Ice Castles 2010

Lexie Winston, Taylor Firth, a sixteen-year-old from Waverly, Iowa, dreams of becoming a champion figure skater. Her boyfriend, Nick Peterson, Rob Mayes, dreams of playing hockey.

Coached by a family friend and former skater Beulah Smith, Lexie enters a regional championship over the objections of her father, Marcus Winston, Henry Czerny. The event marks the moment she is noticed by the elite coach Deborah Mackland, who sees a rare spark in the teenager despite her limited training and relatively late start.

Guided by Deborah, Lexie leaves her quiet hometown for Colorado Springs to train at the renowned Broadmoor World Arena. Her arrival brings a mix of awe and friction among the other trainees, who are unsettled by the attention she attracts and the extraordinary opportunities opening up for her.

As Lexie makes the jump to the senior championship level, her life undergoes a dramatic transformation. She rises to stardom, strains her relationship with Nick, and begins dating a grown man, television broadcaster Brian Dockett. The new spotlight overwhelms her, and she steps away from a sponsorship party, seeking solace at a nearby outdoor skating rink.

On the ice, the moment of truth arrives. Lexie attempts a difficult triple jump, but misjudges her land and crashes into a line of tables and chairs chained at the rink’s edge. The fall leaves her with a serious head injury, a blood clot in her brain that robs her of sight and threads of vision — just enough to see light and blurry shapes. The doctors are unsure whether the damage will be permanent.

Returning home, Lexie retreats into a quiet, isolated life. Nick, still carrying resentment over the affair, urges her to come back to the world and to skating. Through the effort of Nick, Marcus, and Beulah, she begins to believe that her dream can endure even in the face of disability. Though nearly blind, she learns to read the reflections on the boards at the rink’s edge and to adapt her technique to rely on other senses and muscle memory.

Lexie trains for the sectional championship and delivers a flawless program that earns a standing ovation from the audience. Yet the danger of her condition resurfaces in a moment of vulnerability: the crowd discovers that her disability remains, not as a limitation but as a part of her new strength. Roses thrown onto the ice reveal the truth, and Nick hurries to her side, saying,

“We forgot about the flowers,”

as the realization settles in that Lexie’s path forward is not simply a return to who she was, but a courageous adaptation of who she has become.