In mid-April, ice dancers Karina Manta and Joseph Johnson announced they were stepping away from competition for a whole new adventure, joining the circus… really! In June, they'll head to Montreal to begin working with Cirque du Soleil on a project. Here, we take a trip back to Detroit and the U.S. Championships in January, where Manta and Johnson finished seventh after a spellbinding free dance.
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Bright-faced and whole-heartedly expressive, Joe Johnson has never been known in figure skating for his subtlety. He wears his heart (and humor and glee and good-natured smugness) on his sleeve, which often means an over-the-top greeting of a familiar face at the rink, or – in competition – a full commitment to whatever character he is portraying.
But on the Saturday afternoon of the GEICO U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Detroit in late January, Johnson's expression beamed throughout Little Caesars Arena from the kiss and cry, up on the jumbotron, and glowed into countless living rooms around the country.
"OH MY GOD," it said, in stunned disbelief.
"Oh. My. God."
Johnson and ice dance partner Karina Manta had just blown the roof off the place with their "Sweet Dreams" free dance, earning one of only a handful of standing ovations from the U.S. Championships crowd over the weekend. And with it, an oh-my-God-inducing 104.81 score, some 17 points better than their career best.
Exactly. You just try and hold your face together after something like that.
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This story neither starts nor ends rink-side in Detroit, where Manta and Johnson had long been waiting to make a thoughtful splash in 2019 in the poignant months following Karina's brave decision to come out as bisexual, making the duo the first all-queer team in figure skating history.
It starts, in a sense, some five years earlier, when the two were brought together on Valentine's Day (of all the days!) in 2014, both in search of a new ice dance partner and, as Manta remembers, in total silence: "We didn't speak that first day" of tryouts, she told me in an interview in November.
"I think she had her hands clasped the entire time," Johnson added.
What they are now – simply "Karina and Joe" or "Joe and Karina" in U.S.-figure-skating speak – are the best of friends, but that didn't happen overnight.
"You guys know you can talk to each other, right?" Johnson recalls coach Patti Gottwein saying to them that very first day. "The barrier started to come down slowly but surely, and now we are as thick as thieves."
What that meant for Karina and Joe was this, however: Hard work at World Arena in Colorado Springs while she went to school full time and he did as well, both of them teaching separate cardio classes. (Gyro tonics your thing? Joe's got you. Spin? That's Karina.)
The landscape of U.S. ice dance continued to grow and grow after Meryl Davis and Charlie White's historic gold in Sochi, and while they dedicated as much time to their craft as possible, teams like
Rachel Parsons and Michael Parsons and
Lorraine McNamara and Quinn Carpenter rose from the junior ranks and leap-frogged Karina and Joe.
Yet their goal remained: To work hard and skate their best. And skate their truth. Little did they know how impactful that could be.
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"I've worked with Karina and Joe for three years now… they're lovely people," Christopher Dean (yes, Christopher Dean!) tells me on the phone one day. "I've seen them grow from the young people they were into what they have become."
It was somewhere between that 2014-15 first season together and this past fall that Johnson came out to friends, family and the greater skating community as gay (though, as Joe points out, there was no big public "coming out" moment for him, it just sort of happened) and revealed a little more of himself to those who knew him well or knew him not at all.
"I would have killed for a [role model like]
Adam Rippon when I was 10 or 11," Johnson admits to me when we speak before U.S. Championships. "I knew when I was younger that I was gay [and] I was terrified. I didn't see anyone like me. I feel like if I would have been able to see myself in someone then I would have been more confident from a young age. It led me to this whole thought process of, 'The more that I can show I'm happy and proud of who I am, the better."'
The "better" also impacted Manta, who was as close to Johnson as anyone. As she struggled with her own sexual identity, Karina drew strength from what she saw her close friend do.
As Manta approached a year of dating girlfriend Aleena Gomez in the summer of 2018, her decision not to be outspoken about her sexuality (Karina identifies as bisexual) began to eat at her. When she finally decided to share herself on a bigger scale, she got cold feet.
