Olga Ganicheva told her skaters at the Dallas Figure Skating Club about a new building going up in Massachusetts that would make the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg look like an ice shanty.

“At the beginning I thought, this totally won’t happen,” said Ashley Lin. “Then at the end of August we came up and took a tour and I thought, well, this is serious.”

The Skating Club of Boston, which for more than eight decades operated out of a glorified Quonset hut by the Charles River, has become the sport’s 21st-century mecca. Its new $67 million facility on University Avenue, which opened in September, has three ice surfaces plus an extraordinary range of amenities.

The centerpiece is a performance center with an Olympic-size ice sheet, 2,500 upholstered seats, an overhead scoreboard, and a Bose sound system. There’s also a figure skating training rink with 1,500 seats and another for hockey with benches and penalty boxes that will be used by the local high school team.

Other features include a strength-and-conditioning center with examination, therapy, treatment, and X-ray spaces, a dance studio with mirrored walls, an academic center, a conference room, a club lounge, a trophy room, a lobby cafe, and a skate shop. “If we missed something, it’s probably very small,” reckoned Joe Blount, the club’s longtime president.

In an era when competitive skaters usually have to bounce around multiple venues for practice ice, dance space, conditioning, and medical care, the Skating Club offers a full-service destination.

“This is providing everything under one roof and it’s all new,” said Ganicheva, who with Aleksey Letov directs the high-performance program. “It is a dream facility for any skater in the world.”

The building is spacious enough that it likely will host regional and sectional qualifiers for the US championships, possibly Skate America or an ISU Challenger Series event plus Ice Chips, the club’s signature century-old show now held at Harvard.

For the majority of skaters, who were afterthoughts in rinks dominated by hockey players, practicing in a building designed specifically for them is a welcome novelty.

“Here, you are the important one,” observed Alex Krasnozhon, who’d trained in Dallas since emigrating from Russia, where he was coached by the legendary Alexei Mishin.

That’s how it was inside the old building at 1240 Soldiers Field Road in Allston, which was built in 1938. The Skating Club, the third oldest in the country, had produced Olympic gold medalists Dick Button and Tenley Albright, as well as a lengthy list of national champions.

But as the sport expanded with learn-to-skate programs, adult skating, synchronized skating, ice dancing, showcase skating, and Theatre On Ice, competition among hundreds of members for the one sheet of ice became intense. “The club was outgrowing itself,” said Blount.

Thus began a quest for a new venue that consumed more than two decades and involved scouting three dozen sites after a planned land swap with Harvard for a spot on Lincoln Street alongside the Mass. Pike fell through. What was clear, given the soaring price of land in the city, was that the Skating Club of Boston couldn’t create what it needed in Boston.

“There was such history there that people were reluctant to leave, but it was necessary,” said executive director Doug Zeghibe. “Our broker said, you cannot afford to build a refrigerated Costco in the city of Boston.”

What was available was a 34-acre parcel just off I-95 and a town with open arms. The Skating Club bought the land for $7 million and sold its rink and the adjacent hotel for $40 million to the Davis Companies, a local developer planning a 535-unit apartment building on the site and an adjacent 255-room hotel and 120 condominiums.

The new facility, which is five times as large as the old one with four times as many parking spaces, quickly became a lure for skaters looking to relocate. “Where we were training we were always struggling to get ice time,” said Misha Mitrofanov, who came from Dallas with pairs partner Audrey Lu. “We had a lot of complications. The Skating Club was able to relieve all of that.”

Vadim Naumov and Evgenia Shishkova, the former Russian world titlists who were coaching in Simsbury, Conn., brought with them son Maxim, the US junior champion. Laura Jacobson, a junior skater who’d trained in Colorado and Chicago but was looking for someplace closer to home, came up from New Jersey primarily to train with Ganicheva and Letov. “This was an amazing opportunity,” she said.

With the Winter Games in Beijing a little more than a year away, the Skating Club has become a magnet for Olympic hopefuls. “This facility is going to produce many, many champions,” said Krasnozhon. “At some point I’ll get to say I was here at the beginning.”

Krasnozhon and Naumov both could crack the top five at the US championships in Las Vegas (Jan. 14-17), as could Lu and Mitrofanov, who placed third at Skate America. And Lin (a.k.a. Lin Shan) is a top contender for the Chinese team.

“You see your competitor do something and you think, I’ve got to do the same thing, I’ve got to do it better,” said Naumov. “Having the ability to do that here every day is a huge advantage. It’s so motivating. They push you to do things you didn’t think you could do.”

The high-performance skaters, who have an oxygen-regulated “altitude room” available, also have in-house access to the Micheli Center for Sports Injury Prevention, an outgrowth of Children’s Hospital’s sports medicine division, which offers programs in sports psychology, nutrition, and physical therapy and has specialists for skating injuries and strength and conditioning plus radiology technicians who perform hip-to-ankle X-rays. The center already has worked with more than 1,000 skaters.

“The beauty of this is that all the equipment is brand new,” said Dr. Bill Meehan, who directs the center. “It’s all top-of-the-line, all cutting edge. We can deliver it right here.”

Convenience is a priceless commodity in a time of pandemic, especially being around kindred spirits. “You know you’re not the only one going through all this,” said Lu, who relocated with nearly a dozen of her Dallas clubmates. “There are others to talk to. When you come to a new rink even though there are new people you still see familiar faces every day.”

Skaters, most of whom are online-schooled, can use the quiet academic center between practice sessions. “I can just pull out my computer and study for a few hours,” said Lin, who’s applying to college. The cafe provides meals ranging from breakfast burritos and power bowls to soups to salads to sandwiches.

For a club that began in 1912, one-stop skating represents a revolution. “I told my skaters, if you’re not going to be successful in this building, you’re not going to be successful anywhere,” said Ganicheva.