I sat across from Louisa Warwin on a bright morning and quickly realized this was not going to be a conversation simply about figure skating. It became a conversation about representation, reinvention, and the kind of self-belief built one fall, one comeback, one sharpened blade at a time.
Louisa is speaking from Las Vegas, where she now spends much of her time coaching and building her wellness brand, though her story begins in Oslo, Norway, where she was born to a Nigerian mother and Ghanaian father. Her story, remarkably, begins before she ever stepped on the ice.
Louisa Warwin (L) Winning a Medal with Colleague (R)
“When my mom was pregnant with me, she saw a Black figure skater at the Olympics. She had never seen a Black figure skater before,” Louisa tells me.
That skater was Surya Bonaly, one of the sport’s great revolutionaries.
Surya Bonaly
For readers who may not know her, Bonaly was not simply a champion, she was a disruptor. A nine-time French champion and five-time European champion, she became famous for refusing to shrink herself to fit a sport that often favored delicacy over power. At the 1998 Nagano Olympics, still recovering from a ruptured Achilles tendon and unlikely to medal, she made history by performing a banned backflip landed on one blade, the first woman ever to do so at the Olympics. Judges deducted points for the illegal move. The crowd gave her a standing ovation. Many still consider it one of the most defiant and iconic acts in Olympic history.
Surya Bonaly at the 1998 Olympics
For Louisa, Surya was not abstract inspiration. She was blueprint.
“I had her posters on my wall growing up,” she says. “I would do the Bielmann whenever I walked past the photo.”
That image of a little girl in Oslo looking up at a Black skater rewriting the rules says almost everything about why representation matters. It shaped not just Louisa’s imagination, but her trajectory. She would go on to become the first Black woman to compete at national championships in Norway, a breakthrough she shares with quiet humility, though its significance runs deep. In a sport long associated with narrow ideals of who belongs, her presence alone shifted something.
She speaks candidly about the realities of navigating that space. The tights that never matched her skin tone. The moment as a young skater in Lake Arrowhead when a child pointed out she was wearing “white girl tights,” sending her to a bathroom in tears. Even now, she tells me women still message her asking where to find tights and costume mesh in darker skin tones.
“It’s 2026,” she says, still incredulous.
That tension runs alongside the beauty of the sport she clearly adores. Because if figure skating can be unforgiving, it can also be transformative. Louisa describes it as a place that builds character as much as athletic skill. The kind of sport where 5 a.m. practices and triple toe attempts teach resilience before you have language for resilience.
“You’re gonna fall so many times, and you have to get back up,” she says.
She means it literally, of course. But also not literally at all.
There’s a reason elite skaters often speak about the ice as something almost spiritual. Louisa does too. She talks about years on Norway’s national team, about junior and senior nationals, about medaling internationally, but what lingers most is how she frames those victories not as achievement alone, but as proof of sacrifice.
“My mom worked so many hours for me to be able to be in the sport,” she says, and she returns often to that idea of labor, not just her own but her family’s. Figure skating, as she describes it, is a world of repetition and sacrifice that begins long before competition day. There was ballet, off-ice conditioning, jump training, stretching, hours at the rink, years structured around practice. “It’s consistency for 26 years,” she says. “Every single day you wake up.”
She talks about placing at national and international competitions with pride, but what seems to matter most to her is not the medals themselves but what they represented. Proof that the work, and her mother’s belief, had carried them somewhere.
And yet, as often happens in the lives of athletes, the path she thought she was building did not remain linear.
A back injury forced Louisa to begin imagining life beyond elite competition. She had considered medical school. She was preparing, in some ways, for an ending. Then another chapter opened unexpectedly when Disney On Ice entered the picture.
“It’s so funny because I was definitely done with skating,” she tells me. “I was like, I might just coach at my rink in Norway and that’s it.”
But what arrived instead was Princess Tiana. There is something almost poetic in that turn. A skater inspired as a child by seeing herself reflected in Surya Bonaly would go on to embody one of Disney’s few Black princesses for children around the world.
And Louisa understood the significance.
