South Jersey’s Isabeau Levito looks to vault herself onto the Olympic team at this week’s U.S. Figure Skating Championships

By the end of this week — when the 2026 U.S. Figure Skating Championships come to a close in St. Louis — South Jersey figure skater Isabeau Levito will know if she has done enough to score a place on the team going to the Winter Olympics next month in Milan, Italy.

Milan is the hometown of her mother, Chiara Garberi, and where her grandmother and uncle still live. Her aunt and a cousin, who is “a very younger sister, kind of,” live about 40 minutes from Milan.

So while the Olympics are the goal for all of the top competitors, this year’s Games are especially meaningful for Levito, 18. She vacations there often and understands and speaks Italian — although would prefer not to speak it on TV.

“Or at least have a disclaimer,” joked Levito, who said her grammar is not by the book and she doesn’t know all the idioms. “‘She’s not from here. She knows Italian because her mommy is from here.’”

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But Italy is the thread that has been running through her entire year.

“That was the focus,” she said.

Both of her programs are set to Italian music. The short, which she will be skating on Wednesday, is to a compilation of sassy songs from Sophia Loren movies. She will perform the free skate, or long program, on Friday, to “Cinema Paradiso” by Ennio Morricone.

Both pieces were suggested for her by her longtime head coach and choreographer, Yulia Kuznetsova.

“Having had me [as a student] since childbirth, she knows me so well,” said Levito, who approves all selections before programs are created.

Those include triple flip-triple toe loop combinations, a triple flip-double axel sequence, a three-jump combination, and her spins and step sequences, all with a lot of personality shining through.

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The skater lives and trains in Mount Laurel. Putting together Ikea furniture for the new apartment she shares with her very fluffy cat has been her unofficial cross-training.

“I think I’m jacked from how much drilling I’ve done,” she said. “And I chose to live on the top floor and there’s no elevator, but there’s not too many floors.”

She has already checked almost every box toward making it to that biggest of frozen stages in Milan. Unlike other sports, figure skating does not have an Olympic qualifying competition. Instead, an accounting of placements over two years determines who will be chosen for the Olympic and world championship teams.

This week’s U.S. Figure Skating Championships will be the final event for skaters to make their case to be among the three women, three men, two pairs, and three ice dance teams who can compete at the Olympics. Levito, world champion Alysa Liu, and two-time U.S. champion Amber Glenn are expected to take the women’s spots.

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Despite missing most of last season because of a stress reaction in her right foot, Levito already has checked off most of the boxes. Even last year, with a training deficit, she came back to finish just off the podium in fourth place at the 2025 World Championships in Boston.

This season, she placed fourth at the Grand Prix de France, second at Skate Canada, and was the first alternate to the Grand Prix Final.

Seasons before this one and the last are not factored into the equation, but it cannot be ignored that Levito was the U.S. champion in 2023 and the world silver medalist in 2024.

The Olympic team will be announced live Sunday afternoon on NBC and Peacock.

Levito looks calm when she skates, but nerves remain a real factor.

“I feel like this year, I’ve been very in tune with my body,” she said. I’ll just get intuition of ‘I should not listen to music on the bus [from the hotel to the competition rink] today.’ I kind of trust it. I’ve been very grounded. I’ve been realizing for myself that all the noise, it overwhelms much too much."

Instead, she tries to maintain the habits she has established at home.

“When I’m at the rink and I’m practicing, I don’t really put in my earbuds and listen to music. I just do my floor warmup in silence, and then I get my skates on quickly.”

Everyone gets nervous before big events, she said, but the bright lights of the competition arena also can give her a migraine and make her vision blurry. It helps to take ibuprofen before getting on the ice.

“It’s OK, I’m weak,” she said, laughing. “I’m not exactly survival of the fittest.

“Between that and everything’s very loud [in the arena], and then everyone watching you, and it’s actually competition, and the judges are right there. It’s overwhelming, overstimulating, there’s a lot going on. So I feel like it’s very important to me that I have my solitude and my silence beforehand, rather than just shoving music into my ears and trying to escape where I actually am.”

In the end, she usually lands near or on top.

This time the stakes are exceptionally high. But even if she doesn’t win, she just needs to show the officials one more time that her next stop should be the Olympics in Milan.

Championship women’s short program

8 p.m. Wednesday on USA Network

8:24 p.m. on Peacock

Championship women’s free skate

8 p.m. Friday on NBC10

3:57 p.m. (for the skaters who place lower in the short program) and 8:58 p.m. (for the higher-placed skaters) on Peacock.

Presentation of the Olympic team

2 p.m. Sunday on NBC10 and Peacock