Emma Aalto and Millie Colling are making history as Finland’s first same-gender ice dance team.
It’s a partnership that could have big consequences for the ongoing debate on open-gender partnering in figure skating.
In 2022, Skate Canada changed its rules to allow teams of any gender to compete in ice dance and pairs, at all levels up to the senior national championships. Since then, several female-female ice dance teams have formed at the Novice level in Canada. A growing movement is pushing for rule changes in the United States, and prominent former champions have endorsed the idea of open-gender partnerships, including Scott Moir, Kaitlyn Weaver, Gabriella Papadakis, and Madison Hubbell. Hubbell and Papadakis have even teamed up to skate in professional shows.
Now, Aalto and Colling are the first female-female team to compete at the junior level in Europe, and possibly anywhere in the world. As they carve a space for themselves on the ice, their federation is grappling with the practical consequences of opening competitions to teams of any gender. For their coach Neil Brown, training Colling and Aalto means rethinking his view of ice dance, and which of its traditions should be preserved or transformed.
Beginning a new adventure
Aalto and Colling met while competing against each other in solo dance. “We didn’t live in the same city, so we probably met [training] just before a competition,” said Aalto.
“We got partnered to do exercises on that first ice time and then it was fate!” added Colling. “So we became friends and we talked about Gabriella Papadakis and Madison Hubbell [skating together] right in the beginning, like how cool it is. We joked about moving to Canada.”
At one point, they wanted to choose the same music to compete with, which skaters who compete against each other usually avoid. “We were fighting over it,” said Colling, “and then we joked about like, ‘Oh what if we just both skated to it? We could just team up.’”
About a month later, in May 2024, Aalto sent Colling a message on Instagram, asking them to try out. “It was three days and it was so much fun,” said Colling, “It was like the best time ever!”
“It was fun in the first tryout,” they added, “because we realized that we both have a very positive mindset on ice and so we just immediately clicked into, ‘okay we’re best friends, we’re doing something that we enjoy, it doesn’t matter if we make mistakes,’ and we’ve continued with that sort of mindset.”
They quickly decided they wanted to skate together. Their coach Neil Brown was supportive of the idea but didn’t know if there would be a competitive path open for the team.
“Ice dance is so hard,” he noted. “Girls want to find partners, but for every boy that’s around, there’s probably about 250, 300 girls that are on the market. So it’s an extremely complicated and competitive environment. You run into the constant issue of geography, finances, schools, just the possibility of going to live in another country or not…Millie and Emma came up to me, and were like, ‘We’re done waiting for men.’ And I was like, “I totally get you!”’
He was nervous about the practical side, however. “I was thinking that I don’t have any issue with it and there was nothing preventing me from working with the same-sex team. But we needed to see what this meant from a legislative point of view and what kind of opportunity it would create. Because, of course, saying yes in practice is quite easy, to say ‘You guys can skate together. We’ll do some basics, we’ll do some work.’ But if there’s no opportunity to compete, then within the group structure that we have as a club, it makes it very difficult for the work. Because if I have five teams on the ice, four of which are competing, working programs, and then another team that wouldn’t be, it puts a strain on the coaching staff. So it’s better if we can have the competitions and we can be on the same circuit.”
Brown got in touch with the Finnish skating federation and started asking questions. “You start to get into the whole complexity of legislative change. And this is where, people say yes, people say no, people say ‘yes, but we need to have this voted by a board, we have to draft up a proposal, have all of this written out’, etc, etc, etc. So unfortunately, last season, it was too close to the beginning of the season to actually get anything going. But the initial feedback from the Finnish, let’s say, Ice Dance Technical Committee, the commission that sort of legislates on the rules, was very optimistic, very positive. They had said, ‘This goes with what we should be doing in society, inclusive and just moving forward.’”
Encouraged, Brown kept working on a proposal. “We spoke to the board of the federation and presented the project to them and said, ‘Listen, we have a same-sex team that wants to compete. They don’t have any place to do that at the moment. And I think this is a shame. So how can we facilitate that?’ And then the board came back and basically said, ‘Yes, no problem. We’re interested, but we’re gonna go step by step.’”
Training for new roles
In April 2025, Aalto and Colling finished the solo dance season and started training intensively as a team. Aalto had skated with male partners in the past, but after a season off due to injury, she had been skating solo dance for a few years. Colling was a singles skater who switched to solo dance.
With different experience levels in dance, they decided that Aalto would take the ‘leader’ role, including lifting Colling. This decision meant that both skaters were doing new roles: Aalto leading for the first time, and Colling doing partnered dance for the first time.
