After fourth-place finish at worlds, South Jersey figure skater Isabeau Levito looks forward to the Olympic season

BOSTON — South Jersey’s Isabeau Levito won the silver medal at last year’s World Figure Skating Championships.

This year, she landed just off the podium, in fourth place.

But Levito, 18, who lives in Mount Holly and trains in Mount Laurel, was not as disappointed as one might expect.

In the fall, she suffered a stress reaction in her right foot and wound up taking months off the ice to heal. It started to hurt at Skate America in October, she said, leading her to miss several important competitions, including the U.S. championships in January. Yet she was named to the world team, pending her health and readiness to compete.

Leading up to Worlds, “I personally didn’t feel I was ready,” Levito said Saturday, less than 24 hours after her free skate on world championship ice. “But my coaches and my federation who came to check on me as part of the return-to-play protocol, they were telling me, ‘Isabeau, you’re ready.’

“Last year, I had really grinded out the training. So coming in here this year, I didn’t feel physically ready. And then mentally, I was still carrying the stress from last year. Because last year, I felt like, was such a highlight, and getting second was so like crazy for me. It just felt like a high, and I felt like I couldn’t live up to that.”

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So she changed her perspective. She would not live and die by placements.

“I came into this actually thinking, ‘I’m just going to work on personal goals, like managing stress, and try to go through this as relaxed as I can.’ I think I did really good because of that,” she said.

She skated a clean short program on Wednesday. In Friday’s free skate, she fell on the second jump in her opening triple flip-triple toe loop combination, but she skated the rest of the program cleanly, placing fifth in that segment and fourth overall.

“I was so focused on keeping my stress down,” she said. “And I think that’s why I skated a good short, and that’s why I kept it together in the free after that first mistake. I really like the way I skated the rest of the program. And everyone reminded me, ‘You’re coming off an injury.’ ”

During those months off the ice, she did “nothing. You would’ve thought I would’ve been reading, making things. I love DIY stuff.”

She once created her own pattern for a crocheted bumblebee-shaped tissue box cover. In 2022, when she was 15, she read 90 books.

“But [during her time off the ice,] I just watched Gossip Girl over and over and over,” she said. “And I did my homework. I’m almost done [with] my senior year of high school. I’m excited to be free from the shackles of education.”

She’s planning to take the Olympic year off from academia before considering college. She’s been in online school since fourth grade and wants to attend college in person.

“Balancing that and then the training, and I don’t want to lose the training,” she said, “but I know [new world champion Alysa Liu] goes to university, and she does the training and she balances it, so maybe I’ll speak with her on that.”

Now she’s raring to go on training. First, she’ll be skating in the Stars on Ice tour in Japan and Canada in April and the U.S. in May. (The closest show will be May 23 in Hershey.)

» READ MORE: Competitors are not always rivals. Just ask top American women’s figure skaters, Isabeau Levito and Amber Glenn.

Then she’ll start working on her programs for next season. The Winter Olympics will be in Milan, Italy, where her mother grew up and her grandmother still lives.

“I think that I’m more excited this year than the other years, because first of all, I didn’t do the full season,” Levito said. “A lot of athletes are really tired from the season, and I don’t have that. And also, I’m very motivated and pumped right now because I feel all this extra gratefulness for getting to train. I’ve never been taken out this long when I wanted it this bad.”

One goal Levito would like to fulfill: “During my career, I plan to land a triple axel at some point. It’s just a bucket list goal for me. It’s not even about competing it, although, obviously, if I had it I would compete it.”

She’s rotated it off the ice but never found a good time to bring it to the rink.

» READ MORE: South Jersey’s Isabeau Levito is just 15 — and she’s already a U.S. figure skating champion. Next up, the world?

“I know if I work on it for two weeks, I’ll have a clean triple axel on the floor,” she said. “So how long will it take to have it on the ice?”

But it’s not necessarily in the works for the Olympic season.

While many skaters retire after the Olympics, Levito says she has time to work on the axel.

“I don’t have like a deadline on it, because I also don’t have, like, a deadline on my career,” she said. “Amber [Glenn, the 2025 U.S. champion] is 25 and she’s still killing it. I’m only 18. There are years to come.”