By Harry Thompson
Isobel Carney leads such a busy life that 24 hours in a day isn’t nearly enough to cover everything she has going on.
From channeling her creativity as a content creator and aspiring model, to working part-time as certified nursing assistant, she still finds time to train as a competitive senior-level skater, crisscrossing New England, from her home rink in Newington, Connecticut, to Salem, New Hampshire, and Acton, Massachusetts, in search of available ice.
She has also followed her mother’s skate tracks and shares her passion and knowledge with a group of young skaters at the Finer Edge Figure Skating Club. All of this in addition to running a foundation (Bella’s Legacy) named in honor of her best friend Isabella Ramirez, a talented skater who passed away suddenly in December 2024 of cardiovascular disease.
Through her foundation’s work, Carney has partnered with Connecticut Children’s Hospital to raise money for its cardiology fund.
It’s a lot for the 23-year-old from Old Lyme, Connecticut, but she wouldn’t have it any other way. She owes a lot of her discipline and time-management skills to the sport she has essentially grown up with. Her mother, Sarah, first put her in skates at the age of 3 for a Learn to Skate program at the Cardinal Skating School at Wesleyan University, and before long Isobel and her twin brother, Jack, were skating in local ice shows. She made the transition to competitive singles skating at 8 and has been training hard ever since.
“Skating taught me that regardless of the talent you have or the level you start at, you can achieve anything as long as you stick with it,” says Carney, who touts her biggest skating achievement as competing at senior sectionals in Boston in 2024.
“I’m still competing to this day, which is not something that a lot of people can say, specifically in a sport like skating. And now, I get to pass along what I’ve learned to all my young kids and to teach them what it takes to not only be a good skater, but to be a good person in skating as well.”
More than just sharing her knowledge and experience as a senior-level skater, Carney is showing her students and the rest of the skating community what it means to power forward in the wake of challenges that life has thrown her way.
In 2021, she contracted a stomach infection and was given an antibiotic that caused an anaphylactic reaction. She went into the emergency room where the staff quickly tried to administer steroids through an IV when they struck a nerve, which paralyzed four fingers in her left hand and caused a condition called complex regional pain syndrome. While the CRPS has gone into remission, her hand function has never returned.
As any high-level skater will tell you, it takes all parts of the body working in concert to execute perfectly on the ice. When one element, in Carney’s case her hand, isn’t working properly, it can throw off other parts of her body.
“When you have something different about the way that your body moves, it will always affect skating because skating is so inherently physical in every single aspect of it,” she says. “Even something as small as a hand that won’t open can massively affect your program and the way you skate comes across to other people.”
Rather than use her hand as an excuse, Carney worked with choreographer, Svetlana Kulikova, “the most creative person I know,” to create a routine that plays to her strengths as a skater, of which there are many.
“If I keep getting mad at the fact that it’s happened, I’m never going to move forward. So eventually we figured out how to work around it,” she admits.
“It has been so interesting to learn how you can not only work around a disability but almost include it as like a part of the choreography.”
Carney has also incorporated what she’s learned in her own skating career to help her students deal with challenges in their own lives.
“I have kids who struggle. Some of them have anxiety or OCD or other things like that, and it’s made it so that learning how to work with their own disabilities has been so similar to working with my physical disability,” she says.
“I’m able to accommodate them and empathize with them and work with their disabilities rather than against them in a way that I’m not sure anyone else would learn, except by experience.”
As if she doesn’t already have enough on her plate, Carney is marking the days until she becomes a full-time college student. She was accepted into the ultra-competitive New York University, where she will study to become a certified pharmacy technician with her eye on pursuing a career as a cardiologist.
It’s a goal meant to honor her friend, Isabella, and to help others along the way. As she becomes a full-time college student, Carney knows that skating will take a back seat. Still, she plans to resume her coaching career during the summer months.
Giving back to the next generation of skaters is her way to not only pass along her passion for the sport but to share the important life lessons that she’s learned along the way.
“I hope to leave my mark by showing that strength in figure skating is not defined by perfection, but by persistence,” she says. “On the ice, I want to be remembered not just for my achievements or the jumps I have, but for the way that I continued to show up, despite everything that I have been through.”
“I want young skaters to look at someone like me and know that their dreams are achievable, even if their bodies or lives don’t follow the expected and typical path.”