While they initially experimented with switching who did what role, Colling noted that it was difficult, “especially since I had less ice dance experience. And then our coach was like, ‘It’s going to be really complicated if we keep switching. But he was really clear that this isn’t a ‘man’s role’. It’s just that one of you needs to decide where you’re going on ice. And I think it was just like, Emma has more upper body strength than me. I think it works physically a bit better.”
“When they first came up to me,” said Brown, “they were saying, ‘we want to break away from the idea of leading man, following lady.’ Which is what Maddie [Hubbell] and Gabi [Papadakis] were talking about as well. And I think it was quite an interesting conversation because I said, ‘Okay, I get that, like from a social point of view I really get it and I think it’s awesome. But you will find out that throughout your performance and your skating, the mechanics of it, there will always be a follower and a guide. And you have to be able to understand which role you’re gonna have in that moment to perform the elements and the dance the right way.’”
“I remember being a bit scared at first of being in the man’s role because I’m not a man,” shared Aalto. “It was hard sometimes in practice because some coaches would… not directly call me a man, but I’d be [treated as] one of the men. And that was hard, but now it’s not like that anymore, I think everyone’s learned.”
“It was very new and kind of scary at first to be lifting,” said Aalto. “I’m still sometimes a bit scared because I don’t want to hurt them. That’s my biggest fear…so I’m planning to get more upper-body strength. Just like a summer of [Aalto flexes her bicep]. That’s the plan. Just a lot of practice.”
“We tried some lifts out, like really simple ones, in our literal first tryout,” added Colling. “Our coaches were like, ‘Go for it!’ Because I think we do trust each other to be capable. I trust her not to drop me – very often! And we try a lot of lifts off-ice.”
While they don’t switch roles in elements, they have experimented a little more with choreography. “Both of the people who did our choreography were kind of careful to change some holds around and really highlight [Aalto] as well so it’s not super clear that this is the one who’s doing the man’s job and this is the one who’s doing the woman’s job,” Colling explained, referring to the way that in traditionally-gendered ice dance, the man’s job is partly to highlight the woman, sometimes referred to as a frame-and-picture model.
They have shared that their rhythm dance will be to music by No Doubt. “We have three songs from the Treasure Kingdom album,” said Colling. “Obviously ‘Don’t Speak’ is in there, because it’s a big hit. We love it. But I think the main reason we picked it was because of the song ‘Just A Girl’, which is something that no other team necessarily would think of as their first choice…But we think it really sort of fits us and encapsulates our general energy and it’s so much fun to skate to.”
A patchwork of competitive opportunities
Currently, Finland is allowing same-sex ice dance at the junior and senior levels, but not yet for lower levels or for pairs. Aalto and Colling will be able to compete at the national qualifying competition, but not yet at nationals.
That national qualifier will be their first competition, in October. “A lot of the season is not quite completely sure,” said Colling. “At some competitions, we don’t know if we’ll be able to compete outside the competition to still get scores or if we just won’t be able to compete. We’ll find that out later. And then maybe in the spring… We’ll go to Sweden, maybe?”
In 2025, the Nacka Trophy inter-club competition allowed basic novice same-sex teams from Sweden to compete. Skate Canada has changed its rules to fully allow teams of any gender composition in domestic competitions, so Brown is looking into having Aalto and Colling potentially compete as international guests at a Canadian competition.
“It’s a great project, but I do think it needs to be organized in a way that we need to be careful and understand what sort of door we’re opening,” said Brown. Working with Aalto and Colling has helped him to think through which ice dance practices should change, and which it is important to preserve.
“I think I struggled a bit working out how I felt about all of this as a coach, as a skater. As somebody who has a traditional view of ice dance, not in the sense that I don’t think same-sex people should skate together, but it’s been ingrained in me since I was a young skater that the man leads and that the man is the knight and he will take care of his girl, you know? And I think that’s a beautiful side of figure skating. I think it’s a really nice thing. And of course, the world is changing, ice dance is changing. And I think we can find that relationship as well with same-sex teams, but I think it does come with a certain degree of experience as a skater.”
The desire to ensure a grounding in ice dance techniques like holds is part of why the rule change only applies at the junior and senior levels so far.
“I was at an interclub competition in Sweden in January where they authorized same-sex teams. I came across two same-sex teams in Basic Novice. The issue that I was confronted with was that these young skaters were not, let’s say, developed enough in terms of skill to actually do what would have been required of an ice dance team in the pattern dance work, guiding, following, all of these things. And so it basically seemed to me like it was a glorified sort of . . . synchro team of two people, without using any sort of proper ice dance holds, and sort of arm-to-arm holds, hand-in-hand, that kind of stuff. And so when I saw this I thought [same-sex ice dance] is really cool, but it needs to be organized and we need to teach it. We need to make sure that those that want to go down this path have the right sort of approach.”
