- jump practice

I spent a couple hours on Sunday at the Toyota Sports Center freestyles past the Airport, and either by reputation (or because Culver Ice is now closed or both) it was a bit too busy, really. It seems they run "open" freestyles where  anyone can show up with any skill level, so some national caliber juniors were practicing triples along with novices trying to hold a steady spiral. The city power cut off around 9:00 with 10 seconds of total blackout until the emergency lights came on -- talk about a scary situation during a freestyle! Rink designers please pay heed: this makes an excellent argument for a couple of small skylights or high transom windows (as long as they don't let the sunlight shine directly on the ice).

Anyhow while watching the more adept skaters practice their elements I was drawn to the difficulty and disconnect between an Axel during freestyle and actually jumping one during your program. The etiology of the issue is down to your horizontal vector -- the speed you travel across the ice when you launch and when you land your jump. At a busy freestyle you avoid other skaters, look for an open place to jump, and vary your stroking speed constantly. During a program you have the entire ice to yourself, are stroking and keeping time to the music, and trying to get full rink coverage by maintaining an elegant velocity. And hence the rub: if you practice your jumps at a slow horizontal velocity during your freestyles, then you are going to herkily jerkily slow down your program when it comes time to launch. Or if you keep your rhythm and speed to launch faster than you've practiced then you will yaw during your spin and additionally land and check with a pressure on your edges to which you are unaccustomed.

I guess what I am asking, dear readers, is shouldn't you always practice your jumps with the same smooth stroking lead-in and velocity as you are expecting for when you are jumping them in your program?

- applauding growth

At local events one encounters a huge variety of participants. When I visit a competition to watch my daughter skate my role is mostly to cheer for these other skaters. When the little kids hit the ice -- the ones that are six through eight -- they have only been competing for maybe two years. While their parents, grandparents, and extended family cheer in the stands, they are still intently working on their own self-esteem. No matter the quality of their performance, once they finish I gently clap courteously.

Even at starting levels I can tell which kids have natural ability, which are just skating for diversion, and who is on the ice because their parents want them to be involved in sports. Of the twenty tots skating a local competition one or two will clearly stand out as passionate. They may not yet have skills, balance, or grace, yet you can still see they have the heart to practice seriously and to study the art. These are the kids that extend a bit beyond their natural capabilities, when they fall they get right back up and continue onward. These are the tikes that garner my heartiest applause.

The middle age group -- kids nine through eleven -- are an interesting bunch to watch, and they skate all over the map. Some are beginners who struggle with their balance or edge work. Many have already been skating for five or six years and are just now reaching their point of frustration. Both the late starters and the frustrated earn my courteous applause. This is also the age though where several of the skaters bloom with their grace and class. Some display an inkling of audience awareness, or might use their hands to express feelings. It is quite clear that a select few of these skaters actually "have it". Even without a firm set of jumping skills, these skaters with class or grace merit my hearty applause.

This is also the age where most skaters develop some semblance of physical maturity: their bodily proportions approach the components they will manage for the remainder of their craft. This can be a rather painful realization; ineffective leg muscles hinder a lanky eleven-year-old boy from progressing to nationals (no matter how hard he practices). I still clap enthusiastically for the teenage skaters with challenging bodies and lots of heart, even though I sense they will only attain the mediocrity of where their bodies leave them stranded.

Very rarely though you spot the nine, ten, or eleven year old that has the appropriate skating body matched with blooming grace or class. It is as plain as day that the skater has national "potential." I expect more from them -- clearly, if they have the native ability and talent, I want to see that they have devoted enough practice to their balance, expressiveness, and skill, and that they have honed their craft. I judge them more harshly because I know that in their future they will face a tougher appraisal of their skating. When they nail a challenging element though I will often compliment them off-ice. "Hey, that was a great toe loop." They'll say thanks and be proud that a total stranger appreciated their efforts.

