Early years

Saarinen started skating when she was about five years old.^[1] She began competing on the junior international level in the autumn of 2012. She was assigned to the 2013 World Junior Championships in Milan, Italy, where she finished 14th.

Saarinen made her ISU Junior Grand Prix (JGP) debut and won the junior title at the 2014 Finnish Championships.^[2] She placed 13th at the 2014 World Junior Championships in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Senior career

Saarinen continued competing on the JGP series before making her senior international debut at the 2014 Finlandia Trophy, a Challenger Series (CS) event. In November 2014, she won a bronze medal at the CS Volvo Open Cup. In the 2015 World Junior Championships in Tallinn, she placed 8th in the short program and 13th overall.

In the 2015–16 season, Saarinen was assigned to the 2015 Tallinn Trophy but withdrew before the short program.^[3] In December, she won the silver medal at the 2016 Finnish Figure Skating Championships, only 0.15 points behind Anni Järvenpää. She was 3rd in the short program and won the free skating.

Saarinen made her senior World Championship debut at the 2021 World Championships in Stockholm, placing twenty-fourth.^[4] This result qualified a place for Finland at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.^[5] The following season, Saarinen won the senior Finnish national title for the first time and made the free skate at the 2022 European Championships, finishing seventeenth; she originally finished eighteenth overall,^[6] but the retroactive disqualification of Kamila Valieva resulted in all other ladies singles skaters moving up a place. Named to the Finnish Olympic team, Saarinen placed twenty-fifth in the short program of the Olympic women's event. This would normally have had her one ordinal outside qualification to the free skate, but due to the controversial Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) decision allowing Valieva to compete in the event despite suspicion of illegal doping the International Olympic Committee decreed that twenty-five skaters would advance.^[7] Saarinen finished twenty-fourth overall; she originally finished twenty-fifth overall,^[8] but Valieva was disqualified by the CAS in 2024 and all skaters who originally placed fifth or lower moved up a place. She was twenty-fifth as well at the 2022 World Championships.^[6]

Illness delayed the start of Saarinen's 2022–23 season, while she also struggled with motivation and had it affect her everyday life. After finishing twelfth at the 2022 CS Ice Challenge, Saarinen decided that she would retire following the 2022 Grand Prix of Espoo, the second special Grand Prix event held in Finland. She placed ninth at the event and explained afterward that she had "a long, great career with ups and downs. I'm starting to get to the point in life where there are other things in life."^[9]