Figure Skating's Not For Sissies

A couple of hours before I got to freestyle a teenage girl was dancing the Kilian with Dance Coach (remember him?)  and during the Open Choctaw stabbed him in the shin and tore it top to bottom with her blade.

 

He drove himself to the emergency room where he got 6 internal and 6 external stitches then drove himself back to the rink to pick up his lessons.

The adult skaters at the rink were telling him to go home, and the little student who had wounded him showed up looking miserable. 

I don't know if  Dance Coach was taking anything for pain, but I never saw him wince. That's what I call a real man.

Of course after he left for lunch every skater on the ice couldn't wait to tell me all their choctaw horror stories. Like I said, figure skating's not for sissies.

When I FINALLY Nailed My Superfast One Foot Spin

Hit a spin--and suddenly hit a speed I'd never done before, hit the rocker perfectly, head perfect,  arms perfect, free foot perfect, and suddenly I'm rotating the speed of stink.

I could not let my coach down by panicking in front of her younger students, so I squeezed my gut in and held on to that spin with all the skill I had in my 6 1/2 C boots. But I Hung On...all the way to a pretty exit.

My Expression? Total Fear all the Way through --

Minus the Jello

My Coach's Expression 

 Oh, yeah, making progress!!

Taking Our Sport Back: Compulsory Figures Part I

In 1971 Trixie Schuba, possibly one of the best skaters of compulsory figures in history of the sport, beat Janet Lynn, the pixieish spectacular star of freeskating, faced off at Worlds. Trixie won because of her superior skills in the compulsory figures which heavily weighted the scores. But Janet Lynn was the far more popular skater....

By 1990 compulsory figures were dead...and gone. The ISU saw ending figures as freeing the free skaters to greater expression---and to be more appealing to TV. At the end of this video you'll see some US skaters were very bitter about it..

Then after the last compulsory figure was skated in the 1990 Worlds....

The century of compulsory figures in competition came to an end.