Kaitlyn Weaver: ‘There was so much more to me than I was able to show’

Several months after coming out publicly as a queer woman, Canadian ice dance star Kaitlyn Weaver was doing a show in Nashville when another woman approached her and asked, “Are you and Andrew dating?”

The woman was referring to Andrew Poje, Weaver’s ice dance partner of 15 years. Weaver told her no, and the conversation flowed into a different topic, before the woman interrupted Weaver to ask her the same question.

Weaver answered again: no. “I told her, ‘I have a girlfriend’ and she did not understand. She looked so disparaged that I wasn’t dating Andrew,” she recalls.

Weaver, who represented Canada at the Sochi and Pyeongchang Olympics, had a long, successful career performing love stories on the ice with Poje. The two of them share three world championship medals, a loving friendship, but not, despite what fans may assume from their very well-executed acting, a romance.

As an athlete, Weaver never wanted to let an audience down. “I was so afraid that people would think of us as inauthentic. I never wanted to risk feeling like I was faking what I loved to do,” Weaver says. “But there was so much more to who I was than what I was able to show.”

Turns out, who she is is so much more than a figure skater. It’s a simple fact, but one that wasn’t always an easy pill to swallow. Weaver and Poje haven’t competed since March 2019, but the pair were still doing shows and as long as she was still skating, Weaver did not need to think about her identity outside of the rink. When the pandemic hit, however, she was forced to stop training for a while.

“When we’re faced with a global pandemic and hundreds of thousands of people are dying, I didn’t want to consider the skating side of myself as important anymore,” Weaver explains.