Sophia Tkacheva Tracey making up for lost rink time with Italian move
RIGHT MOVE: While at home in Gorey, Sophia Tkacheva Tracey faced a three-hour drive for 45-minute sessions at the nearest skating rink in Dundonald, outside Belfast, but now spends three hours a day on the ice in Bergamo, Italy, where she attends the IceLab è Centro di Eccellenza, an academy run by the international ice skating union for athletes from all over the world.
F you’re going to take a gap year then it makes sense to squeeze every last drop from it.
Sophia Tkacheva Tracey had hardly received notice of her Leaving Certificate results when the time came to swap Gorey for the beautiful medieval city of Bergamo. There was no time to lose.
A short drive from Milan, Bergamo is one of those hidden gems standing in plain sight. The old town, the Città Alta, is lined with evocative cobbled streets, the Duomo di Bergamo is just one of three magnificent church buildings, and the whole thing is circled by ancient Venetian walls. There’s even a 10-minute funicular ride running through it. But Tkacheva Tracey didn’t pitch up as a tourist.
The focus for this 19-year- old is the IceLab è Centro di Eccellenza, an academy run by the international ice skating union for athletes from all over the world who need regular access to a rink and harbour professional ambitions. This is where she runs through a blizzard of work on and off the ice from Monday through to Friday.
There is technical work with international coaches, skating lessons, spin and rotational sessions, ballet and stretching and physical work. Added to that is the off-ice training. Everything from dance to injury prevention, mental coaching, and career advice. This is a feast for someone who has lived through a famine.
Tkacheva Tracey was born in Ireland to a Russian dad and a mother from Belarus. She was five when the family moved to Moscow for work reasons and her parents brought her to an ice rink. There were three rinks within a 20-minute drive radius. On their doorstep. Little did they know then how spoiled they were.
Their daughter was hooked from the off. “It’s a form of self-expression that I really can’t compare to anything else,” Tkacheva Tracey explains. “It’s a sport but it’s also so graceful and athletic. There is nothing quite like it.
"The first time I stepped on the ice when I was five I loved it so much. I just couldn’t get enough of it and now I still get the same sense of freedom when I am on the ice. You are free to do what you want. That’s why I do it.
“I really enjoy it and I can’t compare it to anything else.”
That devotion was to be sorely tested when the family returned to Wexford. The nearest rink was now a three-hour drive to Dundonald, outside Belfast. Somehow, some way, the Tkachevas persisted with the gruelling travel, the nights spent in B&Bs, and the 6.45am starts on the ice.
And all for a few snatched hours every week.
There was no other way but to quit. Dundonald was, and still is, the only permanent ice rink on the entire island. The SSE Arena in Belfast was home to the Belfast Giants but apart from that? Nothing. Except for the pop-up rinks dotted around the major urban centres come Christmas. And even those were too small for her needs.
“If I’m being honest, it was always really difficult. Every single trip. It was a harsh realisation that I am doing this, I enjoy it, but this is really difficult. Especially during covid, that’s when it was hardest. Travelling up was the usual trip but while we were there it was only open for 10 people on the ice at the time and for 45 minutes each,” she says.
Sticking at it through the pandemic was an article of utmost faith.
Home in Gorey is a house in an estate. She would swish up and down the roads in inline skates, doing jumps and spins, but it wasn’t progressing her skills or technique a jot. Maybe worse were those freezing cold and wet March or April mornings when she had to warm up outside Dundonald at six o’clock because of the distancing protocols.
Tkacheva Tracey is a two-time junior national champion. She has competed in a myriad of countries and has spent time training and competing in the US and Europe, but Ireland’s lack of any suitable facilities has been a handbrake on her ambitions. That she is still sticking at it, 14 years after what was even then deemed to be a ‘late’ start aged five, is nothing short of miraculous.
And she knows it.
“Every day that crosses my mind, At least once a day. Most of my friends have had to retire but I’m still here and I’m really glad that I am because I would like to think that I still have potential that I can unlock in this sport. It has been such an incredible journey and one that I can’t imagine not going through. I am so grateful that I was able to stick with it because it has brought me so many opportunities and I can’t imagine my life without skating.”
Bergamo is basically the last roll of this dice. Her exam results were enough to be offered biomedical life and health sciences in UCD but skating’s pull prompted her to defer that and a similar course in Queen’s University. Why Queen’s? Well, she liked the college. And Dundonald is less than half an hour away.
Skating will frame her life, until it can’t any longer.
Italy gives her the time to make a more informed choice. The plan is to stay on for the academic year, and maybe into the summer, to see if she can make up for all that lost time on the ice at home in Ireland. And, boy, does she have time to make up.
Bergamo makes for three hours a day on the ice. That was as much as she managed in a week here at home.
The place in Italy became available through the sport’s network. Irish national senior champion Dylan Judge was already enrolled, he talked to his coach, who talked to someone else and, between the jigs and the reels, Tkacheva Tracey found herself living in an apartment in the city and opening a new chapter.
Not speaking Italian hasn’t been ideal but the global flavour to the centre of excellence and the city’s international school means it is flooded with English speakers. The centre’s training regime took more acclimatising. She slept for Ireland after training through the first two months and there was an injury and some surgery as her body struggled to adapt.
Now? She laughs, contemplating the results in just a few short months.
“Honestly, I don’t know what I was doing before I came here. What you really need for ice skating is consistency and focus on the ice. It has massively improved my skating skills. I’m training for almost three hours a day compared to three hours a week.
“I feel a lot more confident on the ice, so much more confident, so much more comfortable in my own skin. I can do better skills. Honestly, I am just a lot happier where I am at the moment. It has really benefited me here.”
Christmas brings almost two weeks home in Gorey and a remove from a rink for the first time since she first left. Belfast is not on her radar while home but the ongoing lack of any winter sports facility in this country continues to gnaw away.
Efforts by the various Irish winter sports bodies to build one that would be fully financed by private investment and add millions to the local economy have fallen on deaf ears despite some whispers of interest from local authorities in a few counties in recent years.
It’s a travesty of a missed opportunity.
Tkacheva Treacy talks passionately but lucidly and logically about it. About the fact that Ireland is one of only four countries in Europe without such a facility. About how beneficial it would be to the economy and the social fabric of society here. And about the demand for places on ‘learn to skate’ lessons in places like Dundrum that are loaded down with waiting lists.
She has seen first-hand how the absence of a rink has scuppered dreams. Her own sister Justina has had to quit skating at just 14 years of age because of it. Winter sports may be seen as exotic in Ireland, she says, but that’s not the case anywhere else. So Tchakeva Tracey, like the rest of our skaters, has had to pack her bags and find a home abroad.
“It’s a really difficult situation to be in,” she admits. “I would love to stay there, I would love to pursue my education there. I received 620 points in the Leaving Cert and I would love to get an Irish education in UCD, that has the perfect course for me. But I have to look into European colleges and places outside of Ireland because I can’t train at home.”
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