Benoît Richaud might be one of the most visible people at the 2026 Winter Olympic Games. Not because he’s a star athlete, but because he is coaching 16 figure skaters from 13 different countries. Each time one of them is on the ice, he stands on the rink’s edge, changing into the jacket of their team.
Richaud has become somewhat famous for this move. Olympics viewers began catching on to the French coach’s antics just a few days into the Games when they noticed the same slender bald man sitting next to so many different skaters. He always had on the jacket of the team he was sitting with in the “kiss and cry,” but his stoic, thoughtful expression remained the same. Soon his omnipresence went viral.
But, as Richaud tells WIRED Italia, he could have been even more of a presence around the ice. He’s currently coaching 16 Olympians, but that’s just the number of them that qualified. “I actually coach a lot more of them,” he says.
Having such a large roster of athletes to coach is not the easiest thing in the world. Yet Richaud makes it look natural. It’s all about planning, he says. Much of his choreography work has to be done after the World Championships, which are typically held in March. So from April until July he has a “big window” to create new choreography. From there he starts to work with the skaters he’s coaching, to take stock of where they are and what they want to be doing.
Sometimes Richaud’s skaters travel to him, sometimes he travels to them. If he needs to update the choreography, he can do so via the internet. “It is very useful because today, with the phone and new technologies, we can do much more and do it much faster,” he says. “I get almost all of my skaters’ programs every day, and this helps me understand what I need to improve to make the program more effective.”
Coaching so many athletes comes with several challenges. One is simply remembering the choreography and details of every skater’s program. The other is riding the emotional roller coaster of watching so many performances and then waiting for the athletes’ scores.
“It’s difficult,” Richaud says. “Because you experience these waves of very strong emotions. I happened to have very strong ones in these Olympics. I had a skater who was third and then ended up off the podium. On the other side, I had another skater, a Canadian, who came here for his first Olympics. He had never even skated at Worlds and he finished fifth, less than a point off the podium.”
Coaching so many skaters it’s hard to imagine Richaud doesn’t have a favorite, but he says he doesn’t. Each one gets 100 percent, he says, and being sad for one and happy for another “balances your emotions.”
“There are times when I cry and times when I have so much joy inside that I have a hard time even controlling myself,” Richaud says. “You experience these emotional peaks that we all experience—only I experience them very quickly.”
Despite the fact that he’s among the most sought-after coaches in figure skating, the public didn’t really know much about Richaud until these Olympics, when he’s constant coat-switching put him in the public eye. While he says his newfound fame is unexpected, he’s grateful for the attention it brings to the sport.
Figure skating, Richaud argues, isn’t quite as popular on social media as it could be. By going viral, he hopes to bring more attention to the sport, which he calls “one of the most beautiful in the world.”
He’s still amazed his jackets have made him a social media sensation. “I saw the first and thought, ‘Ah, funny.’ Then two, then three, then four,” Richaud says. “Often they don’t even mention me, but they come to me because people send them, literally from all over the world. It’s a good and fun feeling, and I’m happy for skating.”