Then we get the group of the serious older skaters, twelve and above. In a local competition you see a definitive split in talent: the kids either skate for fun, or are daily skaters striving for a national rating. I am courteous to those skating for fun, but the committed regulars receive my especially supportive scrutiny. I am judgmental in a way that aims to improve their execution. There's an ongoing mental communication with these serious skaters -- that was a nicely centered spin, that was an especially expressive layback. If I see them off-ice I will compliment them with a nod and a smile. At this level they know what they are doing and tend to be overly self-critical against their adversaries; my role is to boost their self esteem in a way that doesn't swell their head.

Being a conscientious skate parent is a lot of work. The trick is to keep the kids actively engaged in the sport in a neutral-buoyancy fashion. It's about the humble acceptance of a quiet, non-dramatic, and equaniminous glamour.

- unpaired

I'd imagine a solo male figure skater faces a constant challenge dealing with the female skaters. As I watch the rink freestyles it's a bit subtle (but also clearly obvious) that many female skaters wish they could transition over to dance skating. They'd like a pair partner.

I would guess perhaps seven times more females than males figure skate; due to this highly skewed ratio the limiting factor of forming a pair is always how to find a guy.

All a guy has to do is smile at a gal and she'll inquire if he'd like to try skating with her. From what I've read a fair number of the accomplished male skaters tend to end up being brats, as they can pretty much dictate their relationship with their female partner. If they dislike her other good female skaters are a dime a dozen.

This implies that if a gentleman artist wishes to persist as solo he has to present a rather aloof front (while he's practicing anyway). Or more typically by the time he's eight years old or so he internalizes a pat set of answers, shrugs, and responses to all the standard female inquiries.

It takes exceptional single-minded focus to be a solo male figure skater.

- select

The expense of figure skating produces some unique personality oddities. As a parent you should be well advised that skating is one of the more expensive sports, see for example this comparison, or for a real eye opener this PDF from a decade ago. Yes lessons, coaching, skates, costumes, travel, and ice fees are all pricey, but the sport's pathology goes well beyond that. The truly costly part of figure skating rests upon the purely implied sanctuary of the facilities: constructing and subsequently cooling and dehumidifying an ice rink. Building a new dual-sheet rink costs upward of five million dollars; add in debt service and monthly energy costs (not to mention the payroll and insurance) and. . . well there you go.

Since building and operating a rink is so expensive (compared to facilities for other sports) rinks are relatively few and far between. If my kid played little league baseball how many teams could she join here in metro L.A.? Maybe 400. Plus every high school and most parks have baseball diamonds. But figure skating? We can drive to maybe eight rinks, max.

To draw enough customers to recoup their costs rinks must disperse geographically where they can attract a clientele base that isn't already committed to another nearby locale. Now think of what this implies for the culture of the sport. Since a skater has so few local coaches to choose from, every individual coach has considerable power, and they can get away with charging less competitive fees. At the same time since so few new positions open, obtaining a coaching job is incredibly difficult. That means unless your kid is good enough to skate nationally it's unlikely that she'll ever make a decent living from the sport. (Well to be honest this holds true for nearly all sports, I suppose).

Since rinks are far apart I suspect that acquiring judges for competitions becomes quite a chore; it wouldn't surprise me if the availability of judges restricts the quantity of sanctioned events that a rink can conduct.

All these peculiarities have to do with the expense of maintaining an ice rink. Still though figure skaters are like orchids in a forest: although one of the more elegantly colorful parts of the foliage, they don't play an exceedingly large part in the biome's carbon cycle. Skaters scarcely shoulder much of this implied operating burden: the rink managers I've chatted with say that hockey brings in about 85% of a rink's revenue. Without hockey there likely would not be any indoor rink figure skating at all.

