A month before the 2021 World Championships were due to take place, three of Sweden’s top women were battling for the solo entry to the biggest competition of the season.
In Tallinn, Estonia, Josefin Taljegård finished on the podium earning not only the bronze medal, but her minimum technical scores for Worlds. A little over a week later she was officially assigned.
“I was over the moon and I had fought a lot of the competition leading up to the World Championship. I fought hard to get the technical scores until the last competition. So for me, it was a big relief. And I was just super excited. It’s a completely different thing, competing at those big competitions.”
Then at the World Championships, coincidentally held in her home nation of Sweden, Taljegård qualified a berth for the country at the Olympics. It wasn’t at the forefront of her mind whilst competing, she didn’t even know if she would qualify for the free program. “I just tried to skate good. I didn’t have my mind set on the Olympics or anything. I was just in the moment.”
Favourite TV show to binge watch or move
Friends
Born in Mölndal, Sweden, just south of the city of Gothenburg, Josefin Taljegård first started skating at the age of three, following in the steps of her two older sisters: Maria and Malin – who now form part of her coaching team.
Despite her most prevalent successes being recent, Taljegård has been competing internationally since 2009, although she took a break in 2014. “It was more than one reason, but I did have some injuries. And when you have pain in basically your whole body, it’s not that fun to skate. I started thinking about things like: What other things are out there in the world? What would I do if I weren’t skating? And so I stopped, and I did a lot of fun things. But then I felt like I wasn’t done with skating, I had more to give, and I started again.”
“The first time I won Nationals as a kid, that was a huge thing. And also, my comeback to figure skating. I’d been out for a while. Not that the first competition was good. It was awful, actually, but I feel now like that was a high point in my career, because it took a lot of strength and power to just get back there.”
She also spoke fondly of the 2017 Winter Universiade, a competition specifically for university students, which was held in Kazakhstan. “It was an incredible experience, like 12,000 people in the arena. And that was kind of when I started to get back into better shape after my comeback. It was an important competition for me, because that made me [think] ‘Oh, now the next thing is all the Nationals and all the Championships and everything.”
What would you say to your 10 year old self if you could tell them anything?
Don’t be so hard on yourself. Just you know, just try to enjoy it as much as possible and figure skating can be beautiful.
During the 2021-22 season, Taljegård had a goal of making the Olympic team. However, the parameters set out by the Swedish Olympic Committee were an obstacle blocking her and fellow countryman Nikolaj Majorov from achieving their dreams.
The Committee had set a rule that in order to be sent to the Olympics, the athlete must achieve a score equal to 8th at Worlds 2021, which for reference was 198.77 – her personal best before the new season started was 178.10. (The same rule also applied to the men’s Olympic quota. They required a score of 258.45. In 2018, Majorov’s older brother Alexander wasn’t sent to the Olympics because he didn’t archieve the required score.)
Josefin competed in six international competitions in the 21-22 season before being named to the Olympic team – the federation keeping a close eye on each of her results. Competing so much in a season isn’t unheard of, but reflecting back on it she explained, “If I had known that I was going to go to the Olympics, I think I would have enjoyed the fall competitions a lot more. Because my mind was just occupied all the time with the Olympics. My coach said ‘don’t think about it too much, just enjoy skating.’ And I really fought myself like, inside my head, and I tried to not think about it, but then everybody has questions about it.”
She achieved her highest score at Tallinn Trophy in November – even with a new personal best of 182.24 she still fell short of the required 198.77. Nevertheless, the federation decided to send her to the Olympics as a way to inspire the next generation of skaters.
“I know that I didn’t get the score, that they wanted me to have. But honestly, in my heart, I know that I actually deserved my spot,” Taljegård said. “I think and I hope – because it’s been so much in the media – I think they’re gonna have a meeting this spring, where they might change these rules.
“Even if they need to have qualifying points, maybe it doesn’t have to be the top eight in the world. Because if every country had that it would be only a couple [or] very few nations that would send skaters and I think that’s bad for the sport and bad for the Olympics in general. We want kids to be inspired to continue staying physically fit and living a healthy life. So why not send people to the Olympics that the kids actually watched.”
Favourite program by another skater
Pirates of Caribbean – Javier Fernández
A few years ago, Taljegård went to New York to study acting and she uses that skill to create characters for her programs.
“Storytelling is a huge part of who I am. I like to go into characters and perform and that’s what makes me happy, and it’s also how I connect with the audience. If you jump you might hear them clap or something but if I do a really great step sequence I can see the audience and I can feel them in a different way.”
For her short program she chose two versions of Ready or Not – the second a remix. “For me, it was important to have something to say with the program and I really resonated with the theme. I came up with my own theme. It is about a woman, girl or whoever, who is just talking to herself and saying, you can’t hide anymore, you can’t run away, you just have to, even if they’re ready or not, you just have to be yourself now. That’s kind of a little bit like how my life has been. A progression, from being really insecure and ashamed, and now I’m more open with who I am.
