6 Figure Skating Questions That Always Intrigued Us

The World Figure Skating Championships, held this year in Belarus, ended a few days ago. And you must have wondered how athletes are able to perform those incredible maneuvers that, seen on TV, seem so easy….

O awesome.club reveals, below, some curiosities about this beautiful sport.

All the elements of figure skating on ice are formalized, and obviously skaters don’t try to do anything outside of these rules. However, as always, there are exceptions.

In 1998, at the Olympic Games in Nagano (Japan), French skater Surya Bonaly performed a back flip that was prohibited by the rules. He was spectacular and the skater did so as a sign of protest. As she fell at the beginning of the show and knew she had no chance of winning a medal anymore, she tried to visually impact the judges. And it did!

In addition to back flips, other elements are prohibited:

jumps towards double combinations with more than four jumps rotational movements, when one teammate turns the other in the air holding by the hand or leg lying on the ice or kneeling for a long time during the program.

For starters, it’s important to mention that they don’t wear pantyhose. It’s a legging made with flexible lycra. Usually, only women do this. The main reasons are:

protect the skates🇧🇷 What happens is that, throughout the competition, athletes try to use only one pair of skates, and getting used to them is not always an easy task. These protective leggings keep you looking good and hide any problems. Another important reason is to protect yourself in case the shoelace comes loose. With these leggings, the likelihood of that happening is slim to none. Lately, athletes have fixed their skates with a special adhesive tape. And finally, some athletes stretch the material over the skates so that the legs look longer🇧🇷 They do this because many skates make their legs look smaller than they actually are.

They get sick, but they are trained to deal with it. During years of training, the athlete’s vestibular apparatus (linked to control dizziness) gets used to the strong training load, which allows them to perform multiple rotations, jumps and sequences of steps in a single program. A Russian coach named Aleksei Mishin, along with engineers, created a special device to train the vestibular apparatus: a rotating disk with a motor that allows the athlete to learn to maintain balance to prepare for ice jumps.

Athletes experience great difficulties when performing the jumps. Currently, among male skaters there is a great dispute regarding quadruple jumps, which, when well executed, offer a huge score.🇧🇷 American Nathan Chen was the first to perform six quadruple jumps in a single program. Men do all kinds of quadruple jumps, with the exception of the axel🇧🇷

Among women, quadruple jumps are still not very common. The first woman to perform was the Japanese Miki Ando (quadruple sausage), but the real queens of quadruple jumps today are Russian junior skaters: Alexandra Trusova and Anna Shcherbakova. It is still difficult to say when these jumps will be mandatory for a skater to win a competition in the senior category.

It is important to mention the triple axelsince he is the the only jump in which the athlete jumps forward – the axel has an extra half rotation in the air because of the head-on take-off🇧🇷 In other words, this jump features 3.5 rotations, it is one of the most complicated and punctuated and for this reason no one has ever been able to perform a axel quadruple. Most men already do the triple jump, but few women have been able to do it without falling. Current competitors include Russian Elizaveta Tuktamysheva and Japanese Rika Kihira.

Yes, missing. In figure skating on ice there are a total of five modalities: men’s singles skating, women’s singles, doubles skating, ice dancing and synchronized skating. The latter is not part of the official competition program and therefore has a special championship. In addition, the team event was included in the 2014 Olympic Games program.

There is also another discipline: the quartet (two couples meet on the ice). It is very popular in the United States and Canada, but does not form part of international championships.

If we look at the amount of gold medals in Olympic Games, the list is as follows:

In women’s individual skating, the first place is occupied by the Norwegian Sonja Henie🇧🇷 She was an Olympic champion three times in a row: in 1928, in 1932 and in 1936. among men, Gillis Grafström it’s the big name. He was a three-time Olympic champion and also won a silver medal. Furthermore, it is important to highlight the success of Yevgeni Pliushchenko, who has four Olympic medals: individual gold medal at the Turin Olympic Games, team gold at the Sochi Games, and two other silver medals. In ice dancing, the greatest Olympic champions are Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, three-time Olympic champions (dance in 2010 and dance and by team in 2018). Another woman who broke many records was Irina Rodnina. together with your companions Aleksey Ulánov and Alexander Zaitsev she was a three-time Olympic doubles champion. A rather peculiar record belongs to Russian athletes: they are Olympic champions in all artistic disciplines on ice.

Brazil, as you can imagine, does not have a great tradition in this sport. The highlight is the athlete Isadora Williams, born in the United States and daughter of a Brazilian and who chose to represent our country in this sport. One of her greatest achievements was a third place in the Zagreb Golden Spin, one of the most respected international competitions in the world of skating.

Here, you can check out a video of Isadora training.

And you, do you like to watch figure skating championships? Feel like trying to do the same jumps as professional athletes?