- questions

In a recent blog post on Blazing Blades Janet Lynn was asking hypothetical questions for the next USFSA president. Naturally she takes a viewpoint very much from her own experience of the sport (which might have little to do with the USFSA's internal mandate, unfortunately). Although it seems somewhat brash to be doing this nevertheless in the spirit of the times, if I could ask leading questions of the governing body (from a skate parent's perspective) it would be:

1. Can you establish standards for ice rinks that ensure the comfort of the casual observers and parents during the freestyles?

2. Can you make an effort to rate rinks' comfort, costs, and ice quality online? Incorporating this with Google maps would be awesome.

3. You could add in some sort of calendering so I could log in to just one place to find out who has freestyles in the next 3 hours within a 15 mile radius of my house.

4. How does my kid's coach rate? When was her last accreditation tests and how did she do?

5. Can I view free online videos from all of the sectionals and regionals?

6. Can you promote a parallel non-competitive track that still has awards and such?

7. What about injury incident reporting? Something that could be used for epidemiology -- maybe certain rinks / ice conditions / blades / boots / sharpeners are prone to a greater frequency of injuries?

8. How does my sharpener rate?

9. Tributary carpooling or bus rental for events?

(repost from 2014)

- rationalizing the expense

I spent eight hundred dollars on skates today for my daughter. It wasn't a big deal, but at the same time that shows how far I've become acclimated to the whole socialization and industry of skating. I don't question the value, for considering the effort that goes into making the boots and the blades, and given a reasonable markup for everyone involved in the process, I suppose that the price is fair enough. And yet a little voice lingers at the back of my head that says "hey, I only pay one hundred dollars a year for my own health club membership." Sigh. Well, I suppose it's the privilege of having a daughter.

The issue with raising daughters of course is that, as a father, you are responsible for setting the tone of their demeanor; you create an aura of approval or disapproval about how they present themselves to men. So to an extent supporting ice skating is a statement: a stamp of approval to a concept and an approach. You are saying Go for the grace, Go for the art, A positive work ethic is admirable. $800? A bargain at even twice the price.

(repost and ed. note: this was fifteen years ago. . . what do new skates cost today?)

- otherwise

Skating fills a unique niche, a blend of artistic expression and athletics: somewhere between dance, poetry, and theater. When figure skating projects art, the negative-space perspective of the sport is exactly concordant with the positive-space; skating is as abstract as possible while simultaneously as concrete as physically attainable.

Deep inside the bowels of the sport however, the grounds are brewing bitter. Behind the scenes at your local rink the spirals gloss past a quietly seething dismay. Attendance at the local competitive events verges on nonexistent -- when I last attended a local event I sat with only the six parents from the present flight of skaters and a handful of loyal club members. Skating must be a particularly lonely sport.

Although figure skating is still popular (membership in the U.S. Figure Skating Association is near its all-time high) life at the local rink veers far from glamorous. Local ice time mostly is incessant practice of elements and programs, sometimes with the coach, more often alone with a handful of other skaters at a freestyle session, and almost invariably amongst ladies, with maybe one or two gentlemen skating around.

Young skaters tend to get drawn to the sport by the glitz of high-end televised IJS competitions. At elite levels however the travel, costume, boots, blades, and coaching fees make the cost prohibitive except for a lucky few. Similar to gymnastics, the sport of figure skating imposes tightly constraining physical limits upon the body types that might be athletically successful. Performance is married to managing one's center of gravity, angular momentum, and balance, and wide variance from the optimal body kinematics renders many advanced moves impossible.

When skaters encounter the difficulty of IJS competitions, the mismatch of their body ideal, and the realities of rink life, while the parents recognize the expense, the deeper understanding of the underlying physics of the sport disenlightens them. Experienced skating students thus find somewhat of a "credibility gap" between what they have seen on televised competitions versus what they might achieve locally.