"I wrote the poem in July or August, but it took me a while from that point to build up the courage for us to actually film the video," Manta wrote to me in an email. "The Saturday we actually filmed, it took us a million tries because I was so on edge about the whole thing. When we finally had a few takes that we were both okay with, I couldn't bring myself to post it right away. I waited until late Sunday night, figuring not as many people would see it, and I wouldn't have to deal with a ton of attention Monday morning. News spread, and people sort of gradually found out throughout the week. That week was pretty tough for me, just because I was worried about everyone's reactions, and I felt like I had to explain myself a lot, but I also had a ton of people who surrounded me with love and support. Joe was amazingly supportive during that time — constantly reassuring me that things would end up alright."
Posted on September 30
th, Manta's video, entitled "I'm With You" on YouTube, has received nearly 10,000 views.
"I'm super proud," Johnson says in a simple reaction. He added: "I think the importance of our visibility can't be downplayed... and in a small way I think we contribute to that in the space in which we occupy."
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After a strong performance in the rhythm dance on Friday night, Manta/Johnson sat in seventh. But their placement didn't matter much to them. What they wanted to do in the free dance was show their hearts to the audience. Show them what they could do.
To do that, they had crafted a free with Dean, their choreographer, a piece they felt like reached the rafters and beyond. "Innovative," is how Manta originally explained the free dance to me. She continued: "I think we really made this program about who we are as people and to show who we are as athletes."
Johnson followed that up: "We are trying to stay true to a choreographic vision that doesn't necessarily emulate any sort of script. We want to show that there can be all types… of dancers and characters to play. Chris is an evil genius for helping us do that."
Inside Little Caesars Arena, there was a feeling of anticipation as the opening chords of "Sweet Dreams" played over the loudspeaker. Already, Charlie White, commentating on TV for the weekend, felt like Karina and Joe had won the moment.
"It makes me really happy to know that they can use this sport to help themselves find their identity in art," he told me on the phone in the week prior.
Charlie's wife, the Olympic-silver-medal-winning Tanith White, was moved to tears on the NBCSN broadcast as the two skated.
Karina and Joe, meeting their moment, performed nearly flawlessly, the energy in the building growing as they neared the end of their free dance. As they hit their character step, the place roared with cheers. It only grew louder over the closing seconds of the program.
"[That free dance] was a celebration," Tanith said on the broadcast as the duo took bows to a standing ovation. "Karina told me how hard this was for her… to come out… but she wanted to do it so that could be a first, and then a second and then a third…"
White trailed off, overcome with emotion.
Meanwhile, Karina and Joe were making their way to the kiss and cry for their marks from the judges, which would subsequently be through the roof, prompting Joe's ultra-surprised-what-just-happened-face.
It was, as they say, "a moment," and one of the most memorable ones of the 2019 U.S. Championships. And in Karina and Joe's lives, too.
"We were there to have a magical skate," Karina said after. "After we got past the sliding movement I really started to feel the reaction of the crowd for the first time… but I also had to tell myself, 'Don't mess this up!' We didn't want to get carried away by it all."
Seeing people stand at the end of their program was "life-changing," Johnson describes it as.
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Sunday morning Karina and Joe woke up to a surprise: They were being asked to perform in the Skating Spectacular, the weekend's exhibition.
"We had an email asking us to be in the show," Johnson recalls. Manta adds: "It's so special for a team that didn't even end up on the podium to be asked to be in the exhibition. We were floored."
As they prepared to wrap up the memorable few days in Detroit, Johnson reflected on what the time had meant to them.
"We had so much support and so many people behind us this time… not just as athletes but as people," Joe said. "My heart was so full."
Manta says she knows how powerful their moment was, particularly on TV, being able to reach an audience that doesn't know much about them – or their story.
"What was taken from that skate" – by TV and (specifically) Tanith White's commentary – "is exactly we wanted to be taken away from it," Manta says.
What more can you ask?
"It felt like everything we wanted from that performance we got. And more," Johnson concludes.
And so did all of us, too.
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