A quarter-life crisis is a rite of passage in your mid-20s. A messy, disorienting milestone that forces you to question who you are and who you want to become. For Maia Shibutani, that reckoning arrived with a life-altering kidney cancer diagnosis at the peak of her Olympic skating career.
She and her older brother Alex—the duo the world came to know as the Shib Sibs—had just earned two bronze medals at the 2018 Winter Olympic Games in South Korea, making history as the first ice dancers of Asian descent to medal at the Games. On a technical level, their track record had always been impressive: Their inventive choreography and storytelling had earned them medals at every US Championships they had competed in for 14 consecutive years. But many would argue that it’s their unique sibling chemistry and charisma that set them apart, drawing in hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
Then came the diagnosis that would force Shibutani to walk away from the sport that had for so long defined her. Fans didn’t know when—or even if—the young phenom would return to the ice. That is, until early last year, when she announced a surprise “comeback” for the 2025-26 Olympic season.
At the time of our interview, it’s about two months before the US Figure Skating Championships, which will determine whether the Shib Sibs make it to the Olympics.
“Skating was my dream,” Shibutani, now 31, tells me. “Competing at the Olympics was my dream. I made that dream come true between the ages of 4 and 23, but I’m so grateful that I’ve been able to recommit and make this decision again. It feels even more powerful this time around.”
The hard-fought path to her long-awaited return is as much a story of emotional recovery as a physical one. For seven years, she worked to heal physically from a grueling surgery, but perhaps even more challenging was making peace with the diagnosis that shook her sense of self. Now, she’s pulling back the curtain on what that time looked like—and how she’s redefining what comes next.
In the fall of 2019, not long before the world slipped into a global pandemic, Shibutani was supposed to attend a family screening of Jon Chu’s musical drama In the Heights when an unusual stomach pain stopped her—one unlike any injury or illness she’d experienced in her athletic career. “For me to be like, ‘No, no, no, I won’t go to the screening. I need to go to the ER’—it was just completely out of character,” she recalls.
While the discomfort was ultimately caused by a virus, a separate scan later revealed a more concerning abnormality: She had SDH-deficient renal cell carcinoma—a rare and hereditary form of kidney cancer.
“Cancer is a pretty terrifying word for anyone to hear, much less think about,” Shibutani says. She underwent a procedure to remove the tumor, which involved multiple incisions into her stomach. The recovery, she adds, took much longer than she expected—ironically made more difficult by her strong abdominal muscles. “My body did not react kindly,” she elaborates. “I had a very hard time walking for a couple of weeks, because the movement would affect my stomach area.” And for an elite athlete whose life was built around motion and activity, the mental toll was as heavy as the physical.
“I felt very disconnected from my body,” Shibutani says. And unlike any previous setback, “it was the first challenge I’d ever experienced alone.” Prior to this, she at least had her brother going through challenges alongside her—the grueling training seasons, the relentless pressure of competition, even the weight of family stress. This time, however, no one could truly relate to what she was going through.
“Even if it felt like I had the support, I still felt isolated.”
What’s interesting, though, is she says this without a hint of bitterness in her voice. Just a measured calm.
“It never felt unfair, and anger wasn’t what crossed my mind,” Shibutani tells me when I share my observation. Instead, she says, she was consumed by fear—about the future of her health and her career—and confusion about how this could happen to someone who had been physically active her whole life with no family history of kidney cancer. But underlying it all, she says, was gratitude: “If I can go back, I wouldn’t change anything, because the way that it forced me to change as a person is something that I’m very proud of,” she explains. “I really believe that it encouraged me to grow in a unique way.”
Part of that growth involved reevaluating her priorities. If she was going to return to the world of professional ice dancing, it couldn’t be driven by pressure or expectation. It had to be for herself, for the sheer joy of it. That’s why she started skating again in 2022—but only in private, she tells me, and definitely not competitively.
