Shae-Lynn Bourne: The woman who gave Ilia Malinin his voice

MILAN — At 10:48 p.m. local time Friday night in Italy, 10:48 and 50 seconds to be precise, Ilia Malinin, the two-time World champion, will take his first steps into a Milano Cortina Olympic Games free skate that will secure him the gold medal.

Malinin will skate to an innovative, deeply personal and ambitious program entitled, “A Voice.”

Shae-Lynn Bourne gave him that voice.

Bourne, a former World champion ice dancer for Canada, has been one of figure skating’s most sought-after choreographers for more than a decade. But what has attracted Malinin and Olympic champions Nathan Chen and Yuzuru Hanyu to Bourne is her ability to help the world’s top skaters tell their story.

“That’s what I do,” Bourne said recently after spending the morning working with Malinin at Great Park Ice in Irvine, Calif., her home base. “That’s my kind of job and how I think my biggest job is making whatever he skates to the most that represents his voice, because then it’s authentic and it’s unique to him. So yeah, that definitely has to be infused to be at this level. And you know, at the Olympics, a lot of the people that watch don’t even know his programs this year, because it’s the Olympics. Now you have viewers that are only watching the Olympics, but they’re not watching every World Championship. So it’s kind of fun, because you’ve got a new audience in some ways, yeah.

“(A new fan) said, ‘Oh, it’s beautiful.’ Yeah, she’s moved, or she’s not moved. I think that’s it, or are you thrilled? Or, yeah, that’s, I think he’s got to do something to touch the audience. And that’s what makes skating unique, let’s say from hockey, or something that’s based on a clock. You know, we get to express, so it’s our athletic art.”

It is an art few have interpreted or expressed as distinctively as Bourne, a three-time Olympian who, with ice dancing partner Victor Kraatz, finished fourth in the 1998 and 2002 Olympic Games.

“It’s like her own secret language,” said Brandon Frazier, who won the 2022 World pairs title with Alexa Knierim and was a member of the U.S. squad that won the 2022 Olympic team gold medal.

“And when you work with her, she lets you into it, and she teaches you a little bit, and you get a whole different vision of what skating is, and she’ll bring out movements, passion and emotions and perspective on the sport that you never even thought existed,” continued Frazier, who along with Rafael Arutyunyan now coaches U.S. Olympian Andrew Torgashev. When I started working with Shay, I was just like, I never knew I could be at this kind of level. So I think anyone she touches, she has a way to bring out the best in them.”

Torgashev credits Bourne with guiding him through a rough patch in the weeks and months leading up to last month’s U.S. Championships where he placed second, securing a spot on the Olympic team.

Torgashev goes into Friday’s Olympic free skate in eighth place and in contention for a top-five finish overall.

“Shay-Lynn is amazing,” Torgashev said. “She’s just a big ray of sunshine, the way she just thinks about skating and makes you think about skating is completely different from anybody else’s perspective that I’ve ever heard.

“Really, I was working with her more than anybody leading up to this nationals. I was working with her two to three times a week, and just working on the program and jumping with her, and just doing things a little unconventionally from what I previously have done preparing for competitions, just the way we skated.

“Her perspective on skating is so amazing, and she finds a way to pull it out of you, like she pulls out these emotions from you. Really working with her, you see her joy, and you see her emotions. So she’s giving great energy, and it makes you want to give her even more energy, right?”

Malinin’s “A Voice” might be Bourne’s most bold and ambitious project to date, a routine in which she literally gave the skater’s voice to.

Interspersed with his free skate’s music is Malinin’s own voice. Malinin worked with Bourne’s husband, Bohdan Turok, a director, producer and screenwriter, to record his voice for the program.

“The only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing,” he says at one point in the free skate. At another, he says, “Embrace the storm.”

“It’s like both programs have the idea of being, like a process of, you know, changing and becoming a better person,” Malinin said in an interview after his training session at the Great Park Ice, where the Virginia-based skater makes regular stops to work with Bourne and Arutyunyan. “But I’d say like the short program is a little bigger representation of, like, the physical battles that you will have to go through, of like having that change.

“The long program is a little more like deeper in thought, and you really have to be more like psychological thinking about it.”

Both programs are a reflection of Bourne as well as Malinin, looking at his skating and at his life through a wider lens.

“I really believe that the story, what they’re skating about, being present and committed and having meaning to every move is what sort of ties everything together, and that’s also what lures the audience in,” Bourne said. “And the judges are just the audience. If you’re captivating the people, you’re captivating them. You have to tell stories. It’s like when you go to a movie. It’s like a four-minute and in the short it’s two minutes and 50 seconds. So it’s, you want to make people feel something at the end of the day, and you want them to remember what you did on that ice, whether you make them quiet or you make them clap, or you actually involve them in what you do.”