Figure skater from the desert, New York financier, ethnic puzzle: Camden Pulkinen thrives on being an “enigma” in sport

Camden Pulkinen: A figure skater from the desert

The shared experiences that Pulkinen found in figure skating were something he was mostly missing while going to school.

He grew up in Scottsdale, a city in the greater Phoenix area hailed as “The West’s Most Western Town”. It is located at the northern point of the Sonoran Desert, the second largest hot desert in North America that stretches over 310,000 square kilometres sprinkled with cacti and yucca plants. In the summer, temperatures range in the mid-30s but can easily exceed 40 degrees Celsius.

Played on Arizona’s sun-drenched landscape, baseball and American football are the most popular sports in the area. Pulkinen, however, chose a different route.

As a five-year-old, he followed his older sister Elena to the ice rink and while she has since cast figure skating into the realm of hobbies, Pulkinen stayed in the sport. This made him the only figure skater in a high school of 4,000 students.

Wishing to progress his skating further, Pulkinen considered a jump to another desert state to train at the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Training Centre in Colorado. His parents were not thrilled with that option. It would be an expensive undertaking, they said, and cautioned that he could be throwing his life away for sport.

“I was only 16, so I’d be living alone and that’s a hard thing for a parent to allow their kid to do. I also didn’t have the best results in skating prior to moving to Colorado,” Pulkinen said. “It’s not like, ‘Oh I just won nationals and I need to do this’. It was more like, ‘I got 12th or 11th at nationals in juniors out of 12 people and I think I can do it. I feel it somewhere inside me’.”

With this gut feeling spurring him on, Pulkinen packed his bags and made the 1,200-kilometre journey from Scottsdale to Colorado Springs.

It proved the right choice. The young skater enjoyed his best seasons after the move, finishing second at the U.S. Junior Championships in 2017 and moving up to first place in 2018. He also had two podium finishes at the Junior Grand Prix in 2017 and finished second in the Final.

“All these things happened because I moved to Colorado, because I took that leap of faith,” he said.