Back then, “there was no intent to train,” she’s quick to point out. “[Alex] encouraged me to reconnect with what I love about the sport so much, which is the self-expression. The movement. The performing.” It was only after giving herself time and space to enjoy the ice that the thought of competing again began to take shape. “We were thoughtful about making sure we were doing this for the right reasons,” Shibutani adds. “For me, it was that sense of having more potential”—the drive behind her comeback.
I ask Shibutani how she feels about this pressure-laden word that seems to be following her story: comeback.
“Words have such specificity and power,” Shibutani says, and it’s clear this is a topic she’s thought long and hard about. “Comeback…. It’s like reverting back to something, whereas I feel like I’ve only been taking steps forward. I’m only becoming even more of myself.”
Again, there’s that tranquil quality in her voice, which is impressive given the reality of such unsettling what-ifs she’s contending with. What if she can’t perform again? What if the cancer returns? I ask Shibutani these questions towards the end of our hour-long conversation. She pauses, thoughtful.
That’s when she tells me that last August, she suffered another unexpected setback during one of her practices, a knee fracture. “It tested my resilience, my grit,” she says. “It was a moment where I thought all of the hard work would mean nothing, because I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to compete or skate. But fortunately, I was able to recover.”
Just as she couldn’t have predicted another injury, or her cancer diagnosis, she knows she can’t predict what’s ahead either. Accepting the uncertainty took years of inner work. While she confesses that traditional therapy didn’t click for her, she found her own ways to reconnect with her mind and body. One of them was through reading, or what she refers to as bibliotherapy. “Because even though we all feel isolated—I certainly did at the time—there are more threads that are in common through the passage of time and experience that can help you feel less alone,” she explains. (Beaming with pride, she tells me she’s read more than 100 books in 2020, including The Gifts of Imperfection by Brené Brown, Grit by Angela Duckworth, and The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron.)
Leisurely walks became an important part of her routine too. What started as the only form of exercise available to her during recovery (and the COVID-19 lockdown) grew into a meaningful self-care ritual, she says—a way to notice the beauty of life (like the little plants peeking through the cracks of the sidewalk). But also, walks allowed her to slow down mentally; to pause and reflect on the subtle moments her loved ones showed up again and again, and the one constant that had always anchored her—the sheer joy of performing on ice.
“And so this journey back to competing has supercharged the connectivity that I have with my mind and body,” she says. “But it’s certainly something that’s taken time.”
Now, Shibutani is at a place in her life where she’s excited to train for the Olympics alongside her brother while navigating high stakes—and even higher expectations. Like most teammates, the two experience tension. And like most siblings, they get into heated arguments, though a recent one caught on-camera seemed to go beyond routine brother-sister bickering. In October, a controversial video leaked in which Alex can be heard using expletives and berating his younger sister during a rehearsal. (When it was recorded remains unclear.) “I think that it’s very understandable that no one would want their private moment to be shared in that way,” Shibutani says, adding that they worked through the incident almost immediately after. (In November, Alex issued a public apology, saying that he “felt terrible” for losing his temper.) “What I will say is that we’re closer and stronger than ever because we know each other,” she tells me now. “We know the bond that we have and what we are working towards together.”
As the 2026 Winter Games draw closer, the pressure is impossible to ignore. There’s the scrutiny, the comparisons, the question of whether the Shib Sibs can be “as good” as they once were. Right now, Shibutani is concerned with none of that.
“To me, I define winning as how you show up every day,” she says. It’s a definition that looks very different from the one she held when she was younger—and before cancer reshaped her perspective. Ice dancing, by nature, is a competitive and subjective sport built around impressing judges. “When I was 23, I was trying to be something that people would admire or love,” she says. “Now, I feel like I’m not trying to be someone else. I’m just being myself.”
By that measure, then, Shibutani has already won—by reclaiming her body, her voice, and her passion for the sport. So maybe this isn’t your traditional comeback story. In her own words, “it feels like I’m coming home.”
Photographer: Molly Matalon
Hair: Ian James
Makeup: Jenna Anton
Production: Leigh Culbertson
