Japan Now! She Said Yes. Olympic Champions Riku Miura and Ryuichi Kihara Are Engaged, and the Proposal Happened on the Ice (8/24)

Olympic fairy tales are supposed to end on the medal podium. However, Japan’s beloved “Rikuryu” pair apparently read the script and decided it needed one more chapter. On August 23, figure skaters Riku Miura and Ryuichi Kihara, who won Japan’s first-ever Olympic pairs gold medal in Milan this February, announced their engagement, and the proposal photos stopped Japanese social media cold: Kihara on one knee on the ice, ring in hand, both of them wearing the very costumes from their gold medal free skate.

Quick Answer: Riku Miura (24) and Ryuichi Kihara (34), the pair known as “Rikuryu,” announced their engagement on August 23 via matching bilingual posts on Instagram and X, tagged #shesaidyes. The two won pairs gold at the Milano Cortina 2026 Olympics in February, Japan’s first ever in the discipline, and retired from competition in April to turn professional (in figure skating, “turning pro” means leaving competitive events to skate in ice shows). Now, in their own words, they are moving forward “one step at a time” as a couple.

婚約しました。

嬉しい時も、辛い時も、たくさんの時間を共に過ごし、支え合いながら歩んできました。
いつしか、お互いにとってかけがえのない、なくてはならない存在となりました。

こうしてようやく皆様にご報告できることを、心から嬉しく思います。… pic.twitter.com/wcfYNHRIFr

— Ryuichi Kihara(木原龍一) (@ryuichi_kihara) August 22, 2026

Their competitive resume reads like a nation’s entire pairs history compressed into seven years. Japan was never a pairs skating country; Miura and Kihara made it one. Formed at a Nagoya tryout in 2019, they contributed to Japan’s team silver at the Beijing 2022 Olympics, became the first Japanese pair ever to win the World Championships in 2023, and completed Japan’s first “annual grand slam” that season by sweeping the Grand Prix Final, Four Continents, and Worlds. Then came February in Milan: fifth after the short program, they delivered a free skate for the ages to complete the comeback and claim Japan’s first pairs Olympic gold, adding a second straight team silver for good measure. Two months later they retired at the summit. Four months after that, the partnership got its upgrade.

Their announcement, which they wrote in both Japanese and English themselves, needs no translation: “Through both the happy times and the difficult ones, we’ve shared so many moments together, supporting each other every step of the way. Over time, we became irreplaceable parts of each other’s lives, someone neither of us could imagine life without. As we begin this new chapter, we’ll continue to support each other and move forward together, one step at a time, while always staying true to who we are.”

The Proposal, and the Partnership Behind It

The details are the kind that skating fans will retell for years. The proposal shots, credited to photographer Nobuaki Tanaka, were staged on a rink, with Kihara kneeling and Miura’s stunned smile, both in their Milano Cortina costumes, the outfits they wore for the performance of their lives now doubling as the wardrobe for the moment of their lives. The pair spent their competitive years based in Canada, training and living the itinerant life of elite pairs skaters, and their statement’s phrase “through both the happy times and the difficult ones” carries weight for fans who watched them fight through injuries and interrupted seasons on the way to Milan. As we wrote when covering their golden February, this team’s superpower was never just the throws and twists; it was the visible, unshakable trust between two people. It turns out the audience was reading that correctly all along.

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