I could be myself on the ice. And then it wasn’t until social media where I completely broke out of all the chains and the barriers. I was able to just completely be myself and skate to what I want to skate to and to find complete freedom in my sport. And that’s kind of healed my relationship with sport as well.

In 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, you saw society acknowledge the Black struggle and bring it to the forefront. Two years have passed. Have you seen enough change in the figure skating community?

donnovanbennett Shuttersworth_ I love that guy.

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