'Finding that light at the end of the tunnel'

Enduring the two toughest seasons of her young life only made Kaiya Ruiter stronger. Now she's more determined than ever to make her biggest skating dreams come true

Kaiya Ruiter feels a jolt of inspiration every time she hears the free program music that the bubbly teenager will happily skate to for a second straight season. Then again, it’s probably what you might expect from a piece of music entitled ‘Inspiration.’ But for Ruiter, it runs much deeper than that. So much deeper.

“My choreographer, David Wilson, found this piece and it really inspired me,” Ruiter said in the moments after skating the long program of her life at the Canadian championships back in January in Oshawa, Ontario. “It’s called ‘Inspiration,’ but it just felt like the light at the end of the tunnel. Everybody has been through hard times and I feel like everyone can relate to it in a sense. Hardship and struggle, but just finding that light at the end of the tunnel and the inspiration to get through it.”

That might sound like some heavy talk coming from a 17-year-old, but delve into her story a little further and you’ll understand where Ruiter is coming from. Back in January 2020, her career path seemed on a mighty ascent. At the tender age of 13, she captured the Canadian junior title at 2020 nationals in Mississauga, Ontario (one year after she’d worn the national novice crown). Many were anointing her as the next great thing in Canadian women’s skating after watching her reel off multiple triples in winning gold with an exhilarating free skate at Paramount Fine Foods Centre.

The sky, as the old saying goes, did seem like the limit at that point. But nobody saw the dark clouds moving into place that would stall her career for the better part of two full seasons — in fact, that performance in Oshawa in January, which allowed Ruiter to win the free skate and finish with the silver medal in her senior debut, marked her first appearance at nationals in three years. It was indeed a long time in coming.

“That was probably the best feeling I’ve ever had coming off the ice of any skate I’ve ever done,” Ruiter says now in reflecting back on a magical night at Tribute Communities Centre. “It was really special for me because, coming back from a difficult year the year before, it just felt like redemption a little bit.

“After the injury, it was really tough that next year to come back from. So to have that really special moment … it meant the world to me.”

‘The injury’ Ruiter is referring to was a rather gruesome mishap in practice in November 2021. During an awkward tumble to the ice, she had her skate blade carve into the back of her left leg, cutting through a pair of calf muscles. “It took a long time to heal,” she said, and it effectively put an end to her season (she missed Skate Canada Challenge, the qualifying event for 2022 nationals in Ottawa), which had started off in a promising way with silver and bronze medals in her first two Junior Grand Prix events (she was the first Canadian woman to double up that way since Diane Szmiett in 2008). And this was after a 2020-21 season that was scuttled for all but a handful of Canadian skaters by the COVID-19 pandemic, which left rinks shuttered around the country for long stretches of time.

Ruiter eventually got back on the ice and started to do “normal things” in training, but then around late April-early May in 2022, “things started to slow down. I wasn't able to jump very well. Then (doctors) found a lot of scar tissue buildup around my ankle, so I couldn’t bend my ankle or jump off of it.” It led to a summer of frustration for her.

“In the summer, she started having residual effects from the scar tissue that was built up. So it took awhile to figure out exactly what was going on (it turned out to be some nerve damage in the leg),” said Scott Davis, the two-time U.S. national champion and 1994 Olympian who coaches Ruiter at the Calalta Figure Skating Club in Calgary.

At no point, however, did Ruiter entertain the thought that what she was enduring might derail her biggest skating dreams at such a young age.

“Not in my head. That wasn’t happening in my head,” said Ruiter, who had heard from doctors that it might take her a full year to feel like herself on the ice again (they were right). “They said I could come back stronger and I wanted to prove them right. So that’s what my goal was. It was just fight, it was just grit. It was pure grit to get to the end. I knew there was an end, so I just wanted to fight for that end. And then once you find it, nothing feels greater.”

“It’s just setbacks, but they’re part of life,” she said in Oshawa. “You’ve just got to work through them and stay passionate and motivated and keep your eyes on what you want, and you just have to keep pushing for it.