“From the beginning, I’m not even looking at the judges and I’m broken, and then I pick myself up. But also sometimes there’s an inner struggle, and I feel like she’s fighting herself too, because it’s not easy. Or at least I have been my own worst enemy sometimes and put myself down and looking in the mirror saying like ‘you’re ugly and you’re not pretty enough or tough enough or cool enough’. And then I grow from there and I fight my own demons.”
Her free program to the Joker Soundtrack was carried over from the short 2020-21 season. “I watched the film in the cinema two times. There was something about it, I just couldn’t shake. I just started listening to it at my practices and kind of improvised. I was not sick of my music, but a little bit done with the music that I had so I skated my program that I had at the time to the Joker music, like different parts of the soundtrack and it just felt right.”
The choreography was a joint effort with Nikolai Morozov over many zoom calls.
The 2021 European Championships came with pressure and a spotlight on Taljegård.
With the Olympics just a month away, the competition was the last chance for both her and Nikolaj Majorov to earn the Olympic spots through the SOC requirements. But the noise around the event was hard for Josefin. “For me, personally, it was really difficult. As I said before, everybody was asking me, especially Europeans, all the press and media was asking me, every day all the time, ‘Do you think you’re gonna qualify? What do you have to do?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t even want to think about it.’ Because usually, when I don’t think about these kinds of things, I actually perform my best.”
However, on the day of the men’s short program, both Majorov and his coach tested positive for COVID despite testing negative before travelling. Taljegård mentioned feeling anxious that week, not knowing if she would test positive during the event, as she and her sister – who is also her coach – had met the Majorovs’ before their tests. She stayed COVID-free and finished the competition in 14th place – her score of 164.30 missed the official requirement to qualify for the Olympics by 34 points.
A couple of days after Europeans, Taljegård and her coaches were invited to a zoom meeting with someone from the Olympic Committee. “We were so nervous,” she recalled. “[Then] she was really casual, like, ‘so I’m just gonna say like, you’re going to the Olympics’ and I was like ‘What? Wait! Did you really say that?’ I started crying and I saw that my coaches were crying. Yeah, it was a very, very surreal moment.”
In a press release from the Swedish Federation, the decision to send both athletes was made because they “are both great role models for many children and young people, and seeing them at the Olympics will strengthen their dreams of an Olympics for many in the country.” (via Google translate)
Do you prefer training in the morning or at night?
Morning
Describing her Olympic experience, Josefin said, “It’s really cool to be at the Olympics. It was really fun to meet all the people from different worlds, different countries, and different sports [and] I think that we’re gonna break some people’s hearts here, maybe some people’s dreams but it’s a little bit overrated.
“And I say that because I thought, the Olympics were going to be like a huge thing that was so great. And my life would completely change and you know, all that. Then you skate there… and, you know, I had fun. It was a great competition, but it wasn’t that big of a difference from the World Championships. You do the same thing. You go out there and you compete and then you go home. And yes, you feel a bit different, but it’s not…It hasn’t changed the world around you or something.”
On her Olympic skate, Taljegård said she’s only watched it back once – the day after – but was overall proud of herself. “I didn’t skate completely clean. And I think maybe there were some things that I was maybe not rewarded enough for, maybe. I don’t want to be the skater who’s always complaining about that, and that’s why now I’m like, ‘Okay, give me whatever score you want to give me.’ I’m just gonna skate and do my thing. Because I’m so tired of thinking about it.”
And on not making the free skate by just under 3 points, “At first I was devastated. I felt embarrassed for some reason like, that I let people down or something. But then I talked to the people around me, who care about me and I realised that I didn’t really have anything to prove.”
The main talking point of the Olympics became Russia’s Kamila Valieva’s positive doping sample from a few months prior. “I knew there were going to be a lot of questions afterwards. And I think I spent like 45 minutes or something in the media zone after and of course, most of the questions were about the doping thing. It’s not fun to get all those questions because I wasn’t involved in that. It’s sad for the sport. We have this opportunity here to show what a great sport figure skating is, and this is what the people who are watching are going to remember from this. It did taint it somewhat because I want to compete in a clean sport.”
The Swedish National Championships were held in April this year, and were Josefin’s final competition of the season. “I started competing in September, and I had Nationals just a couple of weeks ago. So it was a long season. I had to say goodbye to my Joker program. I haven’t even looked at the result, but I landed everything and it was just an amazing feeling. Apart from the World Championships, I haven’t competed in Sweden for like one and a half years or something. So it was really fun to have a normal Swedish audience there. And so many kids came up wanting autographs and everything. Yeah, I just loved having that moment with them.”
Favourite competition you've been to?
Worlds in Sweden
Looking at the future in skating, Taljegård aims to participate in the 2023 World Championships and away from the ice, Taljegård is currently studying screenwriting and has started an internship at Warner Bros in Sweden.
“I think it’s important to have something else on for me, it’s been really important to have something other than skating, because it makes me just more comfortable with skating, because it’s not the end of the world. I have something else I can do that makes me happy.”
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