Figure skating is mostly a ladies sport; of the U.S. skaters aged 13 to 18 (the serious competitive ages) ladies outnumber men seven to one, and many of those men are in pairs or dance. Hence overwhelmingly a local competition is ladies skating solo. In IJS events they are mostly skating jumps trying to accumulate points. Yeah there's a sit spin quickly up to a Biellmann and a camel spin to a donut in there somewhere, yet the constraints of scoring prevent any programs from being particularly inventive. Watching a local event is mostly skate-jump-skate-jump-skate-jump followed by a couple minutes of wrestling out the score. Repeat sixty times. Yawn. This is why nobody attends local IJS competitions any more.

There are, however, other artistic things to do on ice; as IJS has squeezed the ladies solo side of the sport into local irrelevance these alternative activities have grown in popularity. "Showcase" events scored on 6.0 present duets, small ensembles, theatre on ice, interpretive (extemporaneous), dramatic and comedic skates. The Professional Skaters Association is an entryway to shows such as Disney on Ice or similar private touring ice companies, and sponsors an annual Open event exhibiting skaters that is free to attend. American Ice Theatre is creating innovative contemporary ice dance ensembles, and private sponsors such as Peggy Fleming and Scott Hamilton present annual artistic or fundraising events.

Although glimpses of these are on YouTube and Instagram, aside from the British television show Dancing on Ice the other alternatives lack media exposure (it seems there is probably an opportunity here for some enterprising sponsors).

Since these artistic alternatives don't receive much promotional coverage, a better, although longshot possibility, is that the sport of figure skating could change the way they run local competitions to allow for greater variety and creativity within the solo ladies competitive events.

Modifying the skating protocol does however present somewhat of a Catch-22 situation. By tradition or culture, local competitive IJS events tend to mimic the international procedures with high precision. Flight assignments are similar, event staggering, warm ups, rink announcements, down to the details of scoring and judging all follow very structured timings and procedures. What makes sense in terms of a televised worldwide elite event may however be counterproductive for attracting audiences at a local level.

Local events could become much more interesting and achieve broader appeal if we could rework this standard top-to-bottom protocol. Clubs could vary the procedures at local IJS events to allow for relaxed judging and faster turnaround between skaters. Rinks could use automated motion-capture scoring to reduce the burden of hosting teams of judges. The scoring metrics at local events could be changed to de-emphasize the jumps. One could argue that it shouldn't make that much of a difference what methodology you choose to measure athleticism. The point is to promote safe and challenging physical goals, raising the bar for people that are athletically competitive.

To increase variety, IJS flights could be interleaved with "showcase" skating of female-pair duets, small groups, and light-entertainment events with props. In other words, showcase, ISI, and IJS don't have to be held as separate events.

Parents need the supportive recognition that even at local events with lesser cost, their daughters can gain appropriate value from solo skating. It's time to support a skating system that encourages more dance, poetry, and theater. And for the sake of the sport (and the audience) fewer jumps would be better.

- lull

Unless you are skating to Flight of the Bumblebee or something equivalently vigorous, most likely your program has a couple dips or pauses in the music, a couple of spots where you can catch your breath and strike a pose. Hey dear, don't just stand there! This is the place for captivating subtle hand expressions and audience mental capture. Smile, make your point, complete the flourish of the music or hint where you are heading next.

At a pause in your music, your artistic expressiveness shouldn't lull.

- arm calculus

My daughter once pointed out to me that if the athleticism of skating is in the legs, then certainly the grace of skating is in the arms. Indeed regardless of their program, you can pretty much identify who is skating just by watching her arm style.

If you were to break it down into micro-analytic pieces you'd have to say that a skater's arm style (her armamentation?) consists of camber, clock angle, motion control, rhythmics, and dynamics. Getting all of these "right" is quite a challenge.

Start with camber: how straight, uplifted and parallel your arms are with the ice. You develop this from your shoulder strength. Droopy arms? I like the weight machines where you sit facing the pad, grab the handles and then pivot up the cylindrical pads with your elbows (straight shoulder presses seem to me to be too hard on your spine). Train for strong shoulders to keep those arms elevated.

Once your arms are up there it still takes lots of practice to anchor your awareness so that your body movement doesn't destabilize the arm positions.

