A 6-year-old Jacob Sanchez was one of the millions who viewed Jason Brown’s famed “Riverdance” free skate during the 2014 Olympic season.
“I remember watching that in my room with my mom,” Sanchez said. “After he did that program, I just became obsessed with it.”
A 17-year-old Sanchez is now one of the nation’s best going into this week’s Prevagen U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Wichita, Kansas.
It’s Sanchez’s senior nationals debut, but he is already among the most accomplished men in the field: fourth at the 2021 U.S. Junior Championships at age 13, fourth at the Youth Olympics last season, the Junior Grand Prix Final champion last month and the fourth seed in Wichita by best total score this season.
Sanchez set “low expectations” going into 2024-25: merely make it onto the Junior Grand Prix Series (four American men competed on the circuit).
He exceeded them. Sanchez won all three of his Junior Grand Prix starts, becoming the third U.S. singles skater to do so in the last 17 years after Nathan Chen in 2015 and Alexei Krasnozhon in 2017. (Ilia Malinin won his two Junior Grand Prix starts in 2021, but a potential third, the Final, was canceled due to COVID-19.)
Sanchez isn’t focusing on results. But he did say his “top goal” at nationals is to make two teams: the two-man roster for the World Junior Championships in late February and the three-man team for the senior worlds in Boston in late March. “That would be the best of the best,” he said.
“Winning the Junior Grand Prix Final is amazing, but I definitely still like to carry myself the same as if I didn’t,” Sanchez added. “But I’m definitely very confident in myself going into nationals, and I feel great. I’m super hyped and ready to compete.”
Sanchez has embodied that excitement on the ice since age 5. He first laced up to play hockey near his home in Orange County, New York (about 60 miles northwest of Manhattan).
But he couldn’t stay upright on the skates. He switched to figure skates, which have longer, flatter blades.
“After that, it just took off,” Sanchez said in a 17-minute film about his skating journey titled “Olympic Dreams.”
About a year later in 2014, Sanchez was mesmerized watching Brown’s Riverdance. In 2018, Sanchez competed at the national championships himself, taking runner-up in the juvenile division at age 10.
At the Hudson Valley Figure Skating Club, he has been coached for the last decade by Larisa Selezneva and Oleg Makarov, the 1984 Olympic pairs’ bronze medalists from Russia.
“We took him from learn to skate, he was a beginner,” Makarov said. “We started from basic — from single jumps to doubles jumps to triples.” (Sanchez hopes to debut a quadruple jump (flip or Lutz) in competition over the next year, but not at these nationals.)
Mom Johana was born in Puerto Rico, moved to the U.S. around age 5 and often traveled back to Puerto Rico during breaks from school. She has been an educator for 21 years and currently teaches business classes at New Rochelle High School.
Dad Jose is a retired New York City police officer. He made 80-minute commutes to work, including for Yankees games, the New York City Marathon and New Year’s Eve at Times Square.
At home, Sanchez, the second of three sons, often makes scrambled eggs and pancakes for his 10-year-old brother, Jayden.
He is also an ambassador for Diversify Ice, which provides opportunities for underrepresented figure skaters nationwide.
“Jacob is a very low-key, quiet, very humble young man, and that has to do a lot with his upbringing, with me and his dad,” Johana said. “We always never let him get too ahead of himself and always appreciate everything that has been given to him — or that he has been privy to — and approach this sport with humility.”
Last season, Sanchez skipped the U.S. Championships (where he would have skated in juniors) to compete at the Youth Olympics in South Korea. The two events were held in the same week. Sanchez chose the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of the quadrennial Youth Winter Games.
He still made the two-man team for junior worlds the next month, finishing 10th.
Sanchez, the U.S. junior silver medalist in 2022-23, lamented placing excessive pressure on himself to win in 2023-24.
“I decided this year to kind of step away from results and just focus on one thing at a time,” he said.
His family held a reminder of that in the crowd at December’s Junior Grand Prix Final in Grenoble, France. Their banner read “Jacob Sanchez One Jump at a Time.”
Though Sanchez was the only man to win two Junior Grand Prix regular season events, he went into the Final ranked fourth in the six-man field by best total score on the circuit. The competitors included the reigning world junior gold and silver medalists, who had outscored Sanchez by 30 points at the championships last winter.
Sanchez struggled to practice the week before the Final due to a cold, plus dealt with intermittent lower back pain.
Yet he still stood second after the short program, then watched world champion Ilia Malinin top the senior men’s short program later that night.
Sanchez and Malinin, separated in age by 2 1/2 years, ate breakfast and dinner together in Grenoble. Sanchez also filmed Malinin from ice level performing a back flip.
“We kind of just caught up with each other — even though we talk all the time — but we kind of just were hanging out, being teenagers,” said Sanchez, who like Malinin warms up at events by kicking a soccer ball.
Sanchez said the best advice he’s received from the elder champion is to trust his training.
Still, he struggled to sleep that night between the short program and free skate in Grenoble. The nerves lingered into the six-minute warm-up the following afternoon. He saw the bright lights and filled seats.
Coach Makarov sent his student off for his free skate with familiar words.
“He always tells me that I’m the best,” Sanchez said, “and I always repeat it back to him.”
Sanchez, the penultimate skater, overcame two early jumping mistakes. Afterward in the kiss-and-cry area, he burst into tears after his score came up with a “1" next to his name. He hugged Makarov.
“It was never really an expectation for me to be on the podium,” Sanchez said when asked about the reaction. “I really just went there just to go skate and have fun.”
He became the 10th American man to win the Junior Grand Prix Final, the second-biggest junior competition after worlds. The champions list includes every American who has won an Olympic men’s singles medal in the Grand Prix era: Timothy Goebel, Evan Lysacek and Chen.
“Just making it to the Junior Grand Prix Final in itself was just beyond anything I would have ever imagined, if you would have asked me last year,” Sanchez said.
He didn’t fully commit to the senior division at these nationals until November — after winning his senior international debut at a lower-level event in Estonia.
“I had talked to my team about the plan for nationals, and it was a mutual decision to start to make the transition from junior to senior,” Sanchez said.
Now he will share the ice with the likes of his good friend Malinin. His childhood inspiration, Brown, announced Monday that he will miss nationals.
Sanchez still got to tell Brown in person this past year that he’s a big fan. Already, Sanchez’s reputation preceded him.
"(Brown) actually did know that I skated to ‘Riverdance,’” at the intermediate level (with a similar green and black costume), Sanchez said. “He said he really liked it.”