“(Competing again) just seemed like a distant dream, but one I wanted to hold on to. I didn’t want to ever give up on it because it’s my dream, it’s what I love to do. Just that it became a reality is amazing … Now, every time I can explode off (her left foot) and jump, it makes me so happy.”

You hear comments like that, and it’s pretty clear that Ruiter is a very driven young woman. And it’s that desire and resilience that Davis believes propelled her all the way to being able to shine so brightly in Oshawa.

“She’s obviously super diligent with her off-ice stuff as well, and with getting healthy,” he said. “It just put a little delay to our season, but the intention was to come to Canadians and do programs like that.”

(in an interview with CBC Calgary back in February, Davis called Ruiter the most driven athlete he’d ever worked with in his 20 years of coaching, saying “I’ve never experienced anyone that has that drive and passion for the sport and also the self-motivation, which is amazing”).

Davis also calls her “very motivated technically. She has the two triple-triples, she wants to do the triple-triple at the end of the short” (while she isn’t there yet with triple Axels and quadruple jumps, Ruiter says “that’s what I dream about. I really want that one day”).

When Ruiter finally got back on the ice without interruption in September 2022, it was soon full steam ahead into a new season. After competing in her sectionals, she was assigned to the Ice Challenge in November in Graz, Austria, where she earned the silver medal, finishing just 2.07 points behind gold medallist Anna Pezzetta of Italy (Ruiter won the free skate, a portent of things to come). Then came a sixth-place finish at the Skate Canada Challenge in Winnipeg, which qualified her for nationals. And we all know what happened there, although Ruiter hardly expected to be standing on the podium, given what she had been through just to get to that point.

“Oh my gosh, it feels absolutely incredible,” she said at the time. “It was so unexpected. To skate my best skate and earn a medal on top of it … I still can’t believe it … It was a dream come true just to skate that well. To see a score like that meant the world to me and to finish second, that just felt surreal. I’m so proud of that.”

Her renaissance in Oshawa convinced Skate Canada to send her to the World Junior Championships as Canada’s lone women’s entry. That event at the beginning of March was especially special to Ruiter because it was held in Calgary at the Markin MacPhail Centre at WinSport — her primary training base in the city she now calls home.

“It was probably one of my favourite events that I’ve ever done,” said Ruiter, who placed 10th and opened up a second spot for Canadian women at 2024 Junior Worlds. “It was really cool. Honestly, I feel like I performed at my best and just loved that feeling of performing for a home crowd. There’s nothing like that to me.”

For Ruiter, this was her second shot at Junior Worlds (she placed 31st in 2020 as a 13-year-old and didn’t qualify for the free skate), “but this one felt like I had the experience of the first time under my belt. I was just so excited to have that second shot at it, and I got to perform in front of my family and friends and everyone there. That was really fun.”

She’ll get that experience again in January, when the 2024 Canadian Championships are scheduled to be held in the same building (she’s expected to be the biggest challenger there to two-time defending champion Maddie Schizas). “I actually train there for most of the year, so that’s what made it so cool to do Junior Worlds there,” said Ruiter. “For the past three or four years, that’s really been my second home.”

Ruiter’s first home in life was Ottawa, where she was born, and came to be involved in skating in the most Ottawa of ways. Her parents, Kris and Victoria, would take the family (Ruiter has three sisters, Keaghan, Vaunya and Vyan, who also all competed in figure skating) out to skate on the Rideau Canal, which is known lovingly in the capital as “the world’s longest outdoor skateway.” She still has fond memories of those wholesome first days on the ice, which started when she was four years old and planted an early seed of passion for skating.

“I miss it so much!” she said of skating on the canal. “That’s honestly where I fell in love with skating. It is such an experience to skate there. It’s just the freedom. It goes on for kilometres and kilometres and it’s just open ice.”

(Ruiter still has plenty of family in Ottawa and in Montreal, and they would no doubt love to see her get the chance to be Canada’s lone women’s entry at the 2024 World Championships in Montreal. “There is nothing I would love to do more than represent Canada at Worlds at home in Montreal. Honestly, nothing. That would just be the best opportunity ever,” she says).

