Johnny Weir built a career on being one of figure skating’s most distinctive personalities, both on the ice and behind the broadcast desk, and that same boldness shaped his approach to Season 4 of The Traitors: he spent the season pretending he barely knew his own broadcast partner.
Weir is a three-time U.S. national figure skating champion (2004-2006) and two-time Olympian, known throughout his competitive career for an outspoken personality and a distinctive personal style that set him apart from more conventional skaters. That same willingness to stand out followed him directly into broadcasting, and eventually into a reality-competition strategy built on hiding a friendship in plain sight.
Long before he was known for his broadcasting style, Weir was one of the top competitive skaters in the country.
From a Pennsylvania Horse Show to the Ice
John Garvin Weir was born July 2, 1984, in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, and raised in nearby Quarryville, a rural town in the heart of Pennsylvania’s Amish country. His father, John, worked as a nuclear power plant engineer, and his mother, Patti, worked at the same plant and later as a home inspector. Weir’s first competitive discipline wasn’t skating at all. His father had competed in English saddle events, and by age nine Weir had won several equestrian competitions of his own, riding his Shetland pony, Shadow, at the Devon Horse Show. He later said the body awareness he built on horseback carried directly into his skating. He began skating at 12, and his family relocated to New Britain, Connecticut, so he could train at a higher level.
A Three-Time National Champion
Weir won three consecutive U.S. national championships from 2004 to 2006, was the 2001 World Junior Champion, took bronze at the 2008 World Championships, and competed at both the 2006 Turin and 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. Off the ice, he built a parallel reputation for elaborate, self-designed skating costumes and an outspoken public persona that made him a recognizable figure well beyond the skating world.
NBC’s Signature Skating Duo
Since the 2014 Sochi Olympics, Weir has served as NBC’s figure skating broadcast partner alongside Tara Lipinski, calling every Olympic figure skating competition together since, including the 2026 Milano Cortina Games. Weir published the memoir “Welcome to My World” in January 2011, in which he came out publicly as gay, citing a string of gay youth suicides as part of his reason for speaking out. He married Victor Voronov, a Georgetown Law graduate, in a New Year’s Eve 2011 civil ceremony, taking the combined surname Weir-Voronov; the couple divorced in 2015 following a publicized split that included domestic violence allegations and a defamation lawsuit.
Playing Down a Real Friendship
Weir and Lipinski entered Season 4 with a shared strategy: downplay how close they actually are off camera, so other players wouldn’t assume they were automatically allied. “We were afraid to be too close to each other too often,” Weir said afterward. “It was so strange being in the same room but not holding hands.” The two relied on subtle eye signals at the Round Table instead of open conversation, and the plan held because, as Weir put it on Watch What Happens Live, “celebrities I guess aren’t our target demographic, so they just didn’t know.” In the finale stretch, Weir joined Lipinski in a last-ditch push to target Eric Nam and point suspicion at Rob Rausch as the season’s real mastermind. Maura Higgins ultimately sided with Rausch and Nam instead, and Weir was banished in Episode 11, just before Lipinski, ending both of their runs within the same finale stretch.
Life Now
Weir and Lipinski weren’t at the Season 4 reunion in person, but they didn’t skip it by choice. Both were in Italy at the time, working their usual jobs as NBC’s commentary team for the 2026 Winter Olympics, and joined the reunion by video call instead. Weir has continued his NBC broadcasting work since, still one of the most recognizable voices in figure skating regardless of how his own read on The Traitors played out. More on how the rest of Season 4 unfolded is covered in OpenThreadNews’ Traitors Season 4 cast guide.
