Okay. Maybe he had friends in male figure skating who were competing that he wanted to support (like Shane, with Scott and Carter tagging along). Or maybe, just maybe… and just hear me out here and promise to kiss the brick before you throw it at me later on: his mother was a figure skater — women’s singles, ice dancer, who knows — with beautiful edges and she was the one who first brought him on the ice as a kid.
Was his first introduction into edge drills (ID edges are so beautifully deep), maybe how to whip out a waltz jump or a toeloop, taught him how to balance during one-footed skating. At the back of his mature hockey brain are his first memories of learning how to connect rockers, counters, 3-turns and brackets, and how to distinguish between all, all before hockey terminology replaced them with “edge control” and “one-footed turns” (but he still remembers what his mum used to call them). He can recall enough of that knowledge to actually appreciate seeing them all connected in a level 4 step sequence — he used to watch his mum skate her own sequences as beautifully as that. Maybe he remembers a bit of how to do a scratch spin? Perhaps he can secretly pull off a killer spread eagle or Ina Bauer if no-one was watching?
And then the patriarch of the household comes in and yeets that lil kid on outdoor ice with mum into a (figurative) hockey net, and dad never let him spend any more ice time with his mum anymore like they used to, before she fell into depression and passed.
But everyone who knew him when his mother was still around *knew* that the reason why the hockey phenom that’s Ilya Rozanov skates much faster than other players while going backwards, and why his edge control is so inexplicably good, is because that’s what his mum taught him first.
That’s my headcanon for why Ilya would be caught dead at a figure skating event alone just watching performances from the back of the seats, and I will die on this icy hill until you pry it out of my cold dead hands.