Her first steps in training to be a competitive skater were taken at the venerable Gloucester Skating Club (best known as the home of 1988 Olympic silver medallist Elizabeth Manley) under the tutelage of coach Darlene Joseph, who saw promise in Ruiter at an early age. A few years later, the 2014 Canadian championships came to her hometown and Ruiter eagerly soaked up every moment of it — especially the chance to see her idol Kaetlyn Osmond win her second of three Canadian titles (Osmond, as you no doubt know, would go on to become a World champion in 2018, the first Canadian woman in 45 years to do so, after claiming the bronze medal at the PyeongChang Winter Olympics).

“We got the whole week of tickets, watched every practice, every competition … I loved it,” said Ruiter, whose older sister was a flower retriever for the event. “Getting to watch (Osmond) live was really inspiring for me.”

The inspiration grew even more when the family moved to Edmonton in 2016 (Ruiter’s father was transferred there in his job with the federal government) and, at 10 years old, she found herself training at the same Ice Palace Skating Club as Osmond and her coach, Ravi Walia.

Let’s just say she did a little bit of fangirling about all of that.

“Oh my gosh, I can’t say enough wonderful things about her, not just as a skater and as a person,” said Ruiter, who admits to being “so star-eyed” when having a few conversations with her idol. “I got to skate in Edmonton for a year when we first moved west, and getting to watch her and be around her was just so inspiring because she was just the most beautiful skater, beautiful person … I just wanted to be like her.”

The season she spent at Ice Palace was the one which ended with Osmond winning her first World medal, a silver, in Helsinki, Finland. “I got to be a part of the welcome home party. We did a poster contest. (The club) went above and beyond and it was so special for everybody. It was like her victory was ours. They made such a family out of the club and it was wonderful.”

Ruiter can also tell you exactly where she was when Osmond won her World title a year later and yes, she watched every second of it intently. By then, her father’s job had shifted again to Calgary and she had begun working with the coaching team of Davis and Jeff Langdon there.

“I can still remember where I watched it. I was at WinSport at a table with my sisters watching, and I remember just being glued to it,” she said. “For her to have that moment was just beautiful.”

When Ruiter won her silver medal in Oshawa, the now-retired Osmond was in the building, working as a commentator on the television broadcast of the women’s event. To call that a bit of a treat … now, that would be an understatement. “That meant so much to me, to see her up there. It was really surreal,” she said.

She’ll get more chances to experience that in the season ahead. Ruiter will make her senior Grand Prix debut at Skate Canada International in Vancouver (before that, she’ll compete at Autumn Classic International in Montreal at the end of September).

“I am so excited. Just getting to see my name on the Grand Prix list and at Autumn Classic … I looked it up and saw my name on that paper and it was ‘woahhh,’” she said. “There’s just so many amazing skaters and to see my name, I’m just so excited for the opportunities.”

And she gets to do it with a “normal” summer of training under her belt. In early August, she competed at Cranberry Cup, a summer event in Boston, and came home with a bronze medal. She spent productive time back home in Ontario, visiting Langdon at his current base in Oakville, Ont., and Wilson in Toronto to add some new choreographical touches to her programs. And yes, they’re the same ones as last season — in Ruiter’s mind, there’s still plenty of life in them, and more room to grow.

“I just wasn’t really ready to part with them. I love those programs and I wasn’t ready to switch,” said Ruiter. “I wanted to see where I could go with these for one more year. I only used them a handful of times (last season), so I’m excited to get to hopefully use them more often this season.”

So yes, she’ll continue to be inspired by ‘Inspiration’ (which is performed by Florian Christl & The Modern String Quintet) for several more months yet. That “light at the end of tunnel” that it brings to her mind … well, let’s just say it’s shining brighter than ever these days.

And Ruiter couldn't be more thrilled to keep basking in its glow.

(ALL PHOTOS: Danielle Earl/Skate Canada)