Winter Olympic Games
Olympic title
Founded 1908Global
Figure skating was the first winter sport at an Olympics, contested at the 1908 London Summer Games and again at Antwerp in 1920 before moving to the Winter Games in 1924. It is the most-watched event of most Winter Olympics and the only competition that reliably reaches a general audience. Four individual titles are awarded, in men's and women's singles, pairs and ice dance, plus a team event added at Sochi 2014. A single Olympic gold outweighs any number of world titles in how careers are remembered.
ISU World Figure Skating Championships
Annual world title
Founded 1896Global
First held in St. Petersburg in 1896 for men only, with a separate women's championship from 1906, pairs from 1908 and ice dance from 1952. Held every March, it is the season's decisive event in non-Olympic years and determines how many entries each country receives the following season, which makes it a national as well as an individual contest. Twenty-four singles skaters and sixteen pairs advance to the free segment. The championships have been cancelled three times: for both world wars, for the 1961 Sabena crash and for the 2020 pandemic.
ISU Grand Prix of Figure Skating
Elite season circuit
Founded 1995Global series
Launched as the Champions Series in 1995 and renamed in 1998, the Grand Prix is a six-event autumn circuit staged in Japan, the United States, Canada, France, China and, until 2022, Russia. Skaters are assigned two events by ranking, earn points for placement, and the top six per discipline qualify for the Grand Prix Final in December. The Final is the hardest field in the sport outside the Olympics, since it contains only the season's leaders and no qualifying rounds. Yuzuru Hanyu's four consecutive Final titles from 2013 are the men's record.
European Figure Skating Championships
Continental championship
Founded 1891Europe
The oldest continuing championship in the sport, first staged in Hamburg in 1891, a year before the ISU itself existed. It is open to skaters representing European ISU members, and until 1948 non-Europeans could enter, which is how Dick Button became the only American to win it. For most of the twentieth century the European title was effectively a world title in waiting, and Soviet and Russian skaters dominated it for four decades until the exclusion of Russian entries after February 2022 reopened the field.
Four Continents Championships
Continental championship
Founded 1999Americas, Asia, Africa, Oceania
Created in 1999 to give skaters outside Europe an equivalent to the European Championships, and first held in Halifax. Its status has risen with the sport's centre of gravity: as Japan, the United States, Canada, China and South Korea came to dominate the podiums at world level, Four Continents became a genuinely demanding field rather than a consolation event. Winning it completes the set of major titles required for the Super Slam, which is why Yuzuru Hanyu returned to take the 2020 edition in Seoul after his Olympic titles.
World Junior Championships
Junior world title
Founded 1976Global
The proving ground for every generation, first held in 1976 and contested by skaters below the senior age threshold. Almost every name on any greatest-of-all-time list appears in its results: Hanyu, Chen, Kim, Plushenko and Malinin all won it before winning anything senior. Its importance grew when the ISU raised the senior minimum age to 17, which lengthened the junior stage of a career and made the junior circuit the place where quadruple jumps and triple Axels are now first shown in public.
World Team Trophy
Team championship
Founded 2009Global
An ISU team event staged in Japan, usually in April at the close of the season, in which six qualifying countries field entries across all four disciplines and score by placement. It is deliberately informal by the standards of the sport, with team benches, coordinated costumes and open cheering, and it functions as both a genuine test of national depth and a showcase for the Japanese market that underwrites much of figure skating's commercial base. Japan and the United States have won it most often.