Above: Valentina Plazas and Maximilano Fernandez show their determination. The veteran pairs team said they are well prepared to make the most out of this Olympic season. Photo by Janet Liu
By Mimi McKinnis
A comeback season is significant. So is the Olympic season. For Valentina Plazas and Maximiliano Fernandez, they’re one and the same.
“I keep telling people that I’m hungry,” Fernandez said. “But at the end of the day, I’m starving.”
They earned the 2021 junior bronze medal in their U.S. Championships debut. By 2023, they’d broken the top-five in the U.S. senior ranks, on the ISU Grand Prix of Figure Skating circuit and at their first ISU championship event. By 2024, they were the U.S. senior bronze medalists and became the first U.S. pairs team in which both partners are of Latin descent to compete at the World Championships. What happened next wasn’t as smooth.
“I was dealing with [a nagging pain in my knee] for maybe two years, but especially that last year and a half or so before Worlds,” Fernandez said. “It’s something that happened over time — an overuse injury.”
The day after they returned from the event, Fernandez underwent the first of several treatment suggestions, most of which treated the symptoms, but not the cause.
“I didn’t know exactly what it was,” Fernandez said. “I was talking to a doctor, and they told me there was a procedure that could clear it all up. I’d try something and then I wouldn’t have pain for two weeks afterward. Then that became one week afterward, then at one point, nothing was working.”
After months pushing through the pain, and trying different procedures to alleviate it, with their 2024 Grand Prix assignments looming, Fernandez decided it was time for a second opinion. With that decision, he learned the tendon in his knee had separated from the bone — and that surgery was the only way to fix the problem, relieve the pain and get training back on track.
“After Worlds there was so much on and off training,” Plazas said, “and that in and of itself was difficult.”
They withdrew from their events, and last October, Fernandez traveled to The Steadman Clinic in Vail, Colorado, for surgery. He wouldn’t return to Plazas, or their coaches Jim Peterson and Amanda Evora Will, in Canton, Michigan, for six-and-a-half months.
“Unfortunately, I’ve been through this operation with two different skaters before,” Peterson said. “I think what we understood from that experience is that the best way for Max to truly heal and to be ready for this Olympic year at the highest level was if he stayed in Colorado, around the team that could help him rehab every day.”
Fernandez moved to the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado, to rehabilitate his knee and treat a severe concussion he suffered in training earlier in the year. Plazas remained in Canton, training pairs as best she could alone.
“In those six months, I was able to work on my jumps and my skating skills, but I also worked a lot on my mental approach,” Plazas said. “But the depression was real, especially between December and January when all my teammates were training for nationals. I was still training as much as I could, but nothing’s the same as doing what we usually get to do every day.”
“What Valentina and I could do was prepare,” Peterson said. “We’d have Zoom calls with music and ideas for order of elements. We made sure we were upgrading our elements and that the plan was in place. That way when Max came back to Michigan, we were hitting the ground running.”
With the help and support of their respective teams — Plazas with her sports psychologist, Peterson and Evora Will, and Fernandez with his medical team and fellow Olympic and Paralympic athletes at the Training Center — the pair resumed full training in May 2025.
“The first time we did a throw together after everything, I asked her, ‘How did it feel?’” Fernandez recalled. “She said ‘It feels like home.’”
“We melded back together so easily, and we were better than we were before,” Plazas added. “We were healed and better individually, which made us a better team. The improvements we made last season weren’t made on the ice, but we never stopped working really hard.”
Just three months later, Plazas and Fernandez arrived at U.S. Figure Skating’s annual Champs Camp in Boston with finished costumes, fully completed programs and an arsenal of performance-ready elements. With a third spot for U.S. pairs at the 2026 Olympic Winter Games in Milan Cortina still up in the air, they knew the work they had done was massive — but the work that lies ahead is, too. The difference? This one’s a challenge they’re eager to tackle.
“We’re up for it. We’re excited for it,” Peterson said. “They skated a clean short at camp, and made a few mistakes in the long. It was a strong event for August, and we’re proud that we were part of that.”
“We haven’t competed internationally since March 2024,” Plazas said. “There’s no expectations at this point, but I trust that our training is going to show. Nobody expected us to be as ready as we were at Champs Camp.”
“We’re the underdogs, and we know that going into this year,” Fernandez added. “We’re going to show everyone the new Val and Max.”
