Figure skating is more than just spins and jumps… it’s about feeling every beat on the ice. Now imagine being diagnosed with a hearing disability at just two years old. Most people might give up on a sport where music is everything. But not Georgian ice dancer and 2022 Olympian, Diana Davis. After years of hard work, she’s now shared the story of her disability, just 56 days before the next Winter Olympics.

The 22-year-old recently opened up about a part of her life that few knew. On Instagram, she revealed, “I have bilateral sensorineural hearing loss of grade 3. At one point, it even reached grades 3-4.” This means she has severe to profound hearing loss in both ears, caused by problems in her inner ear or auditory nerve.

This type of hearing loss can affect speech clarity and make it difficult to distinguish certain consonant sounds. Hearing loss is measured in grades from 1 to 4, with grade 3 being a severe condition and grade 4 a profound condition that would make a sport like figure skating, which relies heavily on music, even more challenging.

And it was something that was affecting her “speech clarity” and making it “difficult to distinguish certain consonant sounds.” But this challenge did not begin on the ice.

Davis traced the cause back to a medical error at just two years old, when she was prescribed the wrong dose of antibiotics. Before that, she was an active, lively child who heard every sound, but afterward, she became a completely different child: “I stopped talking, stopped responding to things around me, and became quiet and withdrawn,” she recalled.

Despite this challenge, Davis did not let her hearing disability stop her. At the age of four, she began to speak again. As she says, “My speech was already different, so I was taken to speech therapist…we did audiograms so often that at some point I memorized the rhythm and just pressed the button randomly…after the audiogram showed that I supposedly had no hearing issues, they started giving me the test manually.”

She added, “When I started school, I tried wearing hearing aids but I didn’t like them at all…. the main reason why I eventually stopped wearing hearing aids altogether was that one time they made the ear mold in the wrong size, which caused inflammation of my trigeminal nerve.” The condition also affected how she interacted with the world: “When you live with something like this, your brain works differently: information reaches you later than it does for most people.”

Nevertheless, this has not prevented Davis from skating with her long-time partner and husband, Gleb Smolkin. “I can hear music well (except for certain frequencies), but I often can’t understand the words,” she wrote, noting she can “hear the intonation and feel the emotion.”  Initially, she preferred to remain quiet about her hearing loss, but now she’s looking at it from a different perspective.

“I want people who have the same condition not to feel ashamed or withdraw into themselves not to be afraid to try sports, and not to listen to those who try to limit them,” Davis asserted. “I’m sharing this not for sympathy but so that people with similar challenges can understand that it shouldn’t change a thing.” But all this success wouldn’t have been possible without the support of her mother.

A mother’s belief that shaped Diana Davis’s figure skating journey

Since Davis was a child, her mother, renowned Georgian-Russian figure skating coach Eteri Tutberidze, played a big part in her life. Knowing her daughter would need extra support, she didn’t limit Diana to just one activity.

Along with figure skating, she encouraged her to try swimming and other physical exercises to improve coordination, balance, and confidence. These small decisions helped Diana connect with her body and movement in ways that later became essential on the ice.

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As Diana grew older, skating became her main focus, but the journey was far from stable. During the 2016-17 season, she teamed up with Denis Pechuzhkin, another former student of Tutberidze. The partnership lasted only six months. Soon after, she paired with Fedor Varlamov for the 2017-18 season, competing only in domestic events before that partnership also ended. Through every change, her mother remained her constant support.

Despite the setbacks, Davis kept progressing. During her time with Varlamov, she earned the title of Master of Sports of the Russian Federation. But a turning point came in 2018 when Diana teamed up with Gleb Smolkin.

This partnership brought stability, both on and off the ice. In March 2022, however, their career faced uncertainty when Russian skaters were banned from international competition.

Instead of going back to Russia and competing in their native land, Davis, a dual Russian-American citizen, and Smolkin opted to stay in the United States. The couple married on 18 March 2022 and started the process to get Smolkin a green card. Although they originally denied their departure from Russia, all that changed in June 2023, when the Russian Figure Skating Federation officially released them.

Davis started representing Georgia, where she has a maternal connection with her two grandparents. Davis and Smolkin have since established their careers internationally.  They won silver at the 2024 CS Golden Spin of Zagreb and finished tenth overall at the 2025 World Championships in Boston. That helped her secure Georgia a spot at the 2026 Winter Olympics.

In all stages of her life, it has been her mother who believed in early encouragement and the philosophy that no obstacle could ever be used to determine the boundaries of what her daughter dreamed of in life.