Clock angle is how the arms extend from your trunk when viewed from above. Naturally the expectation is that they point at 3 and 9 o'clock (straight out sideways). I have occasionally seen a slightly closed arm, say at 2 o'clock instead. Far more common though seems to be arms that are correctly "opposed" and yet twisted to the body, at 4 and 10, for example. Unless you saw yourself on video though I don't know how you'd even become aware of such a thing. It seems common enough that I figure most coaches don't bother to correct it.

Now that you're 3 and 9 and elevated parallel to the ice, we can think about movement. Go watch some ballet and pay attention: arm movements are both meticulously deliberate and tightly controlled. Except for specific reasons of expressive pose they aren't frozen in place: they always have either slow rhythm or directive intent. Except on your spiral I don't want to see you glide with your arms outstretched and fixed like airplane wings. Nor do I want to witness you windmilling or flapping your arms like a bird the entire time either. Your arms should strive for ballet aesthetics.

Finally your arm movements should vary in speed: they should have dynamics. Sometimes your arms move slowly, sometimes they move more quickly. But it's also nice when the change in dynamics is smooth: the transition from slow arms to fast arms should be gradual. For you calculus fans out there, the second derivative of arm movement speed is best when very small.

- skate personality stew

Many of the young teen ladies at the rink get torn between their art and their desires to achieve certain technical aspects of their performance. This conflict seems to span four dimensions. On one axis you have the battle toward artistic expression, on another vector you get the strivings for technical accomplishments, on the third axis you have the whole issue of body shape, and finally you encounter the issue of fitting in with society's expectations for a young lady (at their age mostly their parents' expectations, but there can also be peer "drama" here as well). It is a rather complicated formula of flavors, and the most successful skaters have a lot on their plate.

How does the mixing and matching of forces create the personality of the skater? The big popular shows with hundreds and thousands of viewers -- the finals that you see on TV -- really don't do anything for the skaters. It is art of course, and it is a performance with all of the inherent issues of performance-art. But it is too big and noisy for the skaters to gain much critical value out of the process for themselves.

The small practice sessions though (the club events in front of the parents) are really where learning and social processes transpire. For one thing, the club events are small enough that the skaters can pay attention to the thoughts of the audience. They get immediate feedback about the impact of their performance. But more important is the peculiar characteristic of the audience itself: these observers see hours upon hours upon hours of skating. They know every move and they pay attention to the flexing of every muscle and the impact of every jump on each joint and bone. They are not easily impressed and they aren't distracted much by costuming flash... they comprehend the amount of effort and practice that goes into each and every move. And they all have the skaters' best interests at heart.

How the skater interacts with this smaller audience then influences her choices, which then determines her path. Each skater faces a choice of focus between art and technical merit. It isn't exactly a trade-off one-for-one; it is possible to advance both (and in fact the best skaters do advance both). At the middling stage though -- that point where a skater has reasonable control of her body, a fair number of moves and skills, and some experience performing on the ice -- you quickly see that a skater tends to drift toward one seasoning or another.

They can drift toward the flavor of being technically competitive, where they battle each other to see who can spin the fastest or do the most complicated laybacks or be the first to land a triple Axel consistently. Or they can drift to the aroma of showmanship, where they provide graceful entertainment to the audience.

Sometimes a gal is "pre-selected" for the competitive bent, either by her body build or by the influence of her parents. The more robust girls -- the large-boned -- have natural impediments to achieving much of the technical expectations. And yet they often are adequately compensated by being blessed with a certain amount of grace and artistic expression. Some of the more lankly gals don't have a lot of grace, but their physics allow them superior technical ease.

So all in all it’s a big complicated stew.

- smoothe

While watching some intermediate skaters in Pasadena, I was most impressed by a particular gentleman who stroked more smoothly than I had ever seen. I will see if I can describe it in enough detail to give you a sense of the effect of this approach. The technique seems to extend somewhat beyond what one would learn straight up in a stroking class. I saw an article about this type of skating once by a Russian ice dance team (it may have even been called Russian stroking), but I can no longer find its reference. In any case let me describe the impression I got and you can take it from there.

