TheLeader_VOLUME_XXVII_ISSUE1_Spring2026 - Flipbook - Page 35
NEWS OF OUR MEMBERS
Daughter of Leadership100 Members
is Ice Dance Breakout Star
with Teammate in Winter Olympics 2026
“I felt like a rock star for a second,” Kolesnik added with
a wide smile.
“We're going for gold,” Zingas added with a nod. “You
heard it here first.”
Emilea Zingas and Vadym Kolesnik in breakout
performance at the XXV Olympic Winter Games
- Milano-Cortina 2026.
Emilea Zingas, 23, daughter of Leadership 100 members
Christopher and Marsha Zingas, physicians from Grosse
Pointe Farms, Michigan, and her teammate, Vadym
Kolesnik, 24, from Kharkiv, Ukraine, stole the show with
a stunning performance on Wednesday February 11 at
the XXV Olympic Winter Games-Milano Cortina 2026,
as USA ice dancers, placed among the top five teams and
are also the youngest competitors among the top 10.
The duo shouted with joy when a personal best score of
123.19 popped up on the screen above the Milano Ice
Skating Arena on Wednesday evening. Combined with
their personal best rhythm dance score, 83.53, they had
bumped their personal best total to 206.72.
“The score was shocking to us because we've had a lot of
great performances over this season and I don't know if
this 100 per cent felt like the best and cleanest one, but I
think it was the most emotional,” Zingas told
Olympic.com (the official website of the Olympics)
reporter and news producer Lena Smirnova. “I'm really
happy that the judges received the emotion that we were
bringing and the crowd did, too. The crowd was so
encouraging. When we heard them screaming at the end
of the program, I was thinking, ‘This is it, let's go!’”
There are a lot of unexpected plot twists in the story of
how Emilea Zingas and Vadym Kolesnik got here,
according to Philip Hersh, special contributor to the
NBC Olympics.com, who has covered figure skating at
every Winter Olympics since 1980. “Who would have
imagined a convert from singles skating in 2022 and an
ice dancer from a war-ravaged city in Ukraine could be a
team in this position so quickly?”
Emilea Zingas and Vadym Kolesnik acknowledged
for placement at the XXV Olympic Winter Games
- Milano-Cortina 2026.
“I actually had no idea how difficult switching to ice
dance would be,” Zingas said.
“Obviously, skating with somebody else is a huge change,
something I had never done before. Every day the first
year, I was learning 10 new things, compared to just
getting small critiques or making small adjustments in
singles.”
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