In addition to ensuring teams are learning ice dance techniques, there is also a concern that open-gender ice dance could get too popular, with unintended consequences. “If we open the door to anybody that wanted to do it, we could suddenly have 25 teams showing up [to nationals] and that would be logistically a nightmare,” said Brown.
“I was speaking to a coach who was saying like, ‘I don’t think this is a good idea because what happens if men can team up, and we don’t have any boys left [for female/male teams], right?’ It would be silly not to factor that in. You have to also think about that. If you’re allowing women to skate together, you will allow also men potentially to do it.”
There are also potential consequences for the growing discipline of solo dance if more solo dancers decide they would rather pair up with each other.
While the Finnish federation is making changes gradually they are committed to this path. Laura Tykkylainen, the Competitions Director for Skating Finland, wrote: “This change helps ensure that more skaters have the opportunity to pursue ice dance. By opening the gender rules, we are enabling more skaters to train and compete with the partner of their choice, which supports participation and growth in the sport. Our goal is to make figure skating more inclusive, and we see this as a natural step to improve the accessibility of ice dance in Finland.”
“We would very much welcome the ISU taking steps to develop its rules in a similar direction,” Tykkylainen added. “Opening up the sport to teams of any gender composition would be an important and positive development at the international level as well.”
Is there a roadmap for a same-sex team?
Working with Aalto and Colling has helped Brown to think more deeply about ice dance as a whole. “What does it look like? And what should it look like? Should we break away from what it looks like at the moment? Or with the same-sex team are we trying to match what couples do that already exist? And is that the right thing or the wrong thing? Should we look at it differently?”
He’s also started to question which models of ice dance excellence to aspire to. “Do I want to mold them into an idea of Gabi and Guillaume, or Maddie and Evan? Is that what we’re trying to reach with them? Or are we trying to do what Gabi and Maddie did? Or is there no example out there? And therefore we can do whatever it is that we want and forget the romantic aspect of figure skating that is very present and very dominant. It doesn’t have to be a love story. It could be two people having fun. It could be an encounter. It could be all kinds of things. And it depends on, obviously for us, themes of rhythm dances. How would we have processed the rhythm dance if the theme had been a waltz? It would have been a completely different thought process. I think that’s what’s also interesting, because as a coach and as a choreographer, you’re constantly learning, constantly trying to take new inspiration, learn new things. And I think that having the opportunity to work with this team is opening different thought processes.”
The biggest check on experimentation is the expectations of the judges. “You have that risk if you break away too far too quickly from the tradition, or let’s say the ‘ideal ice dance couple’ notion, could that be also destructive to these skaters that are taking this on? And the coaching staff has a responsibility to protect these kids as well. They’re young, and they’ve already done, a nice post on social media and it’s already blown up a bit. So I make sure that all of this is going to be a beneficial experience to them, something that’s going to help them grow.”
Aalto and Colling aren’t scared of the spotlight, however. They hope to inspire other skaters, just as they were inspired by Papadakis and Hubbell.
“Not only is this super fun and we want to evolve as skaters but also we hope that we inspire others,” shared Aalto. “At least my dream is to change the world and make others believe that things are possible.”
“And that they don’t have to wait for an ideal situation to come along,” added Colling, “because you don’t know in ice dance if that’s ever going to happen. There’s such a small percentage of people who can actually [compete] and we kind of want to just be like, ‘No, no. Whoever you are as a skater, in whatever situation you’re in, you should be able to compete.’ So I think it would be lovely to hopefully inspire some, at least the little ones who see us skate.”
“It’s slightly scary [to be first] but I think we’ve sort of trained in such a bubble where everyone’s used to us, it’s normalized, like no one is being mean or weird to us. So I don’t think it really registers that this is such a weird thing because everyone treats us as normal.”
While hopefully more competitive opportunities will come, the everyday training is still a source of joy for Aalto, Colling, and their coaches. “And shouldn’t that be the first thing?” asked Brown. “Sure, you can work on a choctaw, you can work on getting longer extensions. You can work on your musicality or interpretation. But at the end of the day, you should be coming up to the rink and stepping on the ice and feeling happy to skate, happy to practice, happy to perform. Obviously, if you want to compete, it’s an avenue that requires certain things, of course. And that’s where you need to be sort of clear. But they are smiling and enjoying the process and it makes it a great pleasure and a privilege to work with them, so I’m enjoying it.”
Watch: GOEing into Detail with Emma Aalto and Millie Colling
More on Open-Gender Ice Dance and Pairs:
A Subtle Revolution at Art on Ice: Gabriella Papadakis and Madison Hubbell discuss their partnership
The Future of Pairs, Part III: Gender, Power, and the Culture of Pairs
