Entertainment Sports Adam Rippon Says Figure Skaters Can Spend Up to $120K a Year on All That's Required to Compete "Unless you're in that top six in the world, you aren't breaking even," Adam Rippon says By Lindsay Kimble Lindsay Kimble Lindsay Kimble is the Executive Editor, News at PEOPLE. She have been working at PEOPLE for seven years. Her work has previously appeared in POPSUGAR, Us Weekly and Entertainment Weekly. People Editorial Guidelines Published on October 18, 2019 02:01PM EDT Photo: Valery Sharifulin/TASS/Getty Competing on the world stage isn’t cheap for figure skaters. In a new interview with USA Today, former Olympian Adam Rippon got candid about the yearly cost of being a figure skater, revealing that it’s all quite costly. Going through a checklist, Rippon admitted first that “the ice time can be about $1,000 a month.” “The coaching can be anywhere between $1,000 and $3,000 a month, give or take a few $10,000,” Rippon, 29, continued. “A skating coach on the elite level can be anywhere between $80 and $140 an hour. It’s like the cost of a massage, every day. Only instead of getting a massage, you get yelled at.” Rippon — who won a bronze Olympic medal with Team USA in 2018 — said, “Then you have programs. To work with a choreographer, the cheapest program I ever had done was $3,500. On the most expensive side of that, you can get a program done and it costs $10,000.” The former athlete explained that figure skaters have two programs in a year. Does Adam Rippon Think His Long-Distance Boyfriend Is The One? ‘He Has All the Qualifications!’ Then comes the costumes: “Every costume is about $2,000 because they’re all custom-made,” he told USA Today. “Skates, if you get to an elite level, you can get sponsored through them,” he explained. “Which a sponsorship basically just means free boots. But if you were to buy them outright, the boot is $500, and the blade is $500 or $600. So you’re looking at an $1,100 shoe.” Taylor Swift The grand total? Between and [$70,000] and $120,000 a year for a skater. And, noted Rippon, “Unless you’re in that top six in the world, you aren’t breaking even … then you need to do competitions [for prize money].” Rippon just released a new memoir Beautiful on the Outside, and opened up to PEOPLE Now about the process, explaining, “It was harder than I thought.” “You know, because I’ve like, written an e-mail and a text message that felt like a book. … I’m really grateful I went through the whole process, because not being a competitive athlete anymore, I feel like a lot of people don’t talk about that transition.”