Before Kaori Sakamoto skated the last program of her career, her coach told her, “Just skate for us.”
“Us” could have been all-encompassing: not only the 25-year-old Japanese star and her team, but also exponentially more fans who enjoyed her strong and expressive skating over nearly a decade of success.
Sakamoto gave them all a memorable farewell. Her free skate was one of if not her best ever to win a fourth World Championships title on Friday.
She landed all seven of her jumping passes with positive grades of execution, plus had the highest artistic score of the field by nearly six points.
FIGURE SKATING WORLDS: Full Results | Broadcast Schedule
She became the first women’s singles skater to win a fourth world title since Michelle Kwan took five from 1996 to 2003.
Sakamoto totaled 238.28 points between Wednesday’s short and Friday’s free in Prague — a personal best and the world’s top score in this four-year cycle by more than six points. She won by 9.81 over countrywoman Mone Chiba, who like Sakamoto shed tears over the legend’s last skate.
“I was really trying hard not to cry, but I heard so many people cheering for me and applauding me, and when I saw that scene I couldn’t help it,” Sakamoto said, according to the International Skating Union (ISU). “I can say goodbye with this performance.”
Kaori Sakamoto ends her career with a personal-best score AND an ISU WORLD FIGURE SKATING CHAMPION title! 🙌🇯🇵 pic.twitter.com/Hw8uBDl85X
— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) March 27, 2026
Belgian Nina Pinzarrone earned bronze, rising from fifth after the short program.
American, Isabeau Levito, the 2024 World silver medalist, placed fourth (8.21 behind Pinzarrone) — after taking 12th in her Olympic debut a month ago.
Levito was fourth in the short, then had just one significant mistake in the free skate. Her opening triple Lutz-triple toe loop combination was downgraded to a triple-double for under-rotation.
“My consistency (with the combo) was so good, and then the one time I needed it, I wasn’t even thinking enough, and it didn’t happen,” said Levito, who landed the difficult combination in her short program, attempting it for the first time in nearly three years. “So it was very disappointed, because it was something I just wanted to present. So right now, that’s kind of what I’m stuck on. But I feel so strong. I feel in such good shape right now. So it’s very disappointing that I wasn’t able to deliver it, despite how badly I really wanted to.”
Three-time U.S. champion Amber Glenn was in third after the short, seeking her first world medal. She dropped to sixth overall after jumping errors in her free skate.
Though Glenn was the only woman to land a triple Axel in both programs, later in the free she singled a planned triple loop. In the Olympic short program, she doubled a planned triple loop, which took her out of medal contention.
“I just lost focus,” Glenn told Andrea Joyce for NBC Sports. “I did the hard stuff, and I let the easy things kind of get away from me.”
Glenn buried her head in her hands while kneeling on the ice at the end of her program. She said her first thought was “disappointment.”
“I knew that with those major mistakes, that a good score was not something I could achieve,” she said. “That’s not what I’ve been training. Just overall shock.”
Thank you everyone for the love and support🤍 I'm okay! If anything I'm mentally, emotionally, physically exhausted after a season of extreme highs and lows.
— Amber Glenn (@AmberGlenn_) March 27, 2026
I did what I set out to do 6 years ago.
Land a Triple axel and go to the Olympics and nothing will take that away from me
Sarah Everhardt rounded out the American contingent with an 11th-place finish in her worlds debut.
She was called up as an alternate to replace Olympic gold medalist Alysa Liu, who announced her withdrawal from worlds on March 8. It’s common for Olympic medalists to skip the post-Olympic worlds due to off-ice opportunities.
Sakamoto announced before this season that it would be her last.
She burst on the senior scene as a 17-year-old in the 2017-18 season, becoming at the time the youngest Japanese Olympic figure skater since Shizuka Arakawa in 1998. Arakawa later became the first Japanese skater to win Olympic gold in 2006, ushering in a golden era for the nation that Sakamoto has extended.
Sakamoto won Olympic bronze in 2022, then three consecutive world titles before taking silver at the 2025 Worlds and 2026 Olympics behind Liu. She was in tears after her free skate in Milan, where she lost points for not having a third jump combo.
“I really wanted to skate perfectly here,” Sakamoto said in Milan. “Knowing that I couldn’t, and that it was the difference for the gold, was painful. I couldn’t stop the tears.”
Before the Olympics, Sakamoto told Rinka Watanabe, the alternate for worlds, to be ready to possibly compete in Prague. But immediately after she took silver in last Olympics, Sakamoto decided she wanted to go to worlds.
She contacted Watanabe and asked if that would be OK. Watanabe obliged. Sakamoto took 10 days off after the Games.
“I was able to completely reset both my mind and my body,” she said through an interpreter. “From there, I had to restart my training. Of course, being away from the rink for so long, I sort of had gotten out of shape, so I had to go back to getting back into competition mode. But even that process was so much fun, and I continued to progress and get better and better. Turns out that the last week of the training, I was able to do both my short and my free programs completely clean. So this is how I got to getting this medal.”
Worlds finish Saturday with the men’s free skate and free dance, live on Peacock.
