When U.S. Figure Skating (USFS) selected perhaps its deepest team ever for the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, they sent World Champions and medal favorites Ilia Malinin, Madison Chock and Evan Bates, and Alysa Liu off to Italy with something special: custom portraits commissioned from their fellow figure skater, Sonja Hilmer.
The elegant line drawings hang above each figure skater’s bed in the Olympic Village. And the team has been bringing home the hardware. The U.S. edged out Japan for gold in the team event, Chock and Bates won the silver medal in ice dance, and Malinin is in first in the men’s competition going into Friday’s final. In the women’s competition, all three Americans have a chance to podium—Liu, Isabeau Levito, and national champion Amber Glenn, who was part of the winning team effort.
“I’m so proud of all of them,” Hilmer said. “And it was so special to be able to contribute something from home that they could have there at the games with them.”
At the suggestion of team leader and former ice dancer Tiffany Hyden, Hilmer spent six months on the commission—but she had to scramble to do much of the work on the 16 posters the week after the team was named. Many of the skaters had long been near locks to make the team, but others, like Andrew Torgashev, Max Naumov, and pairs team Emily Chan and Spencer Howe, were harder to predict. Rounding out the roster are ice dancer partners Christina Carreira and Anthony Ponomarenko and Emilea Zingas and Vadym Kolesnik, as well as pairs team Ellie Kam and Danny O’Shea, who helped secure the team gold.
“I had a long list of maybe five, maybe six people or teams to keep my eye on per discipline,” Hilmer said. “I did sketches of all of them.”
Their Olympic portraits are inspired by Italian fashion ink drawings, done in black and gold ink from Bortoletti Fonderia, an Italian company, on watercolor paper. Hilmer, who funds her skating career in part through her art, is also selling prints of her designs starting at just $12 each, or up to $200 for a full set.
Who Is Sonja Hilmer?
Hilmer, age 26, was never expected to make the Olympic team. But she’s highly respected by the skating cognoscenti for her unusual choreography and almost unheard-of ability to spin in both directions. Hilmer is also the inventor of the “Shilmer” salchow, a triple salchow in combination with a reverse rotating double salchow—a move so unique it required an official rule amendment by the International Skating Union.
Sonja Hilmer’s portraits of the U.S. Olympic figure skating team members. Photo courtesy of the artist.
She made her debut at the U.S. National Championships, where she has placed as high as ninth, in 2023. But Hilmer doesn’t just compete. She’s an artist who has studied illustration at University of Colorado Colorado Springs and University of Colorado Denver. She is a skating coach and choreographer, she designs and sews her own skating costumes, and she even overlaid the recorded sounds of her own blades on the ice for part of her jazzy short program this season.
“Skating has a component score in it, so we’re all encouraged to be artists,” Hilmer said. “Having different media on and off the ice to continue fostering that really helps me both as an illustrator and as a choreographer and performer.”
Last year, after the tragic crash of American Airlines Flight 5342 killed 28 members of the U.S. figure skating community on their way home from nationals, USFS tapped Hilmer to create a poster for its Legacy on Ice skating show benefit.
Her fumage design—a unique technique created using the soot given off by a burning candle that she learned in a “chaos media” unit in an illustration course—included a dove and roses, symbols of peace and love.
Figure skater and artist Sonja Hilmer testing out her brush strokes for her U.S. Olympic figure skating team portraits. Photo: courtesy of the artist.
“I knew many of those skaters and coaches and had skated with them. I still have trouble thinking about it,” Hilmer said. “It was so special to do that piece, and using the candle for me is remembrance and keeping the flame and the energy of that person alive and honoring them.”
More Art and Figure Skating
Watching the Olympics, you might also have noticed some nods to art history during the competition. The bronze medal-winning ice dance team, Canada’s Piper Gilles and Paul Pourier, skated their free dance to “Vincent” by Govardo in costumes based on Vincent van Gogh‘s Starry Night. They previously did a version of this routine at the Olympic gala in 2022, with an Immersive Van Gogh-style projection on the ice.
Piper Gilles and partner Paul Poirier of Team Canada compete in the Ice Dance – Free Dance on day five of the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic games at Milano Ice Skating Arena on February 11, 2026 in Milan, Italy. Photo by Elsa/Getty Images.
Also in third place going into Friday’s men’s free skate is Adam Siao Him Fa of France. He brought a pair of Italian Renaissance inspired programs to Milan, costumed as Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man in the short program and Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam in the free, with God and Adam’s outstretched fingers across the skater’s chest.
“In that moment, the image of God is pressed into the form of man, a spark passed from eternity into flesh. The gesture carries both power and vulnerability, beauty and faith. A tension where humanity first finds its soul,” Siao Him Fa wrote on Instagram. “Each movement in the program seeks to echo that spark, where art becomes life and life becomes art.”