Meryl Davis & Charlie White's Decision To Not Compete in 2018 Olympics Took Over Three Years

Meryl Davis isn’t the one to make rash decision — especially when it comes to her career as an Olympic ice dancer.

So when she and partner Charlie White announced that they won’t be trying to defend their gold medal at the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, you need to know that it took them a long time to get to that point.

“It isn’t so black and white,” she shared in a new interview. “Charlie and I took until about a month and a half, two months ago to decide for sure to announce that we weren’t going to go back to the Olympics.”

That’s over three years of weighing options and going through all their pro and cons lists.

Meryl adds, “For us, it really is a sort of intangible feeling…We took that time, and were sort of blown in the direction of new adventures.”

And adventures there are…when Meryl isn’t teaching young kids learn to skate through the Figure Skating in Harlem and Figure Skating in Detroit programs, she’s working on her anthropology degree, and next up? Stars on Ice!

Meryl is pictured below at the Figure Skating in Harlem event in NYC with Alex and Maia Shibutani, Nathan Chen and Ashley Wagner.