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.