“One of the biggest highlights was looking into the audience and seeing little girls in Princess Tiana dresses looking at me as Princess Tiana,” she says. “They’re showing up for our girl, Tiana.”
She performed across European and U.S. tours, later touring the Middle East as well, sometimes skating what she says could be more than twenty shows a week. The schedule was grueling, but when she talks about those years, exhaustion isn’t what comes through. Wonder does.
“Even when you’ve done like 25 shows and you’re exhausted, once you’re out there, you’re out there,” she says. “You’re just living.”
Traveling constantly on tour, Louisa needed products that fit the realities of her life. A yoga mat light enough to fit in a suitcase but substantial enough to use. Training tools that supported stretching and recovery. Solutions that did not yet exist in the way she wanted them to.
“So I made my own,” she says matter-of-factly. It started there, in hotel rooms after performances, where she would sit planning products after three-show days.
“I would sit in my hotel room and plan,” she says. “That’s how I started my business.”
Today, that vision has become LW Active, her wellness and activewear line, a brand she began building quietly while touring with Disney On Ice and has since grown into something much bigger. Her newest collection, launching May 2, reflects the same balance of strength and softness that runs through much of her story.
LW Active
She tells me the collection is being produced in Peru, where she works with an ethical manufacturer and develops pieces from scratch rather than working from generic activewear blanks. Sustainability is something she is actively building toward, she says, and getting the materials and sourcing right has been part of the process she has taken seriously.
“We have two sets… they’re both brown,” she says, describing the new drop, which launches alongside a horses and Pilates wellness event.
The concept sounds unexpected at first, but the more she explains it, the more it feels aligned with everything she is creating. The horses represent calm and grounding. The pieces are designed for movement, but also for daily life.
“If you play tennis, if you like to go for walks, if you like to cycle… you can wear it everywhere,” she says.
She talks about the line not as something only for skaters or Pilates devotees, but for women moving through many versions of themselves.
That same openness shows up in the community she is building around the brand. Louisa tells me about wellness events and skating events she has hosted in Las Vegas, spaces where women show up not just to work out, but to try something unfamiliar. One story she returns to involves a Nigerian woman who came to one of her ice events having never skated before. “At first she was on a walker,” Louisa says, smiling, “and then after like 30 minutes she was actually skating.”
It is the kind of story she talks about with the same pride she brings to discussing competitions, and it reveals something essential about what motivates her now.
What makes Louisa’s story even more remarkable is that the skater who first opened her imagination, Surya Bonaly, would later become part of her life in a much more direct way. When Louisa came to the United States to train and later moved to Las Vegas for college, Surya was no longer just the icon on her bedroom wall. She became a mentor. Louisa trained with her, learned from her, and in many ways followed a path first illuminated by her. It is hard not to see that as a full-circle moment.
At one point in our conversation, she says something that feels central to understanding this chapter of her life.
“I’m more than just figure skating.”
Coming from someone who has devoted most of her life to the sport, it lands. And it helps explain why her story doesn’t feel confined to one lane. She talks about coaching, entrepreneurship, music, wellness, even carrying a violin through years of travel and training. There is discipline in all of it, but also curiosity. Toward the end, I ask what advice she would give young skaters. Her answer is immediate. “Enjoy it,” she says.
Then she talks about skating outdoors on frozen lakes in Norway.
“That’s when I actually have the best time skating ever… it’s just me and the ice.”
It is such a simple image, but it says something about how she has managed to hold onto joy inside a demanding sport.
Before we wrap, I ask the question we ask every woman we feature: what does being a Neon Gurl mean to you?
Louisa doesn’t hesitate.
“Believing in yourself. Being kind. Not giving up.”
Norways Got Talent Semi Finalist
It sounds a lot like the life she’s built, from the discipline of skating to the patience of building a brand. And maybe that is what stayed with me most after our conversation. Not just Louisa’s accomplishments, though there are many, but the way she keeps expanding what her life can hold.
Olympic dreams. Disney princess. Founder. Mentor.
And now, through LW Active and the community she is building around it, inviting other women into that expansion too.