If you were to take a high-speed camera and some LED lights marking an outline of a skater's boot on a single solitary stroke, and then graph them onto a piece of paper, I expect (for the typical skater) you would see a slanting line extending downward at more or less constant velocity, of approximately a fixed angle of descent. It would look like a wedge, or the hypotenuse of a triangle, until the skate hit the ice. This is well and good and is rather what one would expect from managing the leg muscles at a constant rate of extension. I doubt it is mechanically optimal and it doesn't look particularly elegant.

Now picture a graph of a curve that starts more steeply and then gets shallower, approaching the floor axis more and more gradually. In math we say that the curve has an asymptote, like a graph of y = 1/x. Is it possible to have each stroke appear this way?  In my lifetime I have seen perhaps two people in person skate like this, and it is quite a striking visual effect. It makes it appear that they are achieving very high transfer-of-energy productivity to the ice, with little or no wasted impact friction. 

- a fix

Once in a while I get to thinking about the state of the "sport" and although I am now actually outside looking in, I do still get somewhat cheesed off at skating today compared to my recollections of its grace and class when l was younger. At the same time, aside from joining the cacophony of bloggers who feel the same and create electronic messages that flow into reader's brains, is there much else that I can do about the present morass? Well yes, unfortunately so. I could found an alternative to ISU.

As I am by profession however a software geek and nominally by free-choice a writer, let's consider this for now just a thought experiment. Would it be possible, what might it achieve, and where would we encounter the major challenges. After reading this if you, as a studious parliamentarian, feel so motivated as to actually carry out these tasks then you have my blessings (and more power to you).

So I hereby propose the Youth Performing Skaters Organization -- the YPSO if you will. Its targeted beneficiaries are youth aged 8 to 20 who regularly skate artistically in front of an audience. Its charter is to promote the long-term comfort, safety, and satisfaction of the participants (including their parents, coaches, and audience members) and to guide the harmonization of rules and services promulgated by the national level skating organizations that may overlap in scope.

Yeah I know, boring bureaucratic hogwash. Yet it's focused to specific ends that the present hierarchy isn't. So say that you're all on board with this. Now what? Well to actually establish such a thing you need to bootstrap a group of relevant and interested experts and participants and create some actual bylaws. I suppose you could do this with a Kickstarter project or some such tool; say you set a funding goal of having a hundred prospective members each providing $1000. Donors who agree to abide by the charter and who pass a certain amount of vetting become "charter members" and get to create the bylaws.

Of course you'd want to assure a fair mix of representative interests: singles skaters, pairs, dance, ice theater, and their respective coaches. Some trainers and sports medicine folks. A couple language and cultural boffins. Some marketing and media types. A few rink owners, a renewable energy representative. And some skate parents, naturally.

So there you go, now you have a group of folks to work with. You next need to mutually create and agree to the bylaws that specify how YPSO will run, keep and suspend members, organize standing committees, hold meetings, resolve problems, yada yada. A good six months of wrestling with best practices and attorneys, certainly.

Then comes the real work.

YPSO will need some initial regular fundraising, with all the politics that implies. It will need to deal with the rules and legalities for a disciplinary committee. It will need to develop a scorekeeping methodology and scoring software. It will need to handle contract negotiations with vendors and media. It will need to establish accounting for startup travel costs and justification for a future budget. It will need to handle auditing and credentialing, copyrights and IP legal matters, and create policies that promote comfort, health and safety. Finally it can think about curation and musing of the art form.

Heck I'm not saying it would be easy, and after the bylaws are established you've still probably got a solid two years of work before you produce anything influential, but it's a start. Of course it's easier to blog concerns and flay one another with comments, but when blades scritch ice the Doing will trump the Writing. Just saying.