There are occupational hazards to pairs figure skating. Concussions, dislocated shoulders, being dropped on the ice. Falling in love with the person whose job it is to prevent the last one seems to be another one, too.
Riku Miura and Ryuichi Kihara Make It Official
On Sunday, Olympic champions Riku Miura and Ryuichi Kihara — better known collectively as “Riku-Ryu” — announced their engagement. The photographs showed Kihara down on one knee on an ice rink, ring in hand, Miura beaming beside him, the ring already sparkling on her finger.
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The reaction in Japan was ecstatic, although perhaps not especially shocked. Miura herself joked that she was surprised by how unsurprised everyone seemed.
Fair enough. Japan had spent years wondering what, exactly, these two were to each other.
Miura and Kihara paired up in 2019, when she was 17 and he was 26 and considering whether to continue competing after the end of his previous partnership. They were introduced through a mutual friend, retired ice dancer Misato Komatsubara, who told Miura that Kihara was “a really nice guy,” which led to a tryout in Nagoya in July 2019; once they skated together, both felt the fit almost immediately.
They won team silver at the 2022 Beijing Olympics, then swept the Grand Prix Final, Four Continents and World Championships during the 2022-23 season. At the Milano Cortina Olympics this February, they went from fifth after the short program to first after a record-breaking free skate, becoming the first Japanese pair ever to win Olympic gold.
At their retirement press conference that April, a moderator said that Riku-Ryu could resemble siblings, friends or even a husband-and-wife manzai comedy duo. So what were they? Miura answered for both of them: being together had become so ordinary it was difficult to define, more like family than anything else. Then, together, the two of them landed on the same non-answer: “We’ll leave that to your imagination.”
Four months later, imagination is no longer required.
Figure skating has, of course, produced many couples whose on-ice intimacy eventually became real-life romance. American Olympic ice dancers Madison Chock and Evan Bates skated together for years before they began dating; they married in 2024. Canada’s Marie-Jade Lauriault and Romain Le Gac have been married and skating together for over a decade, too. Partners train together every day, travel together, perform romance together and, in pairs skating, quite literally entrust their bodies to one another.
For Miura and Kihara, that trust was tested repeatedly through injuries, including Miura’s shoulder problems and Kihara’s back injury. Over seven years, they became Olympic champions, retired from competition together this spring and announced plans to continue skating professionally. Then, Kihara proposed where most of the magic had happened: on the ice.
In their engagement announcement, the pair wrote that after sharing happy moments and difficult ones, they had gradually become people neither could imagine life without. For anyone who spent the past seven years watching Riku-Ryu, the bigger revelation may have been that there was finally a name for